What a day! The launch of Vista, and I didn’t even manage to push out a post! Well, besides this one. Anyhow, I can confirm that my Vista Ultimate copy will be arriving on the 12th of February. Please note that I’ve included a little snapshot above, because the bigger image is 1.1MB in size, and those of you (0.121%) who are using dial-up may not wish to see the whole thing. But click on it to see the full thing.

The ‘Wow’ starts now. In theory… But seriously, Vista is set to be a hit. I’m all for early-adopting it, and in my opinion, Vista will decide the future of Microsoft. I’m hoping to work more closely with the company in future. They still have a great time ahead of them, and us kids need to be educated better, how to use the software, tools and services provided by them in a more streamlined, effective, productive way. At the moment, the only thing the whole of my class knows how to do without fail, is ‘Copy & Paste’. Even then, they have trouble rendering the text/images correctly in MS-Word because of some ‘table’ element in the layout. Shame on you! CSS helps us kids steal your content for homework better. Nope… I’m good. I don’t steal stuff.

Anyhow… Vista. Well, as I can’t be bothered writing a post today (too tired!), I’ll include a list articles below…

Engadget - Vista Roundup
TechTree - Multiple Launches
Huliq - Washington Gets $3.5 Billion from Vista!
MobileTechReview - Interesting Factsheet
BusinessWire - Vista Dell PCs

Anyhow, I’ve been a busy man with Techzi.net, and am proud to announce that we’re very nearly ready! We have some bugs to iron out, we need to finish Wordpress Integration, Tag some 670 posts, set http://www.techzi.net/ to point to the same place that http://techzi.net/ is pointing to, and then we need to finish all of the individual pages on the site/blog/thingy.

Should be great! If I don’t post for a few days, you know why. It’ll be worth the wait!

Okay… I admit it. If it hadn’t have been for the shiny press release that arrived on my doorstep today, I might have actually completely forgotten that today was that day. The day that Vista gets launched and Microsoft realizes they just shipped an operating system which will cost their patching team goodness knows how many million dollars. Nevertheless, there is hope in Vista, the flagship operating system that Microsoft is banking on to take the world forward into the most critical part of computing history yet. The coming years will be not only a test of fate, wit and courage for the Redmond based company, but will also no doubt decide the future face for Microsoft.

Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, rang the NASDAQ opening bell along with NASDAQ president and CEO, Robert Greifeld. Supposedly the start of a new era, November 30 has come and gone as quickly as any other day in my memory. Not even a ten page advert in the Metro. A pity really. Microsoft thought that Windows Live Search deserved a quadruple page spread the other day, over the front page, the second page the back page and the second to back page. Hopes obviously aren’t riding high at Vista. As usual though, Microsoft are banking on the businesses to lead the way, suggesting that all business will see their productivity soar with the new operating system in place. If only it were that simple.

Joining Ballmer at NASDAQ MarketSite was Michael Wolf, president and chief oprating officer of MTV Networks. “In the highly competitive and fast-moving media and entertainment industry, our advantage comes from our people,” Wolf said. “These new products provide rich collaboration tools and powerful information-discovery capabilities that will help our employees be more productive and more creative. This will strengthen our competitive edge, and that’s why we’ll deploy the new products to 3,000 desktops in the coming six months.”

Every now and again, we look at new Open Source technologies and what their developing community is up to. Today we are looking at Firefox Themes. We’ve selected a list of themes that we think might really take off, and that have our backing:

1. Noia 2.0 (Great! It can only improve!)
2. Firefox Vista (Temperamental at best, but we can’t wait till it’s finnished!)
3. Glassier (Needs full icon skinning)
4. Qute Modded (Nice, but needs some tweeking.)
5. Phoenity (Great and colourful, just needs a quick polish off!)

And the Official Top Downloaded 5 in comparison are:

1. Noia 2.0
2. Firefox Vista
3. BlueShift
4. Silver Skin
5. iFox Smooth