Saucemaster

Remember that brown, turd-like MP3 player from Microsoft called Zune?

And what do you get if you play that record backwards?

“Don’t use my anus…”

Reporter trades in his PowerBook for a notebook with Microsoft’s new OS.

Wow, this story already sounds like Microsoft-funded pure fiction, kinda like that whole Mac-to-PC switching fraud from a few years ago.

The new system font, Segoe UI, is simple and elegant.

And don’t forget plagiarised. Lucida Grande, the system font for Mac OS X, enjoys no similar controversy.

Lucky for me the HP notebook was powerful enough to show off Vista’s much anticipated Aero touches.

Yes, wasn’t that lucky, but I do find it strange that you neglect to mention that Apple’s consumer notebooks have been Quartz Extreme capable as early as November 2002.

I pressed Windows + Tab to see another cool Aero feature — Flip 3D — which overlaps windows for all running programs and documents like a Rolodex, shuffling the front screen to the back with each additional press of the Tab key. Positively gorgeous — and as useful as the Mac’s F9 Expose feature, which miniaturizes all open windows to fit on the screen so you can see everything in a single glimpse.

Well maybe not quite as useful as Expose. Whereas Expose shrinks and tiles every visible window, letting you at a glance point at the window you want to switch to, Flip 3D forces you to cycle through every window one at a time until you find the one you want to switch to. If the window you want is at the back of the Flip 3D deck, there’s no doubt you’re going to waste a lot more time hunting for that window than you would using Expose.

Minimizing a few windows to the task bar, I was wowed by miniature live glimpses of the running programs as I moused over each. A video game trailer I’m viewing on Gamespot, for instance, continues to play in the miniature, minimized window.

Again, why not take the time to mention that Mac OS X has shown the live contents of minimized windows in the dock since the first version of Mac OS X shipped, March 24, 2001. Further, there’s no “mousing over” required, the icon for the minimized window is the scaled down version of the window. If you’re playing a movie and minimize the window, the movie keeps playing scaled down, in the dock. If you’re playing a movie in Vista and minimize the window you get a rectangle embossed with the title in the taskbar that you have to mouse over to see the live preview.

Given the subtext of your article is a comparison between Vista and Mac OS X, you seem to be doing your best to avoid comparing the two. Now why would that be? Smells like intellectual dishonesty to me.

With everything downloaded, I dove into Outlook 2007, whose all-in-one approach I’ve always admired. This interrelation between mail, contacts, calendar, tasks and notes is great, particularly when it comes to making an appointment based on an email invite, or getting a quick, month-at-a-glance look at upcoming birthdays.

You may prefer Outlook 2007’s all-in-one approach, however Outlook does not ship with Vista. What does ship with Vista are three separate applications dedicated to email, calendars and contacts. If you like the all-in-one approach of Outlook on Vista, I’m amazed you never bought Office for the Mac, and used Entourage which is Outlook’s equivalent on the Mac.

Vista’s bundled Photo Gallery is better than iPhoto, which I hate because it organizes pictures by “rolls” that correspond to the date they were taken, but there’s no way to simply organize iPhoto by existing folders.

Nope, you’re plain wrong, iPhoto does not organise photos by “rolls”. All photos are stored in a single library, and you create albums to organise the photos. You can tag your photos, rate your photos, create photo books, calendars, and great slideshows (with the Ken Burns effect). The “rolls” thing is a misnomer, because iPhoto includes a couple of smart albums by default that show your last few imported rolls.

The only transfer I’ve seen go so smoothly is when using the Mac’s Migration Assistant to move from an old PowerBook to a newer one.

Nice, and let me remind you that this feature debuted with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, April 29 2005, and you just need a plain old firewire cable.

Times have changed. And I’m happy to report — and Microsoft no doubt even happier — that I’ve had zero indication of any kind of net-related badness since switching to Vista. Microsoft now bundles in a more powerful firewall program for controlling access in and out of your computer. It also includes Windows Defender, an anti-spyware program.

Sounds to me as if you are comparing Vista to XP here, not to Mac OS X. If you’re switching from the Mac to Vista, who cares if Vista is better than XP because you weren’t using XP were you?

In fact, Vista’s system-wide search in some ways beats the Mac because it requires only one keystroke — the Windows key — to bring up the Start menu, where you can immediately type.

By default, to start a Spotlight search in Mac OS X you press Cmd-Space. Of course you could always remap the shortcut for Spotlight to a function key to save that one keystroke. Can you even remap shortcuts in Vista?

At the same time, there’s something more literally hands on with the Mac, as far as how folders are simply organized and the way programs are a single file rather than a whole folder full of files that generally cannot be moved from where they’re installed.

