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…

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

czp’s suggests, in his comment on my last post about Microsoft not supporting Blu-ray because it uses Java, that Blu-ray doesn’t actually use Java. Well it’s damn hard to find definitive information on these two competing formats, but from what I can tell from various sources on the net Blu-ray does use Java software (developed by HP) and will require a JVM on Blu-ray players (including Windows PC’s).

From Business Week:

HP’s détente with Microsoft regarding DVD technology is a surprise, given recent history. Soon after it joined the Blu-ray camp in early 2004, HP nearly convinced Microsoft to do the same. Microsoft’s only requirement, says an insider, was that the Blu-Ray Disc Assn. agree to adopt a Microsoft technology called iHD that had already been accepted by the HD DVD backers. The software would let studios add interactive features to Blu-Ray DVDs, such as the ability for users to buy tickets to new releases or download movie trailers. Trouble was, the Blu-ray camp had already adopted similar software devised primarily by HP, based on the Java standard developed by Sun Microsystems (SUNW).

The insider says the Blu-ray Disc Assn. did a three month side-by-side evaluation and concluded that iHD didn’t offer enough advantages to make a switch worthwhile. That was good news for HP, which stood to earn royalties on every Blu-ray DVD sold.

Microsoft was livid, says the source. For the software giant, it served as yet further evidence that the Blu-ray camp wasn’t embracing its view of how next-generation DVDs should work. Microsoft envisions a future in which DVDs will be just one element of a digital lifestyle, whereby content such as songs or movies can be easily moved among various devices, typically with the PC as the hub. Whether content is purchased in the form of a DVD or as a digital download from an online store, it could be transferred by a variety of means to a variety of devices — burned to a PC hard drive, streamed to the living room HDTV, or ripped onto a DVD to be played in the car.

Engadget has a mildly useful summary of the “facts”, and so does CNET.

From The Daily Princetonian:

Bill Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers [sic] and it won’t work well on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.

Really? So Bill are you sure you’re being completely honest here? Are you sure Microsoft’s support for HD-DVD has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Blu-ray uses Sun Microsystems’ Java for interactivity, a language and platform you have been trying to destroy for the past decade, and that HD-DVD uses something called iHD, which is based on Windows CE and developed by the company you founded?

In the same theme that Sausage has started, I thought it might be time to mention the OS-tans which I find both amusing and interesting.

The OS-tans are an Internet phenomenon on Futaba Channel; the OS-tan or simply OS Girls are the personification of several operating systems (OSes), most famously Windows, by various amateur Japanese artists. A pure fan creation, the appearance of each OS-tan is generally consistent across artists. OSes are almost always portrayed as women, the Windows girls usually as sisters, despite sometimes seeming the same age.

The concept is reported to have begun as a personification of the common perception of Windows Me as unstable and prone to frequent crashes. Discussions on Futaba Channel likened this to the stereotype of a fickle, troublesome girl. The personification became expanded, with the creation of Me-tan (dated to August 6, 2003) followed by the other characters.

Breast Size, Hunger, and Memory -
It has been suggested from time to time, that the breast sizes of the individual OS-tans represent their RAM size. Because Windows XP is considered a memory hog due to its increased resource consumption, XP-tan is incredibly well endowed (and she has no qualms for getting “upgraded” from time to time). 2K-tan normally rates as a close second, whereas the DOS pair are at the distant end of the spectrum.

Another theory states that the breast size of an OS-tan represents the overall “fanciness” of their graphical user interface. Since XP was designed with bells and whistles, she has the largest breasts, but DOS, being no more than a command prompt, is at the other extreme.

An alternate method of displaying memory or resource requirements in general is through the character’s appetite. XP is often seen eating ridiculous amounts of food (yet never gaining an inch except perhaps on her bust) because of her heftier demands on hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan

Since most of us must be using Windows XP, I’ve added a background for everyone of XP-tan.

If only XP looked this good!

Since I started using Mac OS X, I have been struck by how Apple make things simple to understand and use in comparison to other operating systems (especially Windows), but I was never able to really define why that is. The basic concepts are the same: graphical interface, windows, pull-down menus, mouse and keyboard. So how can two operating systems that are pretty much the same, Windows and Mac OS X, feel so different?

Out of interest, I started compiling a list of the names of comparable things in each operating system, see the table below. A couple of things are immediately apparent: (1) Microsoft is more verbose and (2) Microsoft is self-referential.

One might argue that verbosity is a good thing, and that it makes it easier to understand new concepts. I disagree: it shows a weakness of mind and a lack of clarity, and taxes the reader with a dizzying number of words, burdening the memory. It lacks Art.

Witness exhibit (A): “Windows Picture and Fax Viewer”. Firstly, it is self-referential but it could be worse and I am thankful that it is not called “Microsoft Windows Picture and Fax Viewer”. A full 27% of the characters in this string are dedicated to reminding us that we’re using Windows. Why bother? It’s not like they’ve developed a “Picture and Fax Viewer” for Linux and they have to differentiate them. It’s a horrible mix of cross-promotion and ra-ra marketing: Windows Windows Windows!!! It’s like I’m trying to hold a conversation with a twitchy insecure 14-year old nerd with bad acne who simply has to mention how great his best friend, Windows, is in every sentence: “Yeh, Windows is great. He can do everything and even view pictures and faxes at the same time!”

Secondly, why is this a picture and fax viewer? Consider that there is no way to run this program directly, instead you have to double-click or open an image (or fax?!?) to view it. Also consider that a fax is just another type of image anyway. So it’s not really a fax viewer per se, it’s an image viewer and because faxes are images it can also view faxes. By this logic it could be called the “Windows Porn and Fax Viewer”, if specificity is what they wanted. Why not keep it simple and call it “Viewer”?

Compare this with Apple’s “Preview”, which does pretty much the same thing for images and PDF’s. It isn’t self-referential, and it is succinct. In this example, Microsoft uses 3o characters for its name, and Apple uses 7.

This isn’t an isolated case either. Microsoft consistently expresses operating system concepts using verbose language littered with self-referential or redundant noise. On average Microsoft uses 15.23 characters per concept, whereas Apple uses 9.03 characters per concept. That makes Microsoft a whole lot (1.7 x) more verbose than Apple.

This is indicative of the difference in approaches between Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft’s mind is muddy, there is no clarity of thought or vision, marketing and cross-promotion are more important than usability, verbosity is mistaken for being easy to understand.

Everywhere you look in Windows XP, things are named as if they are the sons of rich pompous dukes, with three or more parts (”William Rupert Byron Winchester the 3rd” anyone?). On my Windows desktop sits a shortcut for Outlook, but in typical fashion the name of the shortcut reads “Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.” I’ve just renamed it to “Mail.”