Random Shorts (4)

This week begins with a bang. The death of the longest President ever reigned in Indonesian's history, Mr.Suharto, had taken up almost every slot of TV programs (news or not) for a couple of days in the wake of his death for a couple of days. I was on the road during the moment of his death, and notified by my girlfriend about the event by phone. She was deeply mourned the loss, and i had a great time mocking her for that.

Granted, he was no saint, and not perfect (and what man does?), and had his flaws, but in his long history something good are bound to attributed solely to him. Further, in a quick and simple thinking, i'd say that most of Indonesian citizens would be glad to recount the economically strong and rapid developing country that is Indonesia. Illusion or not.

I had prepared to write something thoughtful about it. And probably had came out with a decent post about it. But, simply because i can't squeeze a time to actually sit and wrote it down, i had totally lost the train of thought and his death was mourned by one blogger less - of course, i wouldn't thought that it would be missed much. I was bemused with how the media drive the opinion toward the deceased. Shortly after his death, a montage of news was showing his accomplishments that all of his faults (if any) that has been the main subject of his overthrown from the presidential chair in 1998, and ensued for almost ten years afterwards seems irrelevant. That's the power of media. You want to kill a man's career? It's easy if you ruled the media.

Just the other day, my President Director personally returned his Vaio TZ-series (running Vista), because it was too-slow. He reverts to his old Pentium III (!) ThinkPad running an XP. Damn! Talk about technology. His Vaio TZ-series is not the only one in the office that runs in an unsatisfactory manner. There are at least two more unsatisfied customer in the office. One practically annoying problem i found with Vista running on Vaio is somehow, the Internet Explorer can't run a .NET infested script properly. My office had a web-based portal application that builds primarily on .NET and Microsoft SQL Server running in an Windows 2000 server. Everyone in the office should and would access this portal time and again. Hence, accessibility is a prime issue. Before these TZ-series arrived, no complaints were ever issued regarding with this portal.

I had compared the Internet Explorer settings in my Toshiba with ones in the TZ-series. In short, i had tried to emulate as close as possible every security settings in my Toshiba with this troubled TZ-series. The result, i still could run a portal application with a default security setting, standard add-ons, standard anti virus precaution in my Toshiba. But not with the TZ-series. The only solution that worked was to put EVERY Internet Explorer's security setting in the TZ-series at its lowest AND JUST THEN it could run the portal application. All i could do is just shake my head. Sure these Vaio looks cool, weighs a nay, and taut a steep price. But, if it couldn't run a Microsoft .NET powered web application with Microsoft SQL Server running on a Microsoft Windows 2000 server, executed through Microsoft Internet Explorer running under Microsoft Windows Vista properly without a heavy tampering, why would you spend US$2000+ to it? Might as well donated it to an orphanage.

Hm, the problem probably resides in Vista. But Microsoft had claimed that Vista is running more safely than any other Operating Systems out there. Yea, right. If by safe you mean i-don't-want-to-run-this-web-for-it-runs-a-safe-script-because-i-was-too-lazy-to-actually-work-on-it-and-instead-said-to-you-that-this-web-is-not-safe.