The Road to the Horizon: Microsoft

Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts

Snapped: Microsoft Windows goes Italian

Microsoft Windows crashes in the most unusual places. Here it does its thing in a Rome shop window.

Google: the new Microsoft?

I am writing quite a bit for BlogTips, my new blog about "Blogging for Non-Profit", where I share some of my past 30 months of blogging experiences.

I am now working on a post helping non-profit organisations decide what blog software to choose.

When I started The Road over two years ago, I compared Wordpress and Blogger, and found them pretty equal in user interface, functionality, features. I choose for Blogger, because of its flexibility. But that was then...

I re-looked at both when starting BlogTips and was taken by the progress Wordpress made over the past two years. Blogger, on the contrary, just did not evolve. A few features were added, but that's it. Wordpress was overhauled several times, and a ton of new features, plug-ins and themes were added. Wordpress' user interface now stands head and shoulder above Blogger's clumsy stuff.

It made me think... I use Google affiliated software (Blogger, Google Apps, Picasa, Feedburner,...) a lot. They all have one thing in common: no technical support (all support is concentrated in user forums), and little effort is made to have the software evolve. (here is ProBlogger complaining about Feedburner)

It feels like "What you see is what you get", nothing more, nothing less. The only thing they are interested in, is content. Could not care less about their users.

Makes me wonder if Google has become the new Microsoft?

Picture courtesy HubPages

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Rumble: I have one question left...

You know in the past months I have been working on increasing the download speed of The Road to the Horizon. It seems the choice of your browser is as important as me optimising the site.

Look at these... The Javascript speed of Chrome -the new Google freeware browser- and Firefox beating up Internet Explorer.

Knowing also the problems Internet Explorer has in seemingly "hanging" for seconds when downloading pages, I have only one question left in my mind:

Why did I wait so long to abandon Explorer?

Graph courtesy cnet.com

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Rumble: Flying again.

As the sliding doors of Rome's Fiumicino airport opened this morning, the smell of coffee and croissants welcomed me. Above the background noise of hundreds of people talking, the clickclacking of hand luggage and an occasional burst of laughter, sounded the high pitched noise of cups and spoons being put on saucers. The sound of Italian breakfast: cornetto and cappuccino. Feels like coming home. Is this weird or what? Arriving at an airport at 6:30, and feeling at home? Am I travelling to much? Lemme see: from three weeks ago: Rome-Brussels-Rome-Parma-Rome-Addis Abeba-Rome-and now Brindisi. Could be worse.

With a comfort of cornetto and cappuccino, who cares Windows on the departure screen crashed again?

Oh, and no sign of striking Alitalia crew members...

More posts on The Road about Rome

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Rumble: Microsoft again.

After my issues with Internet Explorer, I am starting to discover "The World Beyond Microsoft"!

Test of the day: Downloading the home page of "The Road":

Microsoft Exporer 8: 20 to 31 seconds (and seems to hang halfway)
Google Chrome 0.2: 10 to 15 seconds
Mozilla Firefox 3: 12 seconds

The latter two come for free. Go figure.

Check here for a more indepth comparison of the different Internet browsers.

Graph courtesy Chris Blattman's blog

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Rumble: Who needs Internet Explorer, anyway?

OK, OK, I am not impartial. After my computer failed to reboot after the Microsoft XP Service Pack 3 upgrade, the guys from the ICT helpdesk at work had no other choice but to reinstall the whole operating system ("a new image") on my poor laptop.

All my personal data was backed up, so I was cool, but all software settings went back to the defaults. I also had to reinstall the software I had put on it. And of course, there was the usual debugging. Kept me busy on and off for two days.

But the deed is done. Except, I could not get Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 to start up properly. It kept on referring me to this configuration site, which failed to register my settings. So each time I started IE7, it asked to configure itself.

A year ago, I got to learn Firefox (it is for free), and in a short while the newer versions got faster and cleaner... Only a few problems left (some HTML tags don't work properly), but hey...

After installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (beta), and seeing there were more problems (default font were bigger screwing up layouts, scrollbox did not show well etc..), I took a drastic and emotional decision: For the first time in all my life, I configured Firefox to be my default browser.

Looking at the statistics of the visitors on The Road, it seems more and more people did the same. A year ago, only 25% of the visitors used Firefox, now over 50% of you preferred Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Now I know why.

Picture courtesy One Man's Blog

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Rumble: I loooooooove Microsoft sooooooo muuuuuch!

I just upgraded my laptop with Windows XP Servicepack3 (SP3). And after one hour, found it rebooting itself over and over again. "Safe Startup" and any other trick in the book did not help. Searched the Internet on my other computer and there seem to be a thousand reasons why SP3 goes wrong and ten time that many cures. Darned.
Guess the ICT helpdesk will have their hands full on Monday. Running on my personal laptop at this moment.

Let's put what we endure with computers and Microsoft in a bit of a perspective. A joke I will always remember:

A while ago, Bill Gates compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM (General Motors) had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1000 miles to the gallon."

GM responded by saying: If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally, your car would die on the freeway for no reason, and you would accept this, restart, and drive on.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart; in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Only one person at a time could use the car.

6. Apple would make a car that was powered by the sun, was more reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads.

7. The oil, water, temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single 'general car fault' warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same butt size.

9. The airbag system would say 'Are you sure?' before going off.

10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more.

12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

13. About twice a day, all your luggage would disappear from the trunk, and would reappear in your closets at home.

14. You'd press the 'Start' button to shut off the engine.