Saucemaster

Had an urge to mess with the colours of my Windows desktop, as I couldn’t stand looking at the boring gray morass any longer.

Anyway, I thought I should warn any would-be desktop colour scheme explorers that I’ve discovered Calculator (calc.exe) doesn’t play nicely with colour changes. The colours used for the text on it’s buttons appear to be hard coded. That means no blue or red colour schemes for you!

It’s not all bad though, because the buttons on the Calculator are probably the only buttons that are still usable when I apply the “Black on Black” theme (by setting every object I can to black). But every silver lining has a dirty great cloud mucking it up, and it seems that the Calculator actually does honour some of the system colours, such as the colour of the text in the box where the numbers appear, so you can’t read the numbers you enter. But at least it tries to live in it’s new dark skin.

It is a cold comfort that the lovely but wilful Calculator handles living with a dark skin quite well. Let it be known that the Calculator is the least racist part of Windows, unlike, for example, Windows Explorer, which just hates being black. Internet Explorer, too, refuses to remain usable when forced to live as a negro.

How can we explain this behaviour of the Windows software, when forced to live with dark skin? Is it a manifestation of the racism in every white american geek that contributed a line or two of C++ code to the Windows source? Maybe it is just society’s reflection: you see the facade of liberal enlightenment everywhere you look, but scratch the surface and you realise that racism is still deeply embedded within?

I find solace that the Calculator is fighting back, refusing to give in to the racism written between the lines of the very code that runs it. Let’s hope that no Microsoft engineer on reading this checks out the Calculator’s source and fixes the hard-coded button text colours bug, forcing her back into the racist line. Please Microsoft, let my beautiful black Calculator live on.

Seattle, WA - Two hours worth of work lost on a term paper or coding project is a nightmare that most students like to avoid, but many students are tempting fate just for fun. A new, dangerous game is sweeping college campuses and it is causing more harm to academic records than unlimited bandwidth ever did. It’s called “Blue Screen Chicken” (BSC) or “DLL Duel” by the participants. It’s a face-to-face showdown of wills over who will flinch and save first.

The game is usually played at college computer labs. Students decide on several programs, usually between 8 and 10, that use large amounts of resources or that are particularly crash prone (Netscape 4.7 with a Java applet loaded, ICQ and MS Money are common choices). These programs are loaded into memory before starting work on their projects. Now the race is on. The students must continue working on their project without any safety net until someone chickens out and saves, prints or does anything else to preserve their work. A crash by either competitor ends the game in a draw.

“I noticed the computer started slowing down. The mouse got sluggish. I was torn between saving my hour and a half of work and beating that bastard Goldman,” said Ryan Hendricks a self-proclaimed BSC addict. “When I ALT-Tabbed back to Word from Photoshop, It took a full 10 seconds for the screen to re-draw. I wasn’t gonna give in, but the for some unknown reason I decided to listen to some tunes and started RealPlayer. Blue screen for me and another victory for Goldman.”

For many students losing a game of BSC means late nights, missed deadlines and lower grades. Professors report that “losing a game of BSC” has become the top excuse students give for late projects surpassing “There was 2 for 1 on pitchers at Shooter’s last night.”

Many computer lab monitors have expressed concern over the competitions. “To the students, it’s all fun and games, aside from their potential minor loss of a paper. But WE’RE the ones that have to go give the machine the three-finger salute and uninstall all those buggy programs. That pisses me off,” said lab assistant Dan Yaeger. “I mean, this is just work-study. I shouldn’t actually have to DO anything.”

Fran Kessler, a Debian Linux user is the champion of BSC on her campus. “Well, I never lose. My box never crashes so I never have to worry about losing my term papers. However, the professor can’t open OpenOffice.org .sxw files, so I still get screwed in the end.”

For some the standard DLL Duel isn’t enough. These thrill seekers engage in extreme versions of the game where the competition is held during a lightning storm, or only hours before the project is due. One BSC player compared playing the game to other extreme sports such as mountain biking and snowboarding, “I don’t have any athletic ability, but that doesn’t mean I can’t play with fire.”

