Tag: microsoft Posts

So tonight (after a bit of wine) I decided to blow my hotmail account away completely and never look back. Unfortunately, as soon as I tried the circus music started playing and the adventure truly began. Step 1, tell hotmail to go fuck itself. This involves telling hotmail to close down my account. While fucking itself. Oh no! Danger Wil Robinson! Cannot close down your account. Apparently there’s some Microsoft mail thing associated with my account, and I have to close that down first. Not a prob. I’ll gladly fuck over two Microsoft things at the same time: Microsoft says “just joking.” Apparently I need to go to some separate billing site first, and de-associate my account with some phantom billing thing. For some reason it thinks I’m paying for some service, even though I’m not. At least, I better not be. No problem, I’ll just stroll on over and […]

Wow, what can I say. That is a pretty impressive sum of money. I read this before going to bed last night on Digg, but I thought it was fake. Turns out that Microsoft has just extended a 44 billion dollar offer for Yahoo! To be honest, Google has really handed Yahoo! their hand in search. I personally don’t know anyone that uses Yahoo to do search, although I’ve been told it’s still fairly popular in Asia. I have friends over at Yahoo!, and I once showed them my web logs from my blog indicating that something like 98% of all searches originate from Google. They refused to believe they were true, but that’s how the ball rolls over here. Granted, the readers of this blog are biased towards the technical side, but I think the numbers are fairly indicative of things in North America, as I’m sure most of […]

I just read this while surfing the internet – that in a comparison of Windows XP SP3 against Vista SP1, XP blew it completely out of the water: Vista’s first service pack, to be released early next year, is intended to boost the operating system’s performance. However, when Vista with the Service Pack 1 (SP1) beta was put through benchmark testing by researchers at Florida-based software development company Devil Mountain Software, the improvement was not overwhelming, leaving the latest Windows iteration outshined by its predecessor. Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds. 80 seconds in Vista. 35 seconds in XP. It can be yours for only $200, plus associated hardware upgrades. Oh, and while I’m at it, check this out. Do you have a windows […]

I just read an article online that did a comparison between a bunch of different machines running Windows Vista. You know who the winner was? A Macbook Pro. The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year is a Mac. Try that again: The fastest Windows Vista notebook we’ve tested this year–or for that matter, ever–is a Mac. Not a Dell, not a Toshiba, not even an Alienware. The $2419 (plus the price of a copy of Windows Vista, of course) MacBook Pro’s PC WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88 beats Gateway’s E-265M by a single point, but the MacBook’s score is far more impressive simply because Apple couldn’t care less whether you run Windows. Hard to believe Microsoft and their distributors had all their shit together once.

I caught the original news for this in a Skype back channel yesterday, and have had a few people email me links about this since. For those of you who missed it, Microsoft has announced that it will be opening a Vancouver office to attract Canadian talent and to sidestep some of the immigration problems it has had in the past: Microsoft Corp. has ratcheted up the pressure on the U.S. government to boost the number of foreign worker visas it gets by announcing plans for a new software development centre in Vancouver. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said yesterday it plans to open the centre this fall in the Greater Vancouver Area, about 2? hours from its headquarters, but an exact location had not yet been chosen. Microsoft also had not decided what product lines the initial staff of 200 would be working on, nor what the cost of […]

One of the last conversations I had at Northern Voice was with Michael Klassen, and it was about how Microsoft had completely forgotten about the end-user. Sure, maybe they spent five years working hard to make a new OS that they hoped everyone would like, but the user-experience just isn’t there. Which is really the prime area where Apple excels — they listen to the end user, and make the experience simple and productive. Other companies simply want to focus on the “how” and not the “why”. Having a really elegantly coded application with a crappy user interface is just a waste of time. To have a successful software project you really need to listen to the end user. Which makes what happened a few minutes ago all the cooler. I was sitting on my couch listening to music when suddenly I got an SMS message on my phone asking […]

Most of you that know me have undoubtedly seem me cursing at my computer furiously this past week or punching my laptop from time to time. The reason for this sudden change in behaviour stems from my recent installation of Windows Vista. Somehow, that whole process turned a pretty decent laptop into something completely unusable. So today, while trying to edit some photos at Northern Voice, I realized that I just couldn’t go on using my laptop the way it was. Everything was really slow and most applications crashed from time to time (especially Photoshop). Since I’m about to leave on vacation, and I really need a laptop to take with me, I debated spending the first day of my vacation reinstalling XP on my laptop. Which would obviously suck, but something really needed to be done. And then, looking around at my peers in the Forest Sciences Center at […]

I’m officially going to blog about my frustration with Windows Vista so far. If you were following last week, I decided (stupidly) that I would upgrade my laptop from windows XP to windows Vista. First, the whole upgrade procedure took on the order of four hours, and it wasn’t exact smooth all the time. The progress meters were hopelessly broken, and the pre-check that it does to make sure you can actually install vista properly got it wrong. One thing that bothers me right away is that you can no longer install Vista on the same partition as another OS. I’m not really sure why this is, because with Windows XP, you could do this. For example, you could have one version of XP in C:\windows, and another in C:\winxp. What’s funny is this feature is really only useful for an operating system that you have to reinstall periodically, which […]

So, I was multitasking at work today, installing Windows Vista on my laptop, and doing some work on my desktop machine. I thought the upgrade process would be simple, but instead it was a huge headache. First, Windows Vista Installer analyzed my whole machine and told me I was good to go. Then, I start installing it and it goes “wait a sec, just joking — you gotta remove all this software first before you can install Vista.” So, I uninstall Nero, my anti-virus program and a DVD RAM drive thing that I’ve never used. Install, take 2. The next part of the process is rather uneventful, but I have to say that the progress meters in the installer are terrible. First, they aren’t really tied to time or anything useful. It will hover at 2% for 30 minutes, then just up to 15% in about 3 seconds. Second, they […]