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Rescued from Posterous

A refuge for the posts from my posterous.com blogs. Thanks for nothing, Sachin Agarwal!

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I just received an e-mail update from Limmud SA, and promptly unsubscribed from the mailing list.  The catalyst was their decision to hold it as a residential event for the 2nd year in a row, but there’s more…

Up to and including 2010, I had only ever missed Limmud JHB one year.  Despite the dramatic increase in costs each successive year, it had become a fixture on the calendar for my daughter (Young Limmud age) and I.  In fact, Limmud 2010 JHB was so spectacular that I decided to put my name down as a volunteer for 2011.

I registered and, towards the end of 2010, was invited to an initial get-together and motivational session for the 2011 volunteers, and again provided my details and stated where I thought I could contribute.  After that, nothing.  Absolutely nothing, until months later when I, along with everyone else on the mailing list, received notice of the 2011 event and the shock news that it would be a residential event.

Costs had increased steadily over the years, but the two of us were still able to attend the 2010 event for under R1,000.  Attending the 2011 event, however, would require an investment of over R4,000 and an entire weekend away!

In addition, not only was Limmud now residential, but it would be held out of town at a Vaal resort.  This made the residential part mandatory instead of an option.  Whereas, had the event been held in town, one could have chosen to stay over (or not).  (I understand that a bus day-trip option was later offered for the Sunday, but by that stage I’d lost interest and made other arrangements.)

I logged my objections on their Facebook Page and was given the assurance that, despite the cost, this was not intended to be an elitist or “exclusive” event (in the true sense of excluding people who cannot afford the ticket).  Huh!?  How is an event with that kind of price tag not elitist or exclusive, even discriminatory?  As for volunteering, well I should contact them again and offer my services again…

What I found even more disturbing were the stories of “religious coercion” that emerged after the event.  Because Limmud had bookend the entire venue for the weekend, the organisers felt able to dictate to delegates how they should observe the Sabbath, with TV being banned, for instance.

So, for the 2nd year, Limmud SA JHB will be a residential event.  I still wish the organisers the best of luck.  I just won’t be there.

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Some time back, a big shot from a roofing company I’ll never use again quoted for the various leaking roof surfaces in our Norwood home.  When I saw him off, he was driving the most massive Toyota Land Cruiser I’ve ever seen in my life.  The expanse of the bonnet was simply mind-boggling.

I envy some people their vehicles, but with this monstrosity, my first thought was “My God, how much of the planet’s resources are tied up in an abomination like this”.  Think about it.  Think about all the energy, raw materials and labour that went into something like this.  All that input is now effectively “trapped” until the vehicle is eventually scrapped, after being used for perhaps a couple of hours each day (usually to carry only one person, on often pointless trips).

In something approaching an ideal world, our pool of raw materials would be recycled endlessly, instead of new inputs having to be torn from the earth, while rust nibbles away at the end-of-life stock.

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In June of this year, we spent a marvellous 10 days on holiday in Camps Bay (a sought-after suburb of Cape Town).  The beautiful holiday home of our benefactors (Thank you, van den Bergs!) came fully equipped with everything, including a Mercedes C200 Automatic with a GPS system.

Driving this beautiful vehicle made me question again why we choose to automate just about everything in our lives, with the exception of our gear changes!

Yes, the best drivers will probably always be better than an automatic gearbox at matching the car’s acceleration, incline, revs, speed and other conditions to the right gear ratio.  For most of us, however, a computerised gearbox will do a better job most of the time, and do it 100% consistently.

There’s a certain prejudice against the automatic transmission (“slush-box”) out there, a “real men don’t drive automatics” attitude.  Maybe it’s time to put all that behind us, time to convince vehicle manufacturers to put all of their development efforts and dollars into improving automatic transmissions and shifting the price premium/penalty onto the manual transmission.

In an era where we use micro-chips and servo motors adjust our seats and mirrors, we really shouldn’t be spending most of our car journeys selecting the right gear ratio.  Playing with the gear shift is still fun out on the open road.  Most of our travelling time, however, is spent crawling in traffic, alternating between 1st and 2nd gears, barely reaching the speed limit.  Perfect conditions for an automatic gearbox.  The laws of traffic jams also dictate that they generally occur on an uphill, so the handbrake (parking brake) must also be used extensively.

