Field Trip Fun
You think that once you’re out of public school you are done with field trips, right? Not if you’re in IT. Here’s what fun we had today:
Blaze downtown after a quick lunch so we can get a parking space for the Microsoft Vista / Office 2007 Launch Event at the Hilton, only to discover we should have brought sandwiches to eat in the car and driven home to ride the MAX because there is NO fucking parking in downtown. Okay, we did find a spot, but it took 30 minutes of driving through THREE different garages to get it.
Hoof it back to the Hilton and trek over to the Ballroom to sign in. Grab goodie bag and hit the refreshments table for a couple cookies. The Roomie grabbed a soda, and I should have followed suit, because for the rest of the day there was nothing but diet. Not just three or four diets left after the rest of the soda was gone, but rather 3/4 of a bin full of diet soda – like all they brought was 2 regular colas, 2 lemon-limes and the rest diet. I realize we are all chubby geeks here, but c’mon. Don’t try to feed me that unleaded shit. We are the niche market that popularized stuff like Jolt and Bawls fer chrissakes.
Sit through the next 4 hours of Microsoftian propaganda. Spend the entire time making quiet comments with my fellow Linux geek and our Mac-happy sales guy. “Nice GUI – haven’t I seen that on your PowerBook?” Or: MS GUY:’Office 2007 comes with hundreds of amazing features’ – ME: …that no-one will ever use.”
I will give them one point: Microsoft has made a complete about-face on their “minimize the perceived hardware impact” strategy. What’s that you ask? Their policy of trying to squeeze you into buying an update before you realized just what it was going to cost you in hardware upgrades. Things like the published Minimum Hardware Requirements for Small Business Server 2003 are: PIII proc @ 350MHz with 128MB of RAM. (Note that ‘MB’: This was in 2003, when your average server board could handle at least 4GB of RAM.) Yeah, it will boot on that – in 20 minutes or so. And the first time you have three simultaneous logins, the thing is going tits-up. A completely factual, but completely useless piece of information, with real-world figures being a minimum of a P4 proc at 1GHz with 1GB RAM.
This time around, they are being amazingly honest. To score a “Vista Premium Capable” tag, the PC must have a minimum 1GHz 32- or 64-bit processor and 1GB RAM, Direct-X 9 video card with 128MB video RAM. To get just “Vista Capable”, the scores drop to an 800MHz ‘modern processor’ (Translated: P4 or equivalent) and 512MB RAM.
Sonofabitch. An honest, real-world answer from Redmond. Get the helmets kids, the sky is a-comin’ down. (For the non-Geeks out there, that means they admit you will probably have to upgrade the hardware in your current PC, or really just buy a new one.)
So, you’re probably wondering what was in the goodie bag, right? Let’s see…propaganda, propaganda, and what’s this? A download key for a free full-feature-not-trialware copy of Office 2007? Holy shit! They’re holding about 20 of these events, which will be attended by 1,000’s of guys like me! This is going to cost them…
…not a damn thing. This was a Partner event, which means we are all already signed up for the Action Pack, which gives us free copies already.
So, 4 hours of mind-numbing presentation that would have taken me 1 hour to read, a lousy snack table, and you’re giving me stuff I was already going to get. Gee, thaaaaanks. I could have billed this time.
Hollerings