Microsoft Vista Ultimate was the "fanboy" version which included both the business features *and* the media features in one package. There were also promised "Ultimate Extras" which for the most part turned out to be underwhelming, but really shouldn't have been a primary reason for buying Ulimate anyway. Now that Windows 7 is out and promises to bring the experience that Vista should have been to customers, Microsoft it trying to crank up sales with a... sale:

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-Windows-7/category/102

It is always bad when a major registrar has a failure of any type, but the continuing problems at Register.com are affecting at least a million websites (and the Register.com site itself):

Register.com suffers DOS attack

I ran into an issue with users who couldn't connect to a government website; the site reported "You must use Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater". This was odd, as the entire group affected was using IE7.

At first I thought it was just a bad browser detection, but when I visited the site, there was no error message. A bit of searching on the Internet turned up the fact that machines that upgraded from IE 6 can retain part of the connection string in a registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform

Often as a computer gets older it seems to get slower. Some of this is simply perception (we get used to faster machines we work with), some of it is simply software requiring more over time from hardware ("what Grove giveth, Gates taketh away") and some is the reality that machines accumulate "cruft" that bogs the machine down.

Visio 2007 has an incompatibility with Vista that I have seen many responses too, but most miss being a complete solution.

I use Remote Desktop for a lot of purposes: contacting servers and doing administrative tasks, using machines that I have long running background tasks on, without requiring yet another monitor on my desk (I already have four). However, anyone who uses it frequently has encountered the problem with clipboards being erratic.

This older post (November 2006) explains a lot of the complexity, but the key takeaway:

* If remote to local fails, kill RDPCLIP.exe (if running) and then start->run->"rdpclip.exe" to restart it.
* If local to remote fails, reconnect
* If the CPU spikies, kill RDPCLIP.exe *AND* optionally reconnect

While filling out the template for an account with MOSSO, the second page has a check box for "Use the information I provided on the previous step for this form". This is a reasonable option if your billing address is the same as your physical.

Sadly, the option failed silently on Firefox. It turns out, I used the larger address box to enter the suite number on a second line (the newline was accepted into this input box as expected). This caused the script to fail with an "unterminated string error" as it tried to convert that into a string internally and failed to handle the newline properly.

Using a comma and keeping it to a single line worked, but it always leaves one with an uneasy feeling when such minor errors creep into an application, especially one front ending something as complex as cloud computing.

I'm now all signed up, and the control panel seems basic, but usable. I'm transferring some smaller projects now and will update once things have progressed.

Earlier I mentioned a distaste for hard license enforcement schemes for mission critical software. An unmentioned side of the coin is the sheer usefulness of soft license enforcement schemes for ensuring that a company is in compliance with the licenses they have purchased.

I have never been fond of "hard" license enforcement rules for enterprise software. By definition, the software is mission critical, yet vendors continue to deploy it as a default way of thinking, despite possible bad results.

As strange at it may seem, this is often caused by a bad Shell Extension, which is mistakenly handling the launch request.

I had this happen on Vista, and found the NirSoft ShellExView was just the thing to fix my issue. It is freeware and if you don't need it, you won't even know what it is, but if you need it, you really need it.