Have you seen the new adverts for Windows 7 on the TV? I’m a PC, and Windows 7 was my idea…
Microsoft are obviously trying to push the fact that they have listened to their painstaked users and are now responding. Having not seen 7 in the flesh yet, I can’t really comment on it, however I can see a Microsoft ad in a couple of years, once 7 has flopped just like vista:
Windows 7. It’s not our fault, it was all your idea…
Quite a while ago, IE8 was released to the general public. It was billed to be the best browser for web developers, as it now had proper web standards built in like every other browser in the world. It also had this great feature allowing you to render the page in IE7 mode…
Microsoft, what the hell are you playing at?
This week, I had not one, but two phone calls from customers announcing to me that their site had stopped working. In both cases, it was the menu at fault. One site has a fairly hefty javascript based menu, and the other drop-down submenus. So, off I go, testing the sites in all browsers available to me, FF, IE6, 7, Safari, Mac FF, Mac Safari, and then came IE8.
Now we’re not talking a slight rendering issue here, or an IE-hackable few pixels out of place, IE8 had invented a Javascript error. Every other browser in the world was fine, but IE8 had a problem with it. So this is bad enough, but in IE8 there is a button called Compatibility mode.
From the MS site: Internet Explorer 8 is a new release and some websites may not yet be ready for the new browser. Click the Compatibility View toolbar button to display the website as viewed in Internet Explorer 7, which will correct display problems like misaligned text, images, or text boxes.
Sure enough, this actually fixes the problem. What the hell? Microsoft have released a browser that in default form, doesn’t work very well, but if you want it to work properly, you can just click a button. I’m sat here now fuming about this. If I put out a website where nothing worked, unless you click a small button first, without any prompting, I’d be fired for shoddy workmanship. Yet the biggest software house in the world seems to think it’s ok?
Now I need to spend considerable amounts of time fixing websites to work in a minority browser, when this goes against all the normal rules just because of who it is. Well F*** you Microsoft, I’m never going back to a PC if you keep this attitude up. Leave your browser to die, and let the experts who work for free sort out the world’s internet browsing.
An article by Charlie Brooker, of the Guardian. This bloke’s sense of humour appeals to me!
Recently I’ve been using Perl to write a sort of search engine. Basically, it gets given a web address, it goes off, has a good mooch through the given web address, gathers the information I tell it to, has a little sleep, and comes back to me, all the while fooling the chosen site into thinking it’s a perfectly normal web user.
Now I am using this technology for perfectly genuine reasons, but it strikes me that it would be very easy to abuse. Also, for your inexperienced programmer, could easily get out of control. What also strikes me, is that these two scenarios almost overlap if you aren’t careful.
Say for instance, you write a basic spider to read a site, pick up any links, read them too, and record all the information in a text file. Say also, you forget to put in a checker for duplicate links. Already you have a spider that will never stop. In other words, you’ve put it into an infinite loop. ”Oops” you might say, but consider the website you just spidered. What you have essentially just done is a DoS attack. Sure, it may not have done any damage, but it has the potential.
However, chuck in a few random commands, and your basic terrible script can suddenly emulate a real web user, give it a user-agent, and voila, spider away, steal what you want, the possibilities are endless and frankly, scary…
Finally, the refinement the Mac world has been waiting for…
First impressions are, it is faster, but it’s not the huge gap I was expecting. Apple have re-written the entire operating system to run natively in 64 bit. Good news since Apple have been pushing 64bit Core 2 Duo processors out for a few years now.
I was teetering on the edge of swapping back to a dedicated Windows machine. Those who read my last post would have seen me surprised to see how well Vista runs through Bootcamp. Well, I decided to run a little test.
Photoshop CS3, 141 JPG images and an automated action with the following commands:
So, Snow Leopard was first, and completed the test in 6:55. Windows was booted up, and I opened the images. I wish I had timed the opening of the 141 images, as Windows was considerably slower. Once it finally opened, the action was run. Windows completed in 7:45.
Both tests were run from a folder on the desktop, both from the same hard drive.
