So Longhorn gets its first public beta. Time to see what can be seen.

I ran it in Virtual PC first to great and get a grasp on it, but without any dedicated VM Additions, it ran so slow I couldn’t get anything done with it. So I cobbled together a physical test rig and came across my first problem. Longhorn’s activation process is much pickier than those of previous OS’s. Using the same DVD as I installed on the VPC, Longhorn mark 2 wouldn’t activate. Further investigation revealed it was because I had already activated it on the VPC. And as I couldn’t unactivate the VPC, I had to get a new Longhorn disc. Mad installers beware!!

Second thing to note is that wireless networking isn’t installed by default in Longhorn b3 - so it’s wired connections only until you’ve managed to activate it over the internet and get wireless running. If Longhorn doesn’t have the driver for your particular wireless card, try a Vista driver. It had no problem with my installing the Vista driver for my card, so try and start there. One other point to note here was that while it was connected by wire to my hub, nothing could connect wirelessly. Might not have been to do with Longhorn but just in case…

Last but not least is the fact that while it’s not too difficult to find your way around the Longhorn control panels, configuration screens and admin tools, you’re going to need some help to find everything, much like you do after making the switch from XP to Vista. Microsoft says that the best way to work with Longhorn is with Vista clients and the help certainly seems to bear that out, referring to itself as Vista at least in the places I looked and assuming you were running Vista in others. Let’s hope the copy and pasting between OS’s is identified and eradicated when they run through all the docs to change its name to Windows Server 2008.

From a dev’s perspective, let’s also hope they ship a new public build that coincides with the next beta of .NET 3.5. I mean, Server will ship with .NET 3.5 \ Silverlight as features to install - the question is when will one be bundled with the other and be unofficially be renamed .NET 2008?

The co-operative I work for asked me to have a look at Google AdWords a few months ago. I duly set up an account and created a few simple ads for them to see how it all worked. In the end, it was put on hold until marketing had the time to put together a proper campaign but my original ad stayed out there and generate a few click throughs a day. Then yesterday I got this from Google.

———————————————-
Campaign: ‘Campaign #1,’ Ad Group: ‘Ad Group #1′
———————————————-

AD TEXT:

Buy a .coop domain name
Are you a registered co-operative?
Build your brand online with .coop
www.domains.coop

Action taken: Suspended - Pending Revision
Issue(s): Ad Text Trademark Term
~~~~~~~~~

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Ad Content: Please remove the following trademark from your ad: co operative.

–

With all the nice posts about Google, it seems out of place to complain but….

- Since when is the word ‘co-operative’ a trademark? Does that mean that all the co-operatives in the world (bar one presumably who has trademarked it) will be barred from using this word in all Ads?

- Why didn’t this ‘trademark infringement’ come to our attention sooner. For example when I wrote the ad four months ago? Doesn’t Google have some sort of automatic checker for this kind of thing?

- Further investigation reveals that “Due to trademark complaints, we do not allow advertisers to use certain trademarked terms or elements in their Google AdWords campaigns” of which the word co-operative appears to be one. So who complained about the use of that word in a Google Ad? And did enough people really complain that Google decided to uphold the issue?

- Why is there no obvious way to appeal this decision? I’m not saying that you can’t - you have to first edit the ad, make no changes and then click a button to appeal - but it’s not that obvious. Come on Google, you’re a friendly bunch - give us a bit of a clue here.

Rant concludes.