Microsoft Zune

Microsoft is launching its new Zune player soon. but will it work?

Given that you can share music which others can listen to for 3 days or 3 plays I'm assuming that the Zune player is full of DRM. Nice.

If this means that everyone is going to struggle copying music around between home PC and device and laptop etc. as people tend to have multiple machines nowadays then I doubt it's going to go very far.

Zune can play non DRM wma files and the like, but to make it a success it must sell these unprotected files in its store, or you'll pay your money and then be stuck on one device.

For me, I think I'll stick with a CD; unless of course I'm pleasantly surprised at the lack of DRM, but I doubt that somehow.

Loosing Your Rights

I was poking around the web again today and found an interesting article on the BBC Technology site. The below is a brief summary of the bits I found interesting.

While reading it turns out that you have to be very careful when using ‘free’ online publishing services. For example, Microsoft took the rights to do whatever it wanted with everything sent via the Microsoft Passport, and as pointed out in the article, this means anything sent via Hotmail, including your latest business plan or idea.

Google has done the same with Orkut and even the BBC in its own article points out the dangers of submitting photos to its own site.

This is a good article worthy of a read. If nothing else, it emphasises the need to not undertake business via anything except your own servers, and do everything you can yourself.

Using free services is just lazy. The technology is not difficult to reproduce with a database and web server, and there are more than enough free, open source applications to do the majority of the work for you. You can pick up a server of your own for £50, a domain for a couple of quid, apache for free, Oracle for free. If your information isn’t worth £52 its not worth publishing.

Useful links

• Full BBC Article
• Apache Web Server
• 1&1 Internet Hosting
• Jive Software (MSN Alternative)

Oh, and yes, use linux! OpenSuSE

Office 2007 BETA 2 : Initial View

Got my hands on a copy of the latest Office 2007 BETA 2 today. So far I’ve only installed the end user apps, and none of the server stuff.

Initial impression is that there may be something worth buying here. With the BETA you do get everything in all versions, so the cost of all this BETA stuff when it’s in production would be in the thousands rather than the hundreds (and that’s not including the server apps) I suspect, but still, it looks good.

The user interface is completely new in the basic office apps (Word, Excel etc) although Outlook is pretty similar. I’d guess that when its finalised everything will have the new GUI.

Unfortunately the VISIO BETA 2 just crashes each time I try and load it, and since it’s all running on a clean install of XP SP2 then I presume it’s just broken. If it isn’t going to work on that then where is it? Hope it will be fixed soon.

The other (very) annoying feature, which I presume will be fixed in the final release is that when you open Outlook it spurns multiple Word windows (when you create and email, add a contact etc). There just blank and you can’t close or minimise them. I think this problem goes back to Office 2003 as it happened on there too, but you could turn off ‘Use Word to edit messages’ which fixed it. That options not available here, and I suspect using Word is pretty integrated to save creating two spell checkers, two grammar checkers etc.

That problem only seems to appear on multiple monitor setups, so if you’re on a single screen then all should be well. At least, that’s what I found in Office 2003. Primarily I’ve noticed this with Matrox cards, probably something to do with the way they manage the desktop (far superior to other ‘gamer’ cards trying to power two screens from one chip).

Still trying to see what InfoPath and Groove do for me that you couldn’t do with a well tuned SharePoint setup, but we’ll see.

One final point of note so far with Outlook 2007. With an IMAP connection it seems to want to do a lot more to keep the folders synchronised than the 2003 variant did. I’ve not had it installed enough to see what it’s doing, but it’s certainly a lot slower than 2003. Whether this is due to BETA or a new way of looking after IMAP folders we’ll have to wait and see. A bit more digging required there!

Still, a promising start for a BETA application and I’ll wait and see how I get on with it over the coming days and weeks.

Internet Explorer 7

What a load of crap. Use Firefox.

I tried to install IE7, given its promises of tabbed browsing and the like. This worked fine on my laptop, so I thought I'd give it a go on all my PCs. What a fool I feel now.

The installer crashed, not usually the catestrophic failure this one turned out to be. I've no idea what MS have done to create such a mess.

It prompted for a reboot, claiming it needed to restore old files, so, like a fool, I let it restart.

Upon reboot IE just didn't work. It wasn't version 7, 6 or any other. Windows thinks its still installed, won't let me un-install it, claiming it was installed by a different user - and even logging on with Administrator won't let me remove it. What a load of bollocks.

Not only did it kill of IE completely, it also killed Office Outlook 2003 moaning it needed IE4 or higher to work.

DO NOT INSTALL IE7 F YOU FANCY EITHER YOUR SANITY OR A WORKING SYSTEM.

Surprisingly, or not, Microsoft's help doesn't mention what to do with a failed install and how to recover your system. I don't mind testing beta products and don't expect them to be stable. But, if they make a mess of your system it would be nice to have some help on recoving the situation.

If you feel like checking the MS artical on 'recovering IE6 in Windows XP' don't bother. It suggests re-installing SP2. That doesn't work either, as SP2 crashes on reboot and recovers absolutely nothing of use.

The useless system restore feature failed to restore anything useable yet again... has anyone had this thing work? Ever?

Finally, after a lot of web surfing using the, fortunately still working, FireFox you can uninstall it by hacking the registry and adding the following:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer

add a new string value - InstalledByUser
with a value of the account you used to install this pile of crap in the first place.

Close regedit and unstall.

Have a lot of fun. Choose FireFox.