It has never been a case of incremental improvement with Windows—over the years and across versions. It has always been a mindless gag & stitch of UI here, a thoughtless change of functionality there, and a total disregard for the user in general. This saga sadly continues with every new manifestation—Windows Vista and Windows 7 are no exceptions. Take for instance the simple example of a home folder path (or home directory).

Whereas Unix has been around since the early 70s. And for an oldest operating system such as this, its consistency is truly remarkable. Fundamentals right up there in-place. Not to be satisfied, the cyberpunks who designed it also assigned shortcuts to the home folder. the tilde (~). How awesome.

In the case of Windows, all I can say is — how mindlessly irritating. I cannot count the number of problems this stupid Windows folderpath has created throughout my professional career. Lost backups, broken network connections, broken folder links, lost in transfer, the list goes on. I continue to put up with this shit at work. So, it is hardly a surprise that new types of lawsuits are now rearing their heads—just to highlight a case in point.

It had an admin account and a user account. Upon logging in, the user account worked fine, but the admin account seemed to have a mind of its own. It would warn that the password had expired, and then would go on to prompt for a new password. Good so far, but upon changing the password twice, it would throw up this following error:

Configuration information could not be read from domain controller, either the machine is unavailable or access has been denied.

In effect, the machine was virtually locked out from admin access—we knew the admin password, Vista read it correct but refused to login.

I sent a summary of this phenomenon to a trusty old friend—asking for his help. The fact that he found it strange confirms that this indeed is a problem, which appears to have no quick fix. He responded with this:

The error indicates this machine was part of the domain (DC) which is now not available to provide authority to change the password. Was this activated as part of the domain?..My worry is home vista premium cannot connect to domain (the software stack is absent in it).

So how did we go around it? Well, we didn’t, or rather we couldn’t. I used an Ubuntu live CD to copy some important files from the admin account before trying the restore CDs that HP shipped with the computer.

The restore CDs refused to re-image the disk, because admin password refused to get “registered”. The HP Support refused to help—said it was not their problem, and the computer store in Houston that pre-installed the OS for my colleague charged him a hundred and fifty bucks more to reinstall the OS again.

Stories like these don’t instill much confidence when you’re contemplating about upgrading to Vista.

Vista will be a definite upgrade for me and my family.

So what does Gates talk about? The “digital lifestyle” with “software at its center.” Maybe robots want digital lifestyles, but human beings don’t. Human beings want lives. This digital lifestyle, as Gates envisions it, is just another big pile of software features that we have to sort through and make sense of. We get up and stare into a vast computer screen in our kitchen, with multiple video feeds, multiple digital images of our children, and a map on which we can track the moment-by-moment movements of our family members. (What’s next? The Xbox Digital Chastity Belt?) When we get to work we sit down in front of - guess what? - an even bigger computer screen filled with a bunch of software features, not to mention a handy tablet PC to doodle on. Go to the airport? Another big screen with another bunch of software features. As we move between the big screens, we have the little computer screen of our cell phone, loaded with, yes, a bunch of software features.

And Carr is right. We need simplicity in a real sense than the number of envisioned software features, while requiring perfection in those that already exist. I am a firm believer of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous quote: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. But I guess, it’s hard to come by.

A fast-moving computer worm Tuesday attacked computer systems using Microsoft operating systems, shutting down computers in the United States, Germany and Asia.

CNN just aired their green room chaos this morning to show what was actually happening behind the scenes. Oh boy, I’ve so been there and seen it happen before.