I was having trouble installing some updates on my copy of Vista Beta 2 (which I never managed to solve, by the way... if anyone know what error code 8024AFFF means, I’d love to hear it!) when I was distracted by a conversation in one of the Microsoft Support newsgroups.

Basically, someone was complaining that Microsoft was intentionally “crippling” Vista in order to maximize profits. Well, duh!

Someone likened the move to the way Ford charges so much more for an Aston Martin than they do for a Pinto. Which is actually a good comparison, for a number of reasons. First of all, when you get right down to it, a car is a car. Right? Just like Windows Vista is Windows Vista. While it may cost Microsoft the same amount of money to actually build Vista Ultimate as it does to build Vista Basic, when built in similar quantities, an Aston Martin would not be a whole lot more to produce than a Pinto (there would probably still be a difference, but it wouldn’t be as much as it is when the two cars are produced in their current quantities).

Releasing different “flavours” of Windows (and charging different amounts for each) is called “market segmentation” and it’s just like how you can get vouchers for cheaper petrol from your supermarket. The Oil company is selling exactly the same product for two different prices. When you calculate the actual value of saving your docket, 4 cents a litre is maybe $2.50 for a tank of petrol. Some people are willing to spend the extra time and effort required to save that docket, while others simply say “hang it” and pay the extra $2.50.

Maybe Microsoft are ripping off people who buy the Ultimate version of Vista, but so is your Petrol Station, and so is that restaurant that prints buy-one-meal-get-one-meal free vouchers on the back of your shop-a-docket, so are the movie theatres who charge less on tight-arse-Tuesday (as we call it in Australia), and so are the airlines who charge vastly different amounts to basically everyone on the flight.

It’s running off my PC at home, and the ASP.NET pages I made aren’t nearly complete, but you can look at the initial collection of photo from my trip to Korea here: home.codeka.com

Apparently there’s a woman who claims to be a descendent of the union between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. It seems kind of silly, though since, mathematically speaking, most of us would also be a descendent of the same union (assuming it happened at all).

Jesus lived some 2,000 years ago, right? That’s about 65 generations (assuming a generation is 30 years). So how many ancestors did I have 65 generations ago? You just have think mathematically for a bit. 1 generation ago I have two ancestors (my mum and dad), 2 generations ago I had 4 (their mums and dads, my grandparents), 3 generations ago it was 8. So you keep doubling until you get to 65 generations. How many ancestors is that?

2⁶⁵ ≈ 37,000,000,000,000,000,000

Obviously, there weren’t that many people around at the time (there aren’t that many around now, either), so to get an accurate result you need to take into account people who get counted more than once (because they appear in different places in your family tree). But that’s still a staggering number.

In fact, if I were to build a time machine and travel back 2,000 years (even 1,000 years) the first person I happen to bump into is very likely going to be one of my ancestors. The only time this is not going to be the case would be if that person’s line died out (usually if they didn’t have any children themselves).

So the logical conclusion is that if Jesus had a child, and that child’s line has survived into today, then most of us are descended from Jesus Christ.

It would be theoretically possible for there to only be one or two people alive today who can make the claim, but that would require that, for 2,000 years, every descendent had only 1 child. Seems rather unlikely. I’m sure this Ms McGowan has cousins and second cousins – they would all be descendents of Jesus as well, since they all have the same progenitor (Ms McGowan’s great-grandparents).

I don’t know... it just seems like good timing, the way this story was released just in time for her book to come out.

Is it really true that nobody likes change? Not reall. I think the main reason for doing what Microsoft have done, as described in Michael’s post “Nobody likes change,” is because people actually do like change (as long as it’s for the better) but people also work in a world where users are still running Windows 95, years after its support has been discontinued.

Especially when you’re talking about a very simple API that is either entirely algorithmic in nature (like the IDN mitigation APIs mostly are), or is a simple table-driven data-provider (like these new APIs are), there’s no reason for it not to be included in downlevel versions of the operating system.

Obviously, you need to provide some incentive for people to upgrade, but what you need to remember is that you have to encourage users to upgrade, not developers, but you do need to encourage developers to develop for the new platform. It’s a bit chicken-and-egg, but providing downlevel versions of some APIs is a good way to get developers to look at the newer features.

One point Michael makes is that:

[T]o make developers willing to accept change, you need to provide all the following:

• A good reason to make it
• An easy way to do it
• It has to work on more than just the latest version

Now, I would agree with the first two, but I would somewhat disagree with the last point. As long as the first two are true, the second is not necessarily true. Take these new APIs for instance. Currently on Windows XP these is no way to get this data, without including the tables in your own code. This means that if you want this functionality, you would need to do all of the work to include the tables anyway – there’s not much incentive to put in an “if (running-on-Vista) { do-it-the-Vista-way }” block into your code.

However, if you’re (for example) writing a Wizard, then it might make sense to develop two separate user-interfaces. One using the classic Wizard97 look-and-feel for Windows 2000, XP, etc. And another using the new Aero Wizard look-and-feel in Vista. Now, theoretically, it might be possible to do this by simply changing the flags on Vista, but in reality, you’ll probably want to go through and change your radio-buttons into the new “command links” controls to make it more Vista-like.

You could probably even go so far as to design your Vista-only wizards and then programmatically convert them to Wizard97 wizards in code (by replacing “command links” with radio buttons and whatnot) when running on downlevel platforms.

The point is that if it’s possible to do a “similar but less-efficient” or “similar but not-as-good-looking” version of the same in downlevel platforms, then you can just include your changes in the newest version. Developers can then choose to implement both versions if they like. But if you’re providing functionality which you’d have to implement from scratch on the downlevel platform (like this LCIDToLocaleName stuff) then a downlevel API makes sense, in order to encourage developers to actually use it (and not simply implement it from scratch).

Commenter chai asked for some more detailed steps for getting Nate On to run as a limited user. The simplest way is to simply allow all users read/write access to the NATEON folder, this is done by right-clicking the folder and selecting “Properties,” then going to the “Security” tab and giving “Users” Full Control, like so:

That’s not exactly the same method I used, but it’s the simplest. Now, before you can do this, you need to make sure you have the “Simple File Sharing” checkbox in “Advanced” options unchecked, otherwise you don’t get the “Security” tab at all.