Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Windows Vista likes to play “Mother may I?” and ask you EVERY damn time it wants to do something if it’s allowed to, even for services that should be certified as its own:

Why should I have to approve its own activation component? Its rundll components? It’s hardware installation components? I believe in a more secure architecture, but really Microsoft, this is taking the security iniative a little too far. As a consumer, I just want it to run–security decisions should be made behind my back. Especially for operating system components. What does it say for your system when it doesn’t even trust itself?

Ever wondered if you can run Microsoft Windows Vista on, say, a non-intel Apple computer (like the 12″ powerbook)? Well, here’s proof that you can:

This is not a fake screenshot or photo–Microsoft Windows Vista is really on that Apple Mac instead of OSX, and it’s not an Intel x86 chip in there, either, it’s running OSX on a single traditional G4 processor. How did I do it? Simple: I got Windows Vista running in VMware 5 Workstation, which is a major pain, and then used Remote Desktop from the Mac. Did you know there’s a remote desktop client for the Mac? That’s the easiest way to get Vista on your mac.

Installing Vista on a virtual machine is a little more annoying. First, you need a 16GB virtual disk before the Vista beta will let you install it. Second, you need to format this space and then on reboot manually boot from CD again. Third, the virtual shared folder abstraction doesn’t work in Windows Vista for some reason.

I uploaded two short clips to Google Video on February 25, 2006. Guess what, Google, it’s April 8th now and they’re still not live. I keep getting a “Video is verified; stay tuned - it will be live shortly” message when I log in:

What’s wrong with this picture? I upload two less than 10s video clips to Google Video a month and a half ago, and they’ve yet to be released in a form where I can use it. Now, if I used major competitor YouTube, I’d have these videos live and published on my blog in the same few minutes. I’ve emailed Google Video, but unless the time-to-live becomes reasonable, bloggers and home users are not going to jump on the bandwagon.

While major TV studios and movie companies may be useful assets, the real force behind a video sharing system is the viral nature of user-uploaded content. Without efficient publication of that content, Google Video is a crippled Web 2.0 application.

Update

Thanks for your email. We understand that your videos have been verified, but has not gone “live.” We looked into your account and found that the videos listed below do not meet our minimum length requirement of 10 seconds:

MOV01787.MPG length = 3.92 seconds
MOV01674.MPG length = 2.48 seconds

Please make sure the videos you upload meet our minimum technical requirements. To review our technical requirements, please visit: video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=26579&topic=1488.

If you have additional Google Video questions, please feel free to visit our Help Center at video.google.com/support. We hope you’ll visit Google Video in the future to see our additions and improvements.

Here are some first impressions from around the blogosphere on IE7b2:

• Robert McLaws list of related resources
• Sean MCB has a few thoughts on the new beta
• Chron realizes that this is not a beta, but a preview of a beta
• Digg has a choir of anti-MS comments
• Soreeys points us at this Ars Technica review
• David gives it a little trial run. Poor guy had to reboot…
• Matt made it crash!!
• Jeremy has been toying with it for a while now, didn’t die
• The IE team posts a feature list

If you’re interested in more IE 7 news, take a look at the SpreadIE category of this blog!

12345678901234. Can you believe that Blizzard would let install / run / play local or lan or hacked bNet games with this silly default serial number? Yup.