Just this afternoon I spent a good hour or so “paddling the canoe”, i.e. shifting constantly between 1st and 2nd during so-called rush-hour traffic.  That (along with almost constant clutching and de-clutching or “riding” the clutch on an uphill), is the natural state of the motorist today, rather than flicking through the gear changes on a sweeping mountain pass.  (My stint in peak traffic also reminded me that an automatic also does a much better job of consistently smooth gear changes than a manual, and I’m quite a smooth ‘changer.)

I’m all in favour of getting the driver out from behind the wheel, as part of long-term transformation of our transport system away from the private car and towards better public transport (assuming we have a long-term on this planet!).  Part of that transformation will be initiatives such as the Google driverless car.  Another part will be widely adopted innovations such as satellite navigation systems.  A driverless transport system also cannot exist without the automatic transmission.  Bring it on!

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I’ve taken this little quote from a flyer handed out at a bat-mitzvah I attended recently:

“On this occasion of my bat-mitzvah, it is appropriate to remember the unsuccessful attempt of Nazi Germany to destroy the Jewish people.”

Why do we judge Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe to have been unsuccessful?  The fact is that Hitler succeeded in murdering roughly 9 out of every 10 Jews who fell into his clutches.  A 90+ percentage success rate does not constitute failure in my books (and even that success rate would have probably been much higher had the Third Reich been more enduring)!

The fact that there were Jews outside of the sphere of influence of Nazi Germany and its allies should not deceive us.  Hitler’s failure lies in his having failed to conquer the entire world, rather than in having failed to exterminate those Jews who were within his reach or power to exterminate.  There is no doubt in my mind that, had he succeeded conquering other territories with Jewish populations, those Jews would have suffered the same fate as the Jews of Europe.

The fact that the UK (and most of the Commonwealth), the US, Palestine and much of Russia were not overrun should not deceive us into misreading history.  We survived because Hitler did not achieve his military ambitions, not because his attempted genocide did not succeed.

We should keep this interpretation in mind whenever we’re tempted to take refuge in the glib “Jewish survivalist” mentality (“they tried to kill us, we escaped, let’s eat”) we sometimes adopt as a defence mechanism.

--

(I’m “personalising” this by mostly referring to Hitler rather than Germany, as the attempt to exterminate the Jews was very much part of Hitler’s psychopathology, rather than a natural outcome of the anti-Semitism endemic to Nazi Germany at the time.)

(The flyer acknowledged the Remember US Project, so I’m fairly certain the young lady whose bat-mitzvah it was didn’t compose this herself.)

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My PC’s monitor packed up last night.  Nothing extraordinary about that, although I only had four year’s service from it.  (It’s a Fujitsi Siemens Scaleoview L19-2 LCD Monitor (the first LCD monitor I ever owned), so I did anticipate a longer lifespan.)

I needed to replace it with a similar Fujitsu, as the speakers are built into the monitor rather than the system unit.

The replacement was a Fujitsu L20T-1 ECO LED Display, which looked very nice on the display stand.

Here’s where change doesn’t necessarily equate to progress:

• The L19 had a DVI input in addition to the standard D-SUB input.  The L20 doesn’t have this.  My understanding is that DVI is a newer standard than D-SUB, and should be replacing it.  Why isn’t this being reflected in the later model?
• The L19’s stand allowed it to be positioned with the top at eye level, a comfortable height for long-term use.  The L20, on the other hand, sits well below eye level.  Even with it parking on top of my bulky external optical writer (+/-4cm high) it’s still not at a comfortable viewing height.
• The L20 has a “50cm widescreen display in optimum 16:9 movie format”.  But hang on, I’m not watching movies here, I’m working with documents and such, where height is at least as important as width.  The wide-screen is nice enough, but the 4:3 format of the L19 gave me far more usable display surface area.

Progress does not necessarily happen in a straight line, and change doesn’t necessarily equate to progress!

(The FSC Scaleo P bundled with the original monitor seems to have been ahead of its time in other respects.  It was the first PC I owned with no floppy/stiffy drive (amazing how I never missed it, even once).  Another, more questionable “first” was that it had no PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports, only USB ports.  These I have missed, on several occasions.  It also came with a Firewire port and built-in memory card readers.  The latter have proved invaluable over the years.  Lastly, it came with Windows Vista, which I quickly “downgraded” to XP!)

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I know I’m more than a decade too late, but I’ve finally got this whole millennium thing sorted out, at least in my own mind.

The prissy millennial experts lectured us as to why the new millennium would begin in 2001 and not in 2000.  The reason?  The ancients “forgot” to start counting from Year 0/didn’t yet have the concept of zero.

