23.10.09

What?

I have just prepared and published two posts here but clearly there is something wrong with Blogger at the moment as I cannot access this blog: I can access Duncan's Diacritical Discussion, my other Blogger based Blog.

This is what I saw when I opened this Blog ... no use to me at all so I have written to Blogger asking them why they assume I can use the language local to where I am simply because I am where I am. Clots!

What does this say

DW

Do Tectonic Plates SLAM into each other?

I read a report this morning about an earthquake: not the BBC but a site whose name has already gone. Well, they said that earthquakes in the region under discussion have come as a result of one tectonic plate slamming into another one several million years ago.

Now really, can something moving at maybe one centimetre or even one metre a year really be said to have slammed into something?

DW

You're Having a Laugh Mr Gates!

I have fallen for this one AGAIN! I like the idea of booting up a computer and then, rather than cold booting after a break or at the start of a new day, warm booting via the snooze/hibernate button.

Well, it's a right laugh. You might be able to do that once. No, let me be kind and say twice. Then you will find that after it has been warm booted three times it cannot cope: addins stop working, even MS's own programmes stop responding and we get the blue spinning wheel of death for up to five minutes at a time, access to some apparently running programs freezes.

So, you have to restart the computer.

This comes 24 hours after the launch of Windows 7 and although I will buy Windows 7 and I have read and heard A LOT of marketing guff about the new system, I am not that confident that it will give me the kind of experience that I know the average Apple Mac user is experiencing. Don't know about Linux and other OS users but I'll bet there is a lot less frustration with other established OS than there is with most flavours of Windows.

Windows XP seemed good by comparison with what went before: I saw the BSOD very rarely, things seemed more reliable. Of course boot times are slow and they get slower and slower very quickly as you load and use your computer more and more. Against the grain, Vista impressed me by the way it did things in a better way and more efficiently too: even error reporting and recovery seemed more impressive than before. Now, this Vista driven laptop is coming up to one year old and a 5 minute cold boot is fast for it: I even gave the thing an 840Mb boost by letting Windows use a 1Gb micro drive to speed up my system. Pah! (See my post, Gatesed Again!) The blue spinning wheel of death is a more frequent visitor now.

These Windows people often promise that the launch of a new version of their products is a new build, relying on nothing from before: I think they have given the lie to that now. Moreover, things like menus that are used throughout MS products are not consistent: they can look and behave differently even within Office products let alone between Office and Window and so on.

What really irritates me is that I know from my work that even now only 25% or so of the Office population has upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007. I also know from my web stats that 90% or so of my visitors are using a Windows platform to do so.

Gates and his colleagues took the microcomputer world by storm and by aggression throughout the 80s and 90s and we are now suffering from the monopoly they have created. I wonder what will happen, what will MS do, if Windows 7 flops like Vista did and like Office 2007 did?

We need a knight in shining armour. Along those lines, take a look at the Apple iMac just announced: stunning if everything they say is true. Then look at the new mouse that comes with the system: it's called a Magic Mouse. This magic mouse seems to me to be the new iPod/iTouch: the free thinking development that makes anyone wearing a baseball cap say, Wow! Amazing! It IS an astonishing mouse that Gates and his team could never come up with. Start here and no, I am not working for Apple or anyone connected with them ... http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/imac?cid=&cp=2712&sr=em

I have mentioned before that apart from Windows Live Writer, which is just one tiny application really, there is nothing about MS products that make me think that's amazing; and I mean amazing in its true an literal sense, not in the sense that is used by people of limited vocabulary who infest our screens and newspapers now.

Rant over!

DW

20.10.09

Gatesed AGAIN!

Why did I want to believe that Microsoft would keep a promise?

As with many people I accumulate odds and ends and one of these is a 1Gb micro memory card that I used to have in a phone until I bought an 8Gb card to replace it. I then put and kept that 1Gb card in this laptop to use it as and when necessary. Every time I switched the computer on I got a message announcing that it had found something new ... offering to let me look at the files on there or offering to use the card to help to speed up my system.

I fell for it and said, OK use the card to speed up my system. Windows told me it wanted at least 840 Mb of the 1,000 Mb on the card. Initially I thought that's just stupid because I can only use the remaining 160 Mb on the card for files and so forth. Anyway, I gave it a go and watched as the computer booted for the first time under this new and speedier regime.

Did I say speedier? I meant, under this new and completely unchanged regime. NO discernible change in performance at all that I can see. Maybe there are some hidden things happening that Microsoft is really proud of. As for me, I just feel more anti Gates frustration. I still keep wondering how the world fell for this chump so hard and for so long. Moreover, where is the competition to break the cycle of Microsoft domination to get rid of all of this Microsoft nonsense?

DW