For a growing number of students “playing with fire” means a crash and burn. The thrill of winning quickly fades and they move to riskier behavior such as loading Windows 95. It’s a vicious cycle that usually ends with academic expulsion. If you find yourself in this spiral a hotline has been set up to assist you at 1-800-DONT-CRASH.

Sourced from BBSpot.

Redmond, WA - Most people complain about getting too much e-mail, but they have nothing on Wendy Cudahy of Microsoft, who receives around 2.4 million e-mail messages each day.

“You know when Windows XP has a problem and it asks if you want to send an error report? Well, if you click the ’send report’ button that message comes to me,” said Wendy who has been the Error Report Wrangler at the software giant for the past two weeks.

“After six days, I had about 14 million unread messages in my inbox and I knew I probably couldn’t catch up, so I set up some filters. That was only a finger in the dam. Now, I am deleting all the messages until I’ve sorted through these old ones,” said Cudahy.

Error Report Wrangler is considered the highest-pressure job at Microsoft and generates high turnover. Three people held the position in May.

Devin Simpson Vice president of Error Report Wrangling said, “The first Wrangler in May kept printing out every message he got. He ended trapped in his cubicle, and died of unnatural causes before we could dig him out. The second person turned on her ‘Out of Office’ reply message; that was embarrassing.”

Many wonder why a company like Microsoft has a person sorting through these e-mails by hand, when it could be done much easier by computer. “Well, that’s some complex programming involved there, and not worth the effort. If we spent time fixing errors, we’d never be able to get to the next version,” answered Simpson.

Microsoft used to have a large team dedicated to sorting error reports, but tired of the pretense of caring about problems.

Sourced from BBSpot.

Redmond , WA - In a joint news conference, the Grim Reaper today announced the signing of a ten-year contract to use Microsoft’s “fatal system error” screen–popularly known as the “Blue Screen of Death” or “BSOD”–in his company’s life termination procedures.

“Death is a scary new experience to most people,” said Mr. Reaper in a prepared statement. “We wanted to make it more modern, more definitive, and more user-friendly, by presenting it in a manner already familiar to millions of computer users across the globe.”

“The Blue Screen of Death first made its debut in Windows 3.1 in 1990,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, chairman and chief software architect. “Since then, we’ve poured millions of worker-hours into Microsoft Windows to keep it at the forefront of BSOD technology.”

Mr. Reaper said, “Most people just glance at a BSOD before immediately moving on. They don’t linger on it for long.

Our implementation should get souls moving through limbo much more quickly.”

Mr. Gates quickly added, “Extensive human interface testing has proven that BSOD’s trademark look–bold white text on a bright blue background–won’t be mistaken for anything else… Not a coma, nor a persistent vegetative state, nor a bad hangover.”

Until this agreement, news of one’s death could have come in myriad ways. For example, ’sudden death’ might be heralded by a quick loss of consciousness, an icy feeling, and a rapid enveloping in black. A ‘lingering illness,’ however, might subject a person to bouts of consciousness and increasing pallor, along a slow fade to their eventual death, over a span of weeks or years.

Now, with BSOD-enabled deaths, there will be a clear message that someone has passed away.

“There were literally dozens of ways to die, and from each of our basic frameworks, we’d have to customize just the right mix of temperature, otherworldliness, and lighting effects. It’s a labor intensive process,” said Mr. Reaper. “Standardizing on Microsoft Windows BSOD technology will allow us to provide uniform, high-quality death experiences.”

Not everyone was pleased with the licensing deal. Hikaru Shinkansen, a resident of Nagoya, Japan, and, at 131, the world’s oldest man, was disappointed with the change.

“For the past 50 years, I’ve been waiting for my special meeting with Shinigami [as Grim Reaper Ltd., Japan is known locally], but now I feel cheated!” Mr. Shinkansen said angrily through an interpreter.

Mr. Reaper’s Hell-based company will give Microsoft access to 20 percent of the souls whose corporeal existence was terminated using Microsoft technology. On their release from purgatory, it is expected that these souls will be put to work patching security holes in Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Sourced from BBSpot.