I found this reasoning somewhat contorted and unconvincing.  Yes, the concept of zero was a relatively late arrival on the scene, but since when do we start counting from zero anyway?  If the error was made 2,000 years ago, why perpetuate it?  Why not instead simply write off the missing year and get everyone on the same page of the calendar (e.g. as happened when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted).

I’m now finally convinced that 2001 was the 1st year of the 3rd millennium.  Not because 0 hadn’t yet been invented, but because that’s the way we count.  Think about it:

1    1st year of 1st decade
10    last year of 1st decade (1 * 10, 0 * units)
11    1st year of 2nd decade
100    last year of 10th decade
101    1st year of 11th decade
1000    last year of 1st millennium
1001    1st year of 2nd millennium
1900    last year of 19th century
1901    1st year of 20th century
1999    2nd last year of 2nd millennium
2000    last year of 2nd millennium
2001    1st year of 3rd millennium

The fuzzy thinking about when decades, centuries and millennia tick over affects us every 10 years, not just every 100 or 1,000 years.  If we’re not sure when a new decade begins, how on earth are we going to get our century and millennium changes right?  Before we can get our minds around the idea that 2001 (and not 2000) is the first year of the new millennium, we need to get used to the idea that 1960 was the last year of the 50s, not the first year of the 60s!

So, the pedantic millennium experts were right after all, but for the wrong reasons.  Pity I won’t be around for the next century or millennium changeover, to say “you’re right/wrong for the wrong reason/here’s why”.

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Following on Twitter used to be a very selective thing.  You followed those you found truly worthy, and only followed back if you found your “follower’s” Tweets to be of real interest.

As with so many other social media platforms, however, Twitter quickly became a numbers game, and those with the most Followers were surely worthy of being Followed.  Except in the case of Shlebs and other Twitter A-Listers, it quickly became the expectation that if you followed someone, they should immediately follow you back.

With these pressure, I have become a lot less discriminating about who I will follow back, but I still don’t automatically follow anyone back,

With this in mind, here’s my “policy” as to who and whether I will follow you back:

• Thanks for following me.  I hope you find my updates interesting.
• I did not ask you to follow me, and your having followed me does not place me under an obligation to automatically reciprocate and follow you back.
• Should I find your Tweets interesting, I may choose to follow you back.
• Should I choose NOT to do so, however (or not do so quickly enough for your liking), and you then un-follow me, I will then block you and report you to Twitter as a spammer.
• I therefore ask that you think carefully about your motives for wanting to follow me.

This is not intended to be arrogant, but I’m quite tired of vetting my latest followers, only to find that I have already been un-followed!

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A few thoughts on what Google is doing in this space.

Firstly, I have no doubt that a driverless system will very quickly prove itself capable of doing a much better job than our current “non-system”, reliant on the driver.  Think about what we’re expecting in our current scenario:  we need every single human being behind the wheel of a vehicle (and every pedestrian, for that matter) to not make a single error in judgement for the whole time he/she is on the road.  That’s quite a big ask, especially when most drivers (i.e. males) see their vehicles as an extension of their personal space, their bodies and/or their sexual organs.

How could the Google concept play a role – not just in assisting the “driver” – but in transforming our transport infrastructure, and the built environment in general?

• Provide dedicated lanes or even “tracks” for driverless cars
• Focus on bringing the driverless capabilities to green (or greener) vehicles, including sub-compacts and other vehicles more fitting for the urban commuter
• Possibilities for shared commuting.  Minibus taxis travelling fixed routes or travelling to destinations selected by passengers

The driverless car, especially in a sub-compact “pod” configuration has the potential to form the basis of a new, shared and publicly-owned transport system, taking millions of superfluous vehicles off the roads and improving the quality of life for all.

Google driverless cars can bring us one step closer to the ideal hybrid public transport system, where the infrastructure is publically owned, but the commuter has exclusive use of the vehicle or pod for the duration of the commute or journey.

Google driverless car - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

p.s.    I’m still the hell in about Google Notebook, Google Pack, Google Sidewiki and all the other products you’ve been slashing lately.  Please stop!  Rather get rid of Google Buzz.  Oh, and please stop messing around with Google Groups too.  You’ve mortally wounded it, no doubt intentionally.  Readers, expect to see an announcement regarding the demise of Google Groups before long.