Imagine this, to install an application I drag its icon to wherever I want (usually the Applications folder), and to uninstall that application, I just delete the icon or drag it to the trash. The icon is the application. That’s how it works on a Mac. So you can keep your Add/Remove Programs, uninstallers, registry hacks, and other hateful esoterica invented by misanthropic C++ programmers.

But I really miss that peaceful, Zen-like quiet I felt with my Mac when I’d wake it up or put it instantly to sleep. For me, it just works right, without really having to think about it. So I decided to switch again. From Vista, back to the Mac — to the brand new, white MacBook on which I told this story.

So this is the punchline: after using 3 different Vista notebooks and supposedly falling in love with Vista you end up buying a brand new Mac. So what’s with the disingenuous title of your article? You didn’t fucking switch to Vista, you tried it for a while, thought it was fine, and then went back to using the Mac.

Microsoft Updates Its iPod Competitor

“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got,” Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman, said in an interview Tuesday. “The satisfaction for the device was superhigh. The satisfaction on the software actually is where we’d expect to see a huge uptick this year. It was just so-so on the software side.”

It took you six fucking months to rebrand a Toshiba Gigabeat? And then it was only so-so? Why did you release it? What is wrong with you morons?

“I’m sure a year from now we’ll do even better,” Mr. Gates said. “But I’m blown away by what they’ve been able to do in a year.”

Gates, you’re so passive-aggressive. Yes, in technology things get better, faster, cheaper as a function of time. But that doesn’t automatically mean you have to give the Zune team a back handed compliment: if they’ve done a good job in your estimation just fucking say it. Don’t pussy around with this “it’ll be even better next year” bullshit. Awww, and now I can’t figure out whether to get a Zune now, or wait another year! :(

“The whole idea behind Zune is much broader than the devices themselves,” said J Allard, the Microsoft vice president who oversees design and development for consumer products like the Zune and the Xbox 360 game consoles. “The conditioned thought is around a portable device being the center point of the experience, when in fact it’s not. It really is about how do we start taking Zune beyond that device.” He said the social networking would appeal to Zune owners and people who had not bought the device.

Oh shit, you know its bad when they deemphasize the device they just finished announcing. It sounds like they don’t even want to sell any of these bricks this christmas.

Poor Microsoft, you didn’t hear the gun when the race started, and you’ve been lapped several times already. I don’t think you can catch up, so if your heart’s not in it, just sit this one out, k?

So Ballmer says that Google reads your email:

“Google’s had the same experience, even though they read your mail and we don’t,” Ballmer said, to chuckles and and a couple of gasps in the audience. “That’s just a factual statement, not even to be pejorative. The theory was if we read your mail, if somebody read your mail, they would know what to talk to you about. It’s not working out as brilliantly as the concept was laid out.”

That’s wierd, because Google’s page on Gmail privacy contrarily says:

Google scans the text of Gmail messages in order to filter spam and detect viruses, just as all major webmail services do. Google also uses this scanning technology to deliver targeted text ads and other related information. This is completely automated and involves no humans.

So either Ballmer is conflating humans reading your email with software reading your email, or he’s just a fucking cocksucker. Assuming its the former, how is ad-generating software scanning your email any fucking different from an SMTP mail server reading bytes of relayed emails on TCP port 25. They are both reading your boring stoopid emails, you lumbering dumbass.

Microsoft has been sued over the tragic discovery of an infant immolation easter egg in the Xbox console:

Microsoft(MSFT) is asking a court to dismiss a lawsuit filed by an Illinois family that claims their infant died in blaze sparked by a faulty Xbox video game system. Among other things, Microsoft is arguing that “misuse or abuse” of the Xbox led to the blaze.

The family’s “losses and damages, if any, resulted from misuse or abuse of the Xbox console at issue,” Microsoft claimed in court papers filed Friday.

The filing does not provide details on the manner of abuse Microsoft believes the Xbox suffered.

According to the original complaint, filed in December, the wiring that connected the Xbox to an electrical outlet became so hot that it started a “catastrophic” fire at a house in Warsaw, Ill. The victim, an infant named Wade Kline, perished in the inferno.

Kline’s family sued Microsoft, seeking unspecified damages.

(Emphasis added.)

So Ballmer, let me get this straight, your company is now claiming that the death of an infant does not count as a loss or damage to a family? What the fuck?!? I smell sulphur…

In a field near Sandwich in Kent, Alan Gibbs, a local model maker, is firing up his steam engine. Its chimney is coughing out irritated little clouds of smuts and its pistons are bobbing up and down.

At a table, curator Rob Tufnell is using an Apple Mac powered by the engine. For this is the Steam Powered Internet Machine: the latest deeply eccentric project from Turner-prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller and his collaborator Alan Kane. “We were thinking about something that connects the industrial revolution and the digital revolution,” said Deller. Kane added: “They are worlds apart but there’s also a proximity. The steam age and the digital age are not so far apart.”