Redmond , WA - Microsoft has announced that Windows XP will be the last operating system to ship with the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” feature. Windows Vista, the company’s next OS, will combine the least popular Windows feature with its most popular to provide Windows users with a much more pleasant crashing experience.

Vista will come with the Solitaire of Death feature as a replacement for the Blue Screen of Death. Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates sees this as a real boon for Windows users.

“Now when Windows reverts to less ideal operation for reasons unknown and not the fault of Microsoft, the operating system will run a tiny footprint version of Solitaire instead of the previous Blue Screen information panel.”

Now when users have a problem with their PC they can play solitaire until help arrives from the IT support staff. Gates believes that this will be a great improvement for enterprise users especially in government departments. “Let’s face it, these users were probably playing solitaire before their PC crashed so falling back to the SOD will not inconvenience them,” said Gates.

In homage to the BSOD, the deck of cards in the game will be blue. Users running the Vista beta will know that this feature has not yet been included in the current version. SOD will ship with the next release of the Vista beta and users will have ample opportunity to see it.

Sourced from BBSpot.

Redmond, WA - In an effort to boost sagging revenue growth, Microsoft today announced it will begin selling advertising space on the company’s world famous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)©. The screen, displayed whenever Windows cannot recover from an error in the operating system’s core, until now has historically served as a display of unintelligible diagnostic data that has not made any sense to anyone, ever, according to a survey conducted by the Gartner Group. In addition, the BSOD has scared most users because it was composed mainly of hexadecimal digits that, which in extreme cases, can lead to hallucinations, epileptic seizures and homosexuality in primates and rats.

“Past efforts to make the blue screen more helpful by adding animated characters and changing the hue to a more user-friendly beige or aqua have failed,” said head of BSOD Development Kate Verban. “When we failed to make the BSOD user-friendly, we decided that at least it could generate revenue. Displayed more than a billion times a day globally, the blue screen has a captive audience, with over 90 percent of the computer desktops in the world. This makes it an excellent platform for advertisers, comparable only to the Super Bowl and makes watching the blue screen just about as exciting.”

Tom Gordon, Director of Marketing for Anheuser-Busch, confirmed today that the beverage giant will be among the first advertisers, “We think it’s a tremendous opportunity,” said Gordon. “Picture this, you’re working late at night on a crucial project. Your computer crashes. You’ve lost all your important work. It’s definitely time for a beer, and we’ll be there to remind you that the beer should be a beechwood-aged Budweiser.”

For earlier versions of Windows, the BSOD ads will be installed using the Windows Update feature. However, Windows XP systems connected to the Internet will automatically install the new software in the middle of the night when no one is looking.

Sourced from BBSpot.

I just finished reading Paul Thurrott’s comparison of Mac OS X and Windows Vista Beta 1. What a total cunt that guy is, and now I’m going to have to tear that guy a brand new cunt with a few choice quotes of his horse shit.

Though Windows XP features a much nicer and more colorful user interface than Windows 2000 and previous Windows versions, it’s still a far cry aesthetically (depending on your taste) and technologically from the Aqua UI in OS X (Figure). Indeed, Mac fans have often sneered at the “Fisher Price” look of the XP UI, which is a bit unfair (I find it highly usable and attractive enough) but understandable. OS X, by comparison, is clean, nicely rendered, and features many interesting transitions and other eye candy.

What the fuck does he mean “depending on your taste” or “attractive enough”? What a cop out. Come on, if you think that Windows XP looks like anything but a poorly designed fisher price toy for toddlers then you actually have no fucking taste at all. None. Taste isn’t some sliding scale for fuck’s sake, you either have it or you don’t. Microsoft doesn’t. And nor does Paul Thurrott.

Note that Thurrott conveniently doesn’t provide a screenshot of Windows XP to compare to the screenshot of Mac OS X in his article, so I’ve appropriated an appropriate image from The GUIdebook. Let’s take a look at the initial desktop after installing Windows XP.

