Chris Szurgot's Blog

http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2007/01/23/security-features-vs-convenience.aspx

Awesome post on the evolution of UAC in Vista. I particularly like that while some of the more stringent requirements off by default (Ctrl-Alt-Delete, and passwords for admin elevation), the functionality is still available to be turned on.

This particular line resonated with me:  "There is clearly a balance here because if we lock the system down too tightly, then we risk the majority of customers turning key features off, or even worse, staying on older versions of Windows and thus not realizing the great security benefits of the new system." I've run into several examples of this throughout my career, from a company with a great firewall that all the mission critical data was outside of becuase the admin didn't want to open up ports (So the devs were protected, but not the web site data), to complex passwords on sticky notes on the monitor.

As see on Paul Thurott

Hmmm.... It does seem to be a bit restrictive for a lot of people, but it will work just fine for my household. I was starting to wonder how I was going to upgrade all the computers in my house. (4 active, one we're not sure what we're going to do with...)

Since it says you can do it off of an Ultimate Upgrade, that's $249 for the upgrade, plus another hundred for the Family Pack, so that's $349 for 3 copies of ultimate. Woohoo!

(The last machine is an older tablet that I don't use too much, so it doesn't actually need to be updated.)

This does alleviate one real concern I have when I was trying to figure out licensing issues. One of the machines that will be upgraded is essentially a headless Media Center. Once installed, I connect to it through the XBox 360 or Remote Desktop. For that machine, Home Premium is great except for that lack of Remote Desktop, and I was having a hard time justifying $100 (cost difference between Premium and Ultimate) just for Remote Capabilities. Now I don't have too.

Can't wait for Jan 30th so I can spend some money. <grin>

Also, I'm going to the launch event in DC on the 30th, so that'll be pretty cool.

I've spent the last day and a half migrating our Team Foundation Server from a test box (setup to determine if TFS would work for us) to a production server (Stored in the server room, better backups, etc...) and I've ran into a few problems.

The first, suprisingly, is one of perception. When you say Development, it gets downplayed. So it's a matter of distinction. There's "development" data, which is test data that can be rebuilt, restored or recovered with little difficultly. Then there is "development process" data. (Revision control, issue tracking, project documents, etc...) that is truely production data, and should be protected at all costs. Fortunately, everybody has been convinced which is why we've promoted the box to production.

The second problem was with the migration. Very straightforward, and very time consuming. Especially since we had to back up all the databases by hand, and restore them one at a time. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to script up, and it took about 3 hours total.

And the third was with the darn service pack. I didn't install the SP before I did the migration into the new server, so everything worked by Source Control. Fortunately, this came to my rescue, and by removing the fifth user, I was able to upgrade and now everything works.

Whew!