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Once upon a time, cars were divided into clear categories; hatchbacks, sedans, LCV’s (bakkies), etc.  At that time, it made sense that only certain types of vehicles, e.g. hatchbacks, station wagons (estates) and SUV’s, should have a windscreen wiper on the rear windscreen.  After all, it was only with these designs that rainwater and dust thrown up by the rear wheels could obscure the rear windscreen.  These neat categories have long since vanished, however.  Rather than set categories, vehicles fall somewhere along a design spectrum.  Dirt, dust, puddles and rainwater can obscure the rear windscreen of pretty much any vehicle.  So, to repeat the question in the title of this piece, why don’t sedans have rear wipers?

When I planned to buy my first new car in the mid-late 80’s, the vehicle at the top of my short-list was the Nissan Langley Exa Turbo.  Certain variants of this iconic range broke the mould by being fitted with just such a wiper.  The car of my dreams was a mere R15,000 in those days, but with my lousy salary at “one of the big four banks” in South Africa at the time, it remained forever out of reach.

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I could have bought a domain through any one of a number of reputable registrars.  Because I’m going to be using it with Google Apps, I made the mistake of registering it through Google.  Oy!  After entering my credit card details, I was told to upload documents to verify my identity and residence (first time ever that this has happened).  This is the confirmation message I received at the end:

Thank you

Thank you for submitting your verification documents. Please note that it may take up to four business days for our specialists to review your Google Checkout account and your verifications documents. We will contact you at the conclusion of our review.

Four business days!?  WTF!?  Are you guys doing this using quill and parchment!?

So, instead of having my shiny new domain available at the speed of light, I face the prospect of a four business day wait.  With no certainty that my domain registration will even be “granted” by Lord Google.  Why didn’t they just cancel the ****ing transaction!?

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So, my question is, what have the clowns in Redmond done to the Microsoft Update site, specifically WRT Windows XP?  Until recently, you could take a newly minted “bare” XP machine, run Windows/Microsoft Update repeatedly and your machine would be fully patched after a few hours of occasionally hitting Enter.

Instead, I now get redirected to this Microsoft KB article, where I’m told to install the latest service pack:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2497281

I do that, and guess what?  After installing XP SP3 and confirming the install with WINVER, I STILL get redirected to the same dumb-ass error message masquerading as a KB article.

What gives, MS?  You guys get tired of something that works nicely and decide to make some “improvements”, based on “feedback from our customers”?  Or this just another subtle way of telling us to get off XP?

Please just fix the damned thing!

(To add insult to injury, Automatic Updates simply doesn’t run on the affected machine, although it has been turned on.)

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Bloggers making use of e-mail to post to their blogs should be aware that blogs are being hacked (perhaps hijacked would be a better word) by spammers.  Three of my Blogger (BlogSpot) and my Amplify stream were hijacked in this manner, with spam posts suddenly appearing on all four within hours of one another.  Fortunately all of them were configured to send me a confirmation email message whenever something is published.  I have disabled posting by means of email on the Blogger side, but it doesn’t seem to be possible to disable this function with Amplify.

If you make use of posting via email on Blogger, make sure the target email address is random, i.e. totally unrelated to the blog name or URL (suggestion: get your favourite password generator to conjure up a randomised alpha/numeric email address for you).  With Amplify, unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be possible to do this.

Thus far, services such as Posterous and Tumblr appear to have escaped the tender mercies of these spammers, at least in my case.

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In the first place, it’s like the proverbial lipstick on a pig.

Worse, every time I use the new look and click a link, all I see is a message saying “Loading...”, and then eventually some obscure error message.

Try to load “My Groups” and I’m rewarded with an error message saying “An error (#401) occurred while communicating with the server.  Dismiss  Reload”.

Try to load a welcome message for a group through the new interface, and all I get is a message saying “An error occurred while communicating with the server.  Dismiss  Reload”.

I’ve chosen the Categories for the Group, and get a confirmation message saying “Group categories successfully updated.”  Look again a few minutes later and the Home Page says “Group categories: Not categorized”.

Click on more …About or more … Settings and you get thrown back to the old interface anyway!

For a company with the resources that Google commands, this is a joke.  Just leave the damn interface alone, fix the bugs and update the functionality a bit.  Jeez!

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My PC is littered with seemingly unrelated and/or overlapping utilities bundled with my relatively new Samsung CLX-3185FW multi-function printer (MFP).  The list includes the following:

• Network PC Fax/Fax Journal
• Samsung AnyWeb Print
• Smart Panel and related utilities
• Easy Colour Manager
• Scan and Fax Manager
• SmarThru
• Samsung SpeedPlus
• IRIS Applications

The SmarThru application – which used to be the heart of Samsung’s printer software – has the ability to Scan To an Application, and E-mail, a Folder, OCR or the Web.