Look at the bottom left hand corner. Look at the state of the word “start”, the jagged hideous italics and blocky drop shadow. And why is it “start” and not “Start”? The ugliness is plainly obvious to the eye, and just try and find the setting to turn anti-aliased text on to ease the eye sore - it’s in there somewhere, but can you even find it?

Look at the use of rounded corners to the start menu and the dumb (annoying) speech bubble. Why the fuck aren’t they anti-aliased - why do I have to put up with jagged ugly curves everywhere I look? If Microsoft were too lazy or too stupid to implement an anti-aliasing algorithm, why the fuck did they then have to rub my face in it with ugly jagged round-rects in every interface element in Windows XP? And I really don’t understand why the speech bubble requires a meta-speech bubble with an “i” inside it to tell me it’s a speech bubble. It’s worthless clutter. Yeah and why does the speech bubble refer to the “start” menu as the “Start” menu - make up your minds already.

Look at the icons in the start menu for “My Documents”, “My Pictures” and “My Music” and compare it to “My Computer”. So why is the icon for the first three basically the same, almost impossible to tell apart unless you look hard, but “My Computer”, is markedly different. Why didn’t they make the icon completely different for the pictures and music folders - you know, one a picture, the other some notes on a scale? Nope, Microsoft likes the small details to be plain, mediocre, boring.

And finally, look at the MSN messenger icon in the system tray - don’t you think it’s shocking to be confronted with an icon showing two nameless faceless men with a big red cross over them the first time you run Windows? Is this some kind of homophobic or anti-casual-gay-sex message from Microsoft? Crass, right-wing pandering is ugly too you know.

And can you actually believe that Paint makes it into the prominent list of recent apps in the start menu? So IE, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer (what is that?), Windows Media Player, Windows Movie Maker, some XP tour I’ll never watch, some file transfer wizard I’ll never use, and Paint (!) are the jewels in the Windows XP crown. These are the apps Microsoft thinks everyone should see and try out after installing XP. The best of the best. It’s a pretty poor showing by anyone’s reckoning. And you’ve got to love their insistence of naming everything Microsoft Something or Windows Something, you know so everyone knows exactly who’s to blame for the bugs and bad interface design.

So Thurrott, face it, it’s definitely not “attractive enough” - it’s a complete fucking eye sore. Windows XP is what you get when a tasteless whore fucks a retarded kid and gets pregnant. Ugly, stupid, and confused.

Windows Vista Beta 1 closes the gap, though I don’t think the beta Aero UI we’re seeing now is quite as nice looking as Tiger’s Aqua. In Vista Beta 1, Microsoft has added a number of visual effects that Mac users have enjoyed for four years, including translucencies, high-resolution icons, and animation effects that are both attractive and functional.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Check out the screenshots of Aero, or whatever the fuck Microsoft calls the shit Windows Vista user interface. There’s no subtlety there - I’d definitely argue that Vista is much uglier than XP. The jellybean green start button, still not called “Start”, is too reflective. The awful search field at the bottom of the start menu, or the windows explorer toolbar making it so much easier to do an ego search of your own fucking computer (Thurrott really is a wanker). Way too much transparency everywhere, it looks like every window is smudged and dirty and in desperate need of a shot of windex and a wipe with a sheet of crumpled newspaper. Even Paint is still there, sitting proud in the list of recently used programs, along with something called “Turn UAP Settings On or Off”. I mean what the fuck is that, and if it only has two states, on or off, why do you need a program for it? Huh? And all the black and purple - what’s with the purple? We’ve gone from fisher price face painting to nu metal goth lipstick and mascara.

Compared to Windows, the OS X Tiger Finder presents more traditional file system views. There are no “special shell folders” as in Windows per se, but rather specific folders under your Home folder–Documents, Pictures, Music, and so on–with which you are encouraged to store files of specific types (Figure). And though Tiger lets you create Smart Folders (saved searches), this feature is neither easily discoverable nor particularly integrated into the system. Specifically, Tiger doesn’t ship with pre-made Smart Folders for commonly-accessed searches.

