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Our family is a heavy user of Pandora.  I use it most of the day at work, Bec uses it a lot of the day and it is on pretty much till we head off to bed at night (dinner, relaxing, etc).  So I was saddened when I read the news today on the Pandora Blog that Pandora will being capping usage at 40 hours for free accounts.

If you didn’t know, Pandora has been in fights with the music industry for years about royalties.  According to the blog post they finally came to an agreement with the music industry.  Unfortunately the fees Pandora has to pay are higher than normal radio.

Going forward you can pay (or “tip”) $.99 if you hit 40 hours in a month to get the rest of the month activated or pay $36/year for Pandora One.  So will this change how you listen to radio?  Will you just use multiple accounts?  I’ll wait and see but I use Pandora enough that I can tip $.99 if I hit 40 hours.

The bigger problem is that the music industry is still trying to get money any way that it can instead of going with a model (like noisetrade.com) that work harder at connecting artist with their fans.  I have no problem buying music directly form an artist or paying for their shows.  I’m just tired of paying the middle man.

As you may have seen, today is the official release day for Windows 7 beta 1.  As I was reading reviews today I couldn’t help but notice all the comments on Vista and how bad it was and how Windows 7 is so much better.  Now I’m not knocking Windows 7 - everything I’ve seen shows great promise.  However, I would like to clear the air on Windows Vista and maybe help explain why it has gotten such a bad wrap.

I will start with just one sentence: Windows Vista was ahead of its time.  You may not agree, but hear me out.  Vista debuted in November of 2006 with the following minimum requirements:

512MB RAM
800MHz Processor

The average price of 2GB RAM in late 2006 was $200.  Today it is $40.  Dual-core processors were just coming out and cost $400+.  Most computer vendors (Dell, etc) sold basic computers that just barely met the minimum specs for Vista.  That means that those computers could run Vista with all the Vista features turned off, but most people didn’t know that.  Anyone today will tell you that if you are going to run Vista you need at least 2GB RAM and a dual core processor.  In 2006 that would cost upwards of $2,000.  Today that costs around $400.  You can see where I am going with this: to get a computer in 2006 that would run all the feature of Vista cost more than the average person was willing to spend.  Spending $399 on the Dell special and complaining that it won’t run hardware intensive software is not the vendors fault - the problem was between the computer and the chair.

Now I have to say something about mac lovers.  I know plenty of people that say that macs are just so much faster than a Vista machine.  What they really should be saying is that a $2,000 mac is much faster than a $399 PC running Vista.  Now let me spend $2,000 on a computer with Vista and then lets compare.  I’m not really a mac hater, I actually prefer Linux over everything.  I just think macs are overpriced and that they are nothing more than a fad.  Sorry for the rant, I’ll move on.

So here is the deal.  Vista is not a bad OS.  I’ve been running it since the beta was out and I never really had any problems in a production systems administration environment.  I also run it on a machine with a quad core processor, 4GB RAM and 256MB dedicated graphics card.  It’s actually a pretty stellar OS.  That said, I’m excited about Windows 7.  Not because Vista needs to be fixed (darn mac commercials make you think that!), but because Microsoft really does a pretty good job with Os’s.

You may have noticed that it has been a long time since I’ve made any posts recently.  I did my best to stay away from computers over the holiday break, except for my grad school project.  Since Eli has been born life has been pretty full throttle, but worth every second.  Sleeping has gotten better and things are feeling a little more managable.

I finally finished up my first grad school class, which I thought was pretty amazing with everything else that was going on.  If you ever wondered what kind of stuff that entails, check out my paper.

I hope to be updating this thing a little more often, not just when we have a child.  Topics to come:

Being a dad
The Pursuit of Coffee and my French Press
The American Church

Despite all the Vista hate going on out there, I have stuck with Vista as my primary OS for well over a year now and guess what: I love it.  Most people give up on it after only a couple days because more often than not, it is just different.  It took me a little while of trying to figure out how to do things the “new” way, just like I had to with Office 2007 (which I think is one of the most intuitive Office suites to date, but that is another story).  Call me a MS fanboy (I am a MCSE), but just being able to hit the Start key and type what I am looking for is awesome.  The one drag I have had (even after SP1 came out) was “how do I admin Active Directory from within Vista?”

I was excited when I saw the release of Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT), but when I installed it for the first time it did nothing.  Go figure, I just didn’t read the instructions (like 99.999% of sys admins in the world).  Turn out I just never enabled it.  For those of you that ignored the instructions and are going to the search engine manual, here they are again.  After you install RSAT (see link above):

Open Control Panel, click Programs, and then click Turn Windows features on or off under Programs and Features. If you are prompted to provide permission by User Account Control, click Continue.
In the Windows Features dialog box, select the remote administration snap-ins and tools that you want to install, and then click OK.

RSAT is all well and good, but my one other beef with Vista is that in a secure enterprise environment, most sys admin work has to be done as a domain administrator, and the shift+right click Run As… trick doesn’t work.  I don’t want to Run As Administrator, I want to run as my domain administrator!  If you just made your user account part of the Domain Admins group you should be shot.  There is actually a simple fix to this.  Check out Mark Russinovich’s (of sysinternals) cool gadget ShellRunas.  It basically adds a link in the right-click menu to a shell script for whatever app you are on that invokes the command line runas command.  A great little tool that makes sys admin work much easier in Vista.

So here is an example problem form my Computer and Network Security class (which is basically cryptography).  Feel free to take a crack at it (note - this is not multiple choice, there are 5 parts to the question):

Compute the following modular exponentiations. If there is a theorem or identity that simplifies the computation, show how that theorem or identity is used for the example. After simplification, you can use your calculator to compute the answer; you do not need to use the repeated squaring algorithm.

a. 15^37 mod 54
b. 6^12 mod 13
c. 8^49 mod 35
d. 22^1047 mod 12
e. 38^16 mod 40

So it seems like I have been switching blogs about once a year, and I’ve decided to do it again.  I have been using a full Joomla site for a while but I’ve decided to give in and go with WordPress.  One reason is that I was just not using all the functionality of Joomla, another is the great integration with Windows Live Writer.  So far so good, more to come soon!

Updated

The other main reason I had to start a new one is because of blog-spammers.  Boooo!!