MacMinute: Apple objects to proposed Microsoft settlement
Stupid, stupid, stupid… I really hope the courts penalize Microsoft with something like $1.1 Billion in cash fines and that’s it…
Archive for the 'windows' Category
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I got a new Dell Latitude 610 yesterday. It’s running Windows XP (which I’m finding I actually like using compared to all the other Windows variants I’ve used in the past.) I like Windows 2000, but hate all the other Windows environments I’ve ever used. None were ever nearly as elegant as the Mac OS. I haven’t really played with it, as I got it at the end of the day on Friday, but it’s a nice machine and looks like it’ll suit my needs more than the old Dell Latitude LS I was given the first day of my job (which is like a 4 year old model I think).
Nice machine Dell…
For years, I’ve used a MS Intellimouse Exlporer on a Macintosh, including OS 9 and OS X. The intellimouse has 5 buttons and the default buttons for the 4th and 5th button (the two on the side) are ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ actions that are pretty useless on a Macintosh (they work, just not nicely) in part because MSIE on Macintosh doesn’t cache or render pages as quickly as one would expect, so…
I didn’t use the default settings. On the 4th button, I used the key command <cmd + click> which in MSIE opens a new window and has a special meaning in the finder. It also allowed me to ‘grab’ a webpage and scroll it using the mouse as if I were using the ‘hand’ tool in Acrobat reader.
On the 5th button, I assigned the key command <cmd + w> which is the standard ‘close window’ key command.
This allowed me to open links into new windows and close them quickly in MSIE, and after I started using Mozilla, allowed me to do the same but with ‘tabs’ instead of windows.
I’ve never had the time to sit down with Windows and really play with it, so I never could figure out how to ‘open a new window in IE with a click + key combination’ and that was pretty frustrating…
Well, frustrated with that one little piece of Windows, I am no more. I discovered quite by accident the special key command that’ll allow me to open a new window with a click, under Windows 2000 at least, is:
<control + shift + click>
So, as soon as I return to the office, I’ll program my Intellimouse Explorer’s 4th button to act ‘properly’ for my use.
Feels good…
I’m a firm believer in Outlook as a group scheduling and contact management tool. It also happens to be a decent email client. But, I can tell you this… if there is no Exchange Server in the equation, then it’s really just an email client.
I work at a company where there are roughly 900 employees. There are many different platforms and OSes running thoughout the organization: Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9, Windows (name your favorite flavor), various flavors of *nix and other proprietary stuff in between. We don’t have an Exchange Server at all, yet my department uses Outlook XP (great upgrade to Outlook 2000 btw). The first thing I tried to do was show some of the office staff how to share calendars last Monday… little did I know that we weren’t able to do that… and the sad thing is, to me that’s over half the value of Outlook.
Hopefully that’ll change in the future.
One thing that I can say can improve organizational efficiency is a strong use of technology to improve communication and collaboration. If you make it easy for people to schedule meetings with each other smartly they generally will. If you make it hard, they won’t meet.
Give them a tool that only does half the job, and they’ll learn to despise the tool, or the team that put it in place as a less than fully-functional tool.
Everyone knows that Apple has adopted BlueTooth as the wireless answer to USB. They’ve embraced it and have put a lot of marketing dollars behind it. I’m happy about this, but still have yet to think about how it might affect me, although having my printer on bluetooth and my scanner on it might be cool, though they’d likely still need to be plugged in to a wall outlet somewhere so they can get enough power to do what they do… About the coolest thing I have that I could use wireless on would be my iPod, but it’s not neccessary.
Anyways, the promise is that people can integrate their digital hardware using wireless technologies like BlueTooth and Airport and whatever marketing name they come up with for these new technologies. I think Apple can do this well, mainly because they’re the only ones that own the whole widget still. That gives them a leg up, sort of…
But, Microsoft is trying with products like the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop for Bluetooth (great name eh? realy catchy… typical MS). The promise is still there, until today.
Sadly, I read Matt’s blog posts about his experiences (read trials and tribulations) with his new fangled MWODfB (great acronym I know – blame Microsoft for the product name, not me) here, here and then…
wait for it…
the reality… here.
Sounds like a great idea. Copy Apple, use their PR wave to create your own product, and then louse up the execution. Typical Microsoft