By comparison, Windows Vista Beta 1 presents you with a well-rounded list of stocked, pre-made virtual folders–such as All Documents, All Pictures and Videos, and All Music–which, in essence, replace similar special shell folders in previous Windows versions (Figure). This is important, because many people store file types (like images) outside of the recommended place (Pictures and Videos).

Let me get this straight - so on the Mac, you get some good simple default folders for your stuff, you get your Home folder, and in that a Documents folder, Music, Movies, etc. On Windows your home is Documents and Settings (great fucking name that one), and in there you get My Documents (who else’s fucking documents would they be?), My Music, My Pictures, My Downloads, etc. I think the My prefix is just a little fucking redundant and it adds a lot of complexity. I’ve overheard conversations like “just go to your my documents folder and click on the…” - “your documents?” - “no, my documents”. All the result of some Microsoft cunt, propelled by the love of cunts like Thurrott, who didn’t want to emulate Unix directory structures too closely. Verbose ugly shite.

Okay, and now for the new bit in Vista - we get some prebuilt virtual folders (yeah, like my mother is really going to understand what a fucking virtual folder is - why not smart folder - whoops that’s what it’s called on the Mac, ok, why not live folder or something - no it had to be virtual folder because the loser programmer implementing this couldn’t think outside his C++ vocabulary for a name) like All Documents, All Music and All Pictures. And Thurrott is claiming that Vista beats the Mac on this one because of a few virtual folders that no one will ever fucking use anyways? He’s stretching now if he thinks that a folder that shows all documents on the hard disk is of any use at all if you have proper indexed searching at your fingertips. Oh I know, I need to find this document from a few weeks ago so instead of searching for “what a cunt” I’m going to browse for hours through a folder that shows every fucking document on the hard disk looking for Untitled Document 25.doc. Does Thurrott even spare a minute to think this shit through before he posts it in a “review”? You probably can’t even delete these fucking pre-built virtual folders, welded to your desktop in perpetuam.

Vista Beta 1 also takes it to the next level with its support of meta data. To deliver accurate search results, the indexer in both Vista Beta 1 and Tiger must examine both the contents of files (the actual data) and the meta data that describes those files. Meta data–technically, data about data–is most easily explained with an example. Consider a typical MP3 file, which represents a single a single track on a ripped audio CD. Meta data stored within the file describes the song name, the artist name, the album name, the track number, and so on. But all data files can (and do contain meta data). A Word document, for example, contains meta data that describes the author name and when the file was last accessed, among other things.

You stupid fucking troll. Usually data like the author of a document is stored in the fucking document - the Word file format stores this data, the MP3 file format stores this data. Mac OS X indexes this data. Mac OS X searches this data. I guess Vista does as well, not that you give any evidence of this (your ego search for Paul Thurrrot on your own computer is not evidence). This isn’t fucking meta data, not in the way you mean, you dumb cunt. Meta data would be something like the type of a file - so if I rename a .doc file to a .cunt file does Windows Vista know that this is still a Word file and Word will open it when I double click on my Paul_Thurrot.cunt file? No, of course it won’t. What a stupid idea. Guess what? A Mac can do this. Meta data, as far as file systems are concerned, is data that isn’t stored with the file, like the file type, or the creation date, or whatever other data you want to tag on a file. NTFS lets you add arbitrary attributes to files, and always has done - this isn’t some new Vista feature you dumb prick, so don’t pass it off as one. And guess what? HFS+ on Mac OS X 10.4 allows for arbitrary attributes or meta data to be tagged on files as well.

So a folder in Vista Beta 1 visually resembles a file folder that’s padded with the actual files you’ll see in the folder. And a document icon in Vista Beta 1 visually resembles the underlying document. That is, a Word document icon will visually resemble the first page of the Word document it represents. A graphics file visually represents the underlying graphic. And so on.

Uh, actually the Mac already does this, which you’d know if you’d ever fucking used one, you cunt.

In part 2 of my comparison of Windows Vista Beta 1 and Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger,” I will examine the security, networking and power management features of the two operating systems.

Boy, I can’t wait for the next part…