| Only Microsoft Could Create a Bug Like This |
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Lifehacker alerts us that there’s a 30-second delay in the login process in Windows 7 if you have a solid-color background. It’s a bug that Microsoft is aware of. Sigh. Why does this not surprise me? |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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Comments (0)December 23, 2009
| An Eye For An Eye Makes Microsoft $290M Poorer |
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Yesterday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Microsoft must remove the custom XML code from its Office software suite by January 11, 2010 and pay Canadian firm i4i $290 million for infringing on its patents. You may recall that back in early September Microsoft asked the Fed Circuit to stay an injunction handed down in U.S. District Court in Texas. The Fed Circuit heard the case and sided with i4i. Microsoft says that, aside from the money, it’s no real biggie: “With respect to Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007, we have been preparing for this possibility since the District Court issued its injunction in August 2009 and have put the wheels in motion to remove this little-used feature from these products. Therefore, we expect to have copies of Microsoft Word 2007 and Office 2007, with this feature removed, available for U.S. sale and distribution by the injunction date. In addition, the beta versions of Microsoft Word 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010, which are available now for downloading, do not contain the technology covered by the injunction.” Notice that first sentence, in which Microsoft calls the custom XML a “little-used feature.” Reading that, I immediately thought of Neal Stephenson’s book In The Beginning Was The Command Line — still fresh and relevant, even after 10 years — in which he calls MS Office an “omnibus software package” and compares it to Wal-Mart: “As [graphical user interfaces] get more complex, and impose more and more overhead, this tendency becomes more pervasive, and the software packages grow ever more colossal; after a point they begin to merge with each other, as Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint have merged into Microsoft Office: a stupendous software Wal-Mart sitting on the edge of a town filled with tiny shops that are all boarded up … The most serious drawback to the Wal-Mart approach is that most users only want or need a tiny fraction of what is contained in these giant software packages. The remainder is clutter, dead weight.” What’s the app that I use most at work? Notepad. And at home? TextEdit on the Mac. Keep it simple. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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December 8, 2009
| Google Chrome Extensions Are Now Available (Without Any Smack-Talk) |
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Extensions for Google Chrome are now live for non-developer folks like me running Windows. I’ll probably go easy on them, just as I have with Firefox. (And there’s no point throwing down some smack about this at my wife because, unlike the Mac — which, according to some agreement I have no recollection of, is apparently “hers” — she could care less what I put on the netbook.) |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 24, 2009
| I Hit the Jackpot Yesterday |
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I had the (dubious) pleasure of trying to get things done using 5 different computer operating systems: Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac OS X, Crunchbang Linux, and Google Chrome OS. The latter is a very early pre-release version that I’m running as a virtual machine on my Windows XP laptop. I was stoked about Chrome OS when Google announced it back in July. I thought a stripped-down, lean OS made sense — you know, less-is-more. But I have to say I’m underwhelmed. Chrome OS just feels sort of dumbed-down. The applications tab strikes me as cartoonish. (It sort of reminded me of the Linux distro gOS.) I know Google’s got a lot of work to do on it, so I won’t presume to judge until I get to play with a more-developed version. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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November 11, 2009
| Small Numbers Loosely Joined |
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Item 1: Verizon sold 100,000 Droids last weekend. Not bad for an Android phone launch, but small potatoes when you consider Apple sells a million iPhones each time it debuts a new model. But Android is a long-haul project, for sure. Item 2: Only 2 weeks after its release, Windows 7 has the same market share (4%) that Vista had after 7 months. These numbers are based upon Web usage statistics, but they seem to confirm what everyone already knows: after a dog like Vista, anything else will look good by comparison. Item 3: Google has expanded its free holiday wifi offer to 47 airports. And, of course, Philly International isn’t. On. The. List. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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October 23, 2009
| Win7 is Released! Hellloooooo? Are You Paying Attention? Anybody? |
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Windows 7 is now out there for the taking buying. I wish Microsoft all the best. But I’m afraid Fake Steve may be right when he says that Microsoft is “now pretty much irrelevant, just like IBM, which is ironic and perhaps fitting since IBM was always the Borg’s ultimate role model.” Oh, and it didn’t take Apple long to tweak the Borg with a new Mac commerical. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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October 8, 2009
| Time for a Rant |
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There’s an article in the WSJ (sub required) about how Microsoft and the EU hope to settle their antitrust differences wrt IE and Windows soon. They’ve got a settlement proposal worked out. Here it is (I’m quoting verbatim): “The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said Wednesday that it will ‘market test’ the proposal, under which Windows users in Europe would get a ‘ballot screen’ allowing them to choose a browser other than Internet Explorer.” And one more quote: “[EU Competition Commissioner Neelie] Kroes said she is ‘very hopeful’ the new proposal will give ‘a choice between Internet Explorer and competing Web browsers.’ She added, ‘that’s what we were really looking for.’” It’s taken almost a decade and $2 billion in fines — that’s what the article says — to get to this point? Europeans have *always* had a choice. They simply had to visit the Mozilla Website and download Firefox. Or the Opera Website. Heck, when I use IE to go to Google, I even see a little ad in the upper right-hand-corner of the screen: “A faster way to browse the Web – install Google Chrome.” If the point the EU is making is that people don’t know enough to go to these sites and download the software, what makes them think that these same people will be able to figure out a browser ballot screen? Really what it comes down to is this: Europe gets to ding Microsoft for a few bil, treating them like an ATM machine. Regulators get to puff their chests out and point to their efforts to protect consumers. And users get no real benefit from any of this. What a waste of money and resources. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 27, 2009
| Markoff’s Back With More Choice Quotes About Conficker |
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“It is still out there. Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security experts to eradicate the program and trace its origins and purpose, exposing serious weaknesses in the world’s digital infrastructure.” I love it. John Markoff’s giving us an update on the Conficker worm, and as he did on two other occasions, he makes it entertaining. Even though apparently nothing much is happening: “Some researchers think Conficker is an empty shell, or that the authors of the program were scared away in the spring. Others argue that they are simply biding their time. If the misbegotten computer were reactivated, it would not have the problem-solving ability of supercomputers used to design nuclear weapons or simulate climate change. But because it has commandeered so many machines, it could draw on an amount of computing power greater than that from any single computing facility run by governments or Google. It is a dark reflection of the ‘cloud computing’ sweeping the commercial Internet, in which data is stored on the Internet rather than on a personal computer.” It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a woman screamed. Conficker had struck again … |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 25, 2009
| Snow Leopard Available This Friday, August 28 |
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Apple has announced that Mac OS X version 10.6, called Snow Leopard, will drop this Friday, August 28. As I posted back in June, the price will be $29 for a single upgrade and $49 for a family pack. Compare this with the ten different prices for upgrading to Windows 7. That’s what kills me about Windows. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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August 7, 2009
| Wanna Switch to Windows 7? My Advice Is To Just Buy a New PC With It Preloaded. |
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Here’s the official Windows 7 upgrade chart. Lemmee boil it down for you: you’re probably gonna have to start all over with a clean install. If you have an older PC, in the end it might be cheaper, time- and money-wise, just to buy a new one with Win7 preloaded. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
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