The Guardian: Art brings steam power to the digital revolution

It always amazed me when a large labourious terd application like Visual Studio .NET would seem to close instantly when asked. Usually you have to wait minutes for the enormous shit-flecked application to release it’s handles to every file on your system and get each handle back and then write each file on your hard disk back over itself… But then there’s Visual Studio .NET, and when you say close, it’s gone instantly. It seems almost impossible, I mean have Microsoft actually written something effiecently?

I found the secret of this new breed of super-fast-to-fuck-off Microsoft applications by accident, when I happend to have SysInternal’s ProcessExplorer running at the same time.

Visual Studio is running alongside ProcessExplorer, Studio is using a frugal 180 MB of precious RAM, which would be about right when you have a handle to every file on the system.

Visual Studio is told to fuck-off and it disappears immediatley. But hey...what's this.. the thing is still running, minutes later it is still trying to free up my RAM and has got down to 160 MB ... it's doing well but it really is a fat pimple bottomed piece of crap, though at least now it's not visible.

It must have taken some senior engineer on 500K a year to come up with this solution. A solution that eases the pain of having a slow resource raping application. Still, the amazing feet is managed in two lines of code:

this.Visible = false;
this.Dispose(); // release handles to every file on system, then get each handle back and then write each file on hard disk back over itself

In response to a couple of posts about new features in Rails 1.1, “The sprint of ideas before release“, and “Discovering HTTP #1: The Accept header“:

I can’t understand why you would use XML at all when XHTML will do, and will keep you much DRYer in the process. Take a look at the XOXO microformat, and re-imagine it as a Ruby hash.

Using your XML example from your “Discovering HTTP” post, the following XML fragment

<comment>
  <body>First post!!</body>
  <author>David</author>
</comment>

could become

<ol class='xoxo'>
	<li>comment
		<dl>
			<dt>body</dt>
			<dd>First post!!</dd>
			<dt>author</dt>
			<dd>David</dd>
		</dl>
	</li>
</ol>

So instead of maintaining two different interfaces, one for the browser and another for clients, we can have one single XHTML interface that is both XML parsable, and browser renderable. Separate API’s for software clients then become completely redundant…

Samsung Electronics, Intel and Microsoft have been promoting their joint project “Origami” mini-laptop PC since they first showed it last month.

In fact, the new PC proved to be too revolutionary, enough to baffle the three firms’ executive officers who publicly tried to demonstrate how to use it.

During Wednesday’s news conference at Grand InterContinental in southern Seoul, some 30 reporters gathered to watch the much-hyped product named Q1, or Ultra Mobile PC. Kim Hun-soo, vice president of Samsung’s PC division, first ascended to the podium as he tried to do the presentation in a Steve Jobs style _ which was not so successful.

Kim first tried to start the Powerpoint presentation, which was saved in his Q1. But after introducing himself, he failed to turn to the second page while his staff nervously watched him.

Unlike conventional laptops, Q1 does not have a built-in keyboard. Users type on its touch-screen keyboard or on a small external keyboard that users may find uncomfortable and unfamiliar to use.

After spending several nerve-racking minutes trying to solve the problem on his own, Kim was finally helped by one of his staff to get to the next page.

“This kind of mistake happens in every presentation, even though you practice it all night,” he said.

But that was not the end of his bad day.

Several pages later, the large projection screen suddenly completely went black. Samsung’s staff again rushed to help the vice president, and found the Q1’s battery has run out.

It is not known why the battery only lasted for a few minutes of the presentation. However, Kim later admitted that Q1 has three hours of battery life and two hours when watching a DVD, which is comparably short to other laptops.

Samsung has been jointly developing the Q1 PC with Intel and Microsoft since last year. It is about half the size of an A4 sheet of paper and has unique features such as a virtual on-screen keyboard.

But Wednesday’s mishaps showed that the innovative features of the Q1 can bring the very different results from what the three companies had been expecting.

Microsoft Korea’s president Yoo Jae-sung became the second victim of the day when he took over the turn after Kim wrapped up his presentation.

Yoo also spent several minutes figuring out how to start the presentation file. Finally, a Samsung employee succeeded in turning it on. But then the Q1 suddenly flipped through every page of Yoo’s presentation file in a just few seconds.

“Now you have seen all the contents in advance,” Yoo said, and made a very brief presentation.

Lastly, Lee Hee-sung, president of Intel Korea, had his turn.

Going up to the podium, the energetic Intel Korea CEO pronounced that he would “do it in my own way as my predecessors have had a difficult time.” But Lee also failed to kick off his presentation by himself, and had to be helped by the staff who looked as if they were expecting the same kind of problems to happen again.

The Q1 will be sold for 1.2 million won in Korea from next month. Samsung aims to sell 100,000 units in the first 12 months.