I think if the RAM was upgraded, the Mac would have steamed ahead thanks to it’s 64bit-ness.
So, for now, I’m back on the Mac side of the fence…
I’m posting this from the usual place, in front of my stunning iMac. However, there is one major difference. Behind this website is firefox, nothing unusual there, but behind that is a Windows desktop, and not just any version of Windows, it’s Vista.
Previous readers will have read my opinion of Vista and Microsoft in general since I became a Mac user.
So, what happened? Well, a friend sent me a link detailing the upcoming release of a new series of Monkey Island games. To your average nerd, this is the best news since, well, the last Monkey Island game! This presents a problem to the Mac user. A productive, stable machine it is, but a games platform it isn’t.
So, Bootcamp was installed, and then Vista was dusted down and installed. I am slightly concerned to say, that Vista appears to run quicker and more efficiently that Leopard. I know that I need to install Anti-Virus etc, but I was expecting to install a great big turd of an operating system, as I remember it on my laptop, but it just doesn’t seem to be. Maybe the service packs and general updates have improved it, but I am actually enjoying using it again. Plus, I much prefer Photoshop and Dreamweaver on the PC. They just seem to work nicer, however I’ve been using video capture recently, and also iDVD, and these run nicer on the mac than the PC…
I’ve been playing Guitar Hero on the PS3 for quite a while now. I’ve never played a real music instrument, but I’ve just bought an electric guitar and intend (with the help of t’internet) to teach myself to play it.
Currently, the house is rocking to the tune of classics like, “a slowed down version of the intro of Smoke on the Water”, and “the first 5 notes of Enter Sandman”.
Still, when it comes to learning new things, I am a patient person, and if all else fails, at least it looks quite cool.
Today we woke up to a completely white Guernsey. Guernsey hasn’t had proper snow in years, and needless to say, the entire island ground to a halt. By about 3 in the afternoon, everything was closed. I even saw 2 cars with snow chains on. Snow chains, in Guernsey.
Still, at least all those people who’ve bought an expensive 4×4 to take the kids to school in could use them to their potential today, oh no, that’s right, they all stayed at home because the schools were closed.
I’ve been using my iMac for 5 months now and I can honestly say, I am completely converted to the simpler way of computing.
Never have I had any trouble doing whatever I need to do, and it’s been perfectly reliable. So much so, that i recently swapped my Windows mobile HTC mobile phone, to an Apple iPhone, which is the most impressive little device I’ve ever seen.
Now, my first ‘real’ pc was a lowly AMD powered Windows 95 machine. I have owned at least one computer with every major version of Windows since then. Each one was a big step forward in terms of what you could do, and how easy you could do it. XP is by far and away the leader in terms of amount of users with around 70% of computers on the internet using this OS. Next in line is Windows Vista, presumably, because it comes pre-installed on almost all laptops now.
Now, I haven’t heard of a single place of work upgrading their office machines to Vista. Being the sole person in charge of this at my place of work, I will never put Vista on any of our machines, and I know most others in my position feel the same way.
So where does this leave Microsoft for the future? They have again extended the time they will keep providing OEMs with Windows XP. They are never going to infiltrate the average office with Vista, their flagship OS, so what is their next move? Windows 7 is in public beta, I’ve not installed it since I don’t own a PC anymore, but early tests indicate it is a vast improvement over Vista, with quotes like ‘substance over style’ appearing everywhere. It appears Microsoft is trying to remove all the annoying parts of Vista and start again. Surely then, starting from XP would be a better bet than starting with Vista?
I’m also keen to see how they deal with keeping 3 versions of their operating system supported. They can’t leave reluctant sysadmins with vulnerable XP systems, and they have to keep supporting Vista…
Apple’s market share is getting larger by the month, and with more accessible versions of Linux around, as well as the infamous Firefox, Microsoft is losing its grip on the PC world. I am now a Mac user, but I wouldn’t like to see Windows die a painful death. The fact remains however, if they shoot themselves in the other foot with Windows 7, they are going to find it very difficult to get back up.
