6/26/2008 - Introducing Windows Vista for iPhone

Months ago I would have given some slack to Windows Vista. After all, how bad could it possibly be? The thing is I exactly have a computer that runs it. I've only tested it out in stores and on other computers. Well, after having to set up a few Vista computers at work, I can honestly say that it is that bad. I just don't get how they could have screwed it up that badly. My main complaint about it before was that it required too much in terms of RAM and processor... that it was a bad excuse for people to buy new hardware. While that is still true, the other problems with Vista I have faced gave me a full appreciation as to why people want to downgrade to XP. When an "upgrade" like Service Pack 1 causes a computer to crash with the Blue Screen of Death, you know you have a turkey of an operating system. Vista was supposed to be touted as all backwards compatible, but that is simply not the case. Much of that is due to lack of drivers, but if the codebase is not supposed to be that different from XP, then incompatibility is just a sign of bad programming. What offends me most about Vista is its blatant attempt to copy Mac OS X's interface with its fluid animations and graphical flourishes. So I don't know if its some kind of sick joke or karmic retribution that something like this can even be thought up:

11/28/2007 - Don't Give Up On Vista Ad

Now this is rich... Apple is not-to-humbly crowing about the fact that some computer manufacturers are "downgrading" to XP instead of installing Vista on their new hardware because of Vista's incompatibility issues, its sluggishness, and its higher expense. If you've seen the new Apple ads with the Mac guy and the PC guy, you'll see that the PC guy is not too happy about this downgrading trend and is trying to persuade those who will listen to not give up on Vista. The funniest of these ads is actually not on TV. A few days ago, Apple started a viral marketing campaign on some tech websites with the Mac and PC guys in an online Flash advertisement. What's really clever is how the ad was designed on the webpage, as you'll see in this video:



What's kind of ironic is that the new Apple operating system, Leopard, shares a few problems with its direct competitor, Vista. My main beef with Leopard is that you really need the newest hardware to take advantage of all of its features. My Powerbook is running perfectly fine with Tiger and I don't see any compelling features that I would need in Leopard.

What is really exciting to me, though, are these new mobile computing platforms in the form of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS and the new Google Android mobile operating system. These new operating systems really allow developers to "start over" with software that has no bloat (yet), allowing for applications that run fast, are efficient, and are a truly new experience because they have to adapt to a new user interface in a mobile device. Leopard and Vista may be the big boys on the desktop and laptop computers, but Web 2.0 and mobile apps are the future, in my opinion.

11/10/2007 - Vista Oops

We all saw previously how a Microsoft product demonstration can go wrong when the product just stops working. Now here comes a Microsoft product demonstration where the product works, but works poorly. Voice recognition software has always been dodgy at best. Even after months of training the product to recognize your voice and speech pattern, there is always going to be the occasional hiccup where it confuses words that sound alike. It's kinda like that episode of Seinfeld with the lipreader. I guess it could be easy to confuse "sleep" and "sweep", but what we see in this demonstration defies explanation:



After watching these buggy Windows systems, I just hope that the air traffic control system in this country isn't run by Microsoft products.