So what’s missing from this comprehensive list?  You cannot scan and fax a document in one operation!  For crying out loud people, multi-function printers have been doing this for decades!  Instead of a single, seamless scan to fax operation, you are forced to scan the document and save it to a folder on your hard drive, then find the document through Explorer and print it to the Samsung Network PC Fax driver.  You must then open the Fax Journal to determine whether the fax was successfully sent or not.  What a kludge!

IMHO, somebody senior at Samsung should be canned for this.

If you’re in the market for a networkable, colour, multi-function printer, look elsewhere.

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I realise it’s nothing personal, but just in the last couple of months we’ve had a number of user-hostile moves from the guys who practically invented the concept of being user-unfriendly:

The demise of Windows Live Spaces.  It was never going to take the blogging market by storm, but it was a reasonable (and reliable platform).  I’d just started using it for my family and friends updates when they pulled the plug on it in a very short space of time.  Yes, WordPress is nice, but it wasn’t what I wanted.  IMHO the demise of Windows Live Spaces has left a significant gap in the Windows Live online portfolio.

Next, the product owners of Windows Home Server did away with the idea of being able to expand the storage pool on a WH Server just by plugging in another USB drive.  They even had some fancy terminology for it.  Anyway, it’ll be gone when the next (VAIL (or should it be FAIL?)) release of WHS comes out.  I’d just started recommending it to SME clients.  Thankfully nobody had taken me up on it yet.

Lastly, the demise of Live Mesh Beta (remember, the one that supported XP) and its replacement by Windows Live Mesh, which DOESN’T support XP.  Thank goodness Dropbox has no such limitation.

Redmond has developed the ability to tick off its user base into a fine art.  That worked in the days of yore, when Bill gates was at the helm and Microsoft was riding the crest of the wave.  In this new era, where many people manage to get along just fine without their offerings, it’s not that wise.

Microsoft, you’re really starting to look Novell-ish.

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I wrote the review below to post on the CNET Download.com site where I searched for and downloaded the utility.  I’ve edited it somewhat for publication on this blog.

As an IT consultant, I occasionally need to rebuild a machine for a client.  Almost invariably, it’s a no-name brand PC, with no easy way to restore the drivers.  I was therefore looking for a product that would allow me to backup and restore the existing driver set for the workstation.

After an exhaustive search, I finally settled on Drivermax to help me with this and other device driver issues.  In summary:

• The best of a not particularly impressive bunch.
• The “Identify unknown hardware” function is very useful.
• Both the product and technical support exhibit behaviour that doesn’t inspire confidence.

Pros

Appears to do a good job of identifying and backing up your existing driver set, saving it to a folder tree “My Drivers” under “My Documents”.  I haven’t yet been able to test the restore function in a Live scenario.

The “Identify unknown hardware” function proved extremely useful where Windows XP failed to identify the Graphics and Network cards on a PC during and after Setup.

Cons

On one machine, I carried out a “mass update” of all outdated drivers.  I would, however, recommend rather just updating the drivers for particular devices where there are known issues rather than this shotgun approach, i.e. take an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach.  Following this exercise, I noticed that the descriptions for a large number of drivers were now in German instead of English (as per the log.txt backup file).  Although the machine still appears to be working properly, this doesn’t inspire confidence in the product, nor does the lack of a satisfactory explanation from Drivermax support.

I’ve seen far too many instances where the New Version according to Drivermax has a lower version number than the current version.  I haven’t had a satisfactory explanation from Drivermax support for this behaviour.

All my technical support issues have been responded to by a single person at innovative-sol.com.  I hope that there’s a bit more depth to their engineering area than this!

Having some sort of public support forum, e.g. on a platform such as Get Satisfaction would also be very welcome, and allow peer support to pick up some of the slack from the support people (person?) at Drivermax.  It would also allow users to get a feel for what support issues are out there, and how others have managed to resolve them.

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Has the era of freeware and shareware come to a complete end?  I may well have missed the announcement, but here’s what I found with a recent foray into freeware/shareware to find a utility to find/update device drivers:

• Freeware appears to have become just another name for crippled trialware.
• Similarly, shareware appears to have become a synonym for commercial software with a 15-day trial period.
• In most cases, the free and/or trial versions of these products have been so crippled as to be almost useless.  Gone are the days of being able to download the fully functional version, then toss a few coins in the cap once you tired of the nag screen.

So what’s wrong with attaching a price to these utilities?  Surely their creators are also entitled to make a living from their work?

Well, one of the problems is that vendors see fit to charge the same or only slightly less than the price of quality commercial software.  The ask is generally $29.95 for a hideously ugly, poorly coded piece of software with an abysmal user interface that generally can perform only one single function, as against a commercial utility toolbox or suite for $40-60!  In some cases the $29.95 licence buys you a single year’s use only!

My take:  If I were the creator of such a utility, I would rather have 100 users at $10 than 10 users at $30 (I’m pretty sure my ratios are right).  When you’re selling a utility that is somewhat useful in certain very specific situations, but not essential, you need to price accordingly.  The buy/don’t buy decision should be a no-brainer, which it is at $10, but not at $30.

In case you’re wondering, I eventually downloaded Drivermax (I’m tired of being politically correct about the eccentric use of UpperCase), and even sprang for a 1-year Pro licence.

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For reasons I won’t bore you with, I recently needed to migrate from a Windows 7 machine to one running Windows Vista, a version of the O/S that I (like many) had effectively ignored, preferring to leapfrog from Windows XP to Windows 7.

I ran the bundled version of Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7 on the Win/7 machine (the “From” machine) without a hitch.  I expected the process to be just as smooth on the Vista machine (the “To” machine).  I ran the bundled version of Windows Easy Transfer on the Vista machine, but was shocked to find that it didn’t recognise my  “Windows Easy Transfer - Items from old computer.MIG" file as a valid Windows Easy Transfer file!

Thinking the problem through, I realised I should be running the Vista component of Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7 (WET/7) on the Vista machine.  After going through the Vista Service Pack hell I described in my last blog post, I duly ran WET /7.  Despite trying every option, I was unable to convince WET/7 that the Vista machine was the To machine and NOT the From machine.  My 6GB .MIG file was completely worthless!

My gripe is this:  why the assumption (presumption?) that files and settings are always being migrated to a later version of Windows?  I cannot be the first Windows user who’s needed to migrate to the same or an older version of Windows, for any number of reasons.

Instead of having at least three versions of a files and settings migration utility (the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (XP), Windows Easy Transfer (Vista) and Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7), why not instead have a single cross-platform utility that can migrate files and settings from/to all current versions of Windows, earlier, the same or later.  This universal utility would still require different components for the various Windows versions, but that means three setup files at most, rather than a half-dozen or more.

How about it, Microsoft?  Just for a change, do something to help your users work with Windows they way they’d like to, rather than trying to force them to work the way you want them to.

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So, I needed to install Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7 on my Vista machine (more on the need for that in a future piece).  When I attempted to install and run it, however, it came up with the following error message and aborted once I clicked OK:

To run Windows Easy Transfer on Windows Vista, you need to have the latest service pack installed. Go to Windows Update and download and install the latest service pack.

Immediately, there are two things wrong here:

• The machine was already fully patched, as attested to by Windows Update itself.  Agreed, the service packs hadn’t been installed, but all the underlying components certainly had been.  (This is not me saying so, it’s Windows Update.)
• The message “Go to Windows Update and download and install the latest service pack” is also problematic, as Windows Update does not and will not ever give you the option of installing service packs!  Nice going, guys.  Great to see that the left hand still doesn’t know what the left hand is doing in Redmond.

After further moaning and bitching, I finally knuckled under and downloaded the humungous service pack (SP) files.  Following a process which lasted almost an entire working day, I finally had the SP’s installed, then ran the setup for Windows Easy Transfer for Windows 7.  (After all that, it didn’t help anyway, but more in a future piece.)

Here’s what’s wrong with the whole Vista Service Pack picture, in my considered opinion:

• Why are SP’s required for a machine that is already fully patched?  Shouldn’t a Microsoft installation routine recognise this?
• Why doesn’t Windows Update give me the option of installing the service packs, instead of installing each individual update?
• Why don’t the engineers on the Easy Transfer team know that Windows Update has nothing to do with service packs?
• The Web version of Microsoft/Windows Update simply referred me back to my local machine version.
• Why are these files so insanely large (450 and 350MB respectively)?  What the hell is in them?  Would it help to offer a single language version (instead of 5 or all), or leave out the updates for Server 2008?
• Lastly, and to me the most egregious offence of all, why is SP2 not cumulative, i.e. why do I first need to install SP1, then only SP2?  Even in Windows XP, service packs are cumulative, with only the latest needing to be installed.  Why was that lesson lost with Vista?

Microsoft, you do some great stuff.  What a pity that, every now and then, you seem to need to show the world how much you really suck at getting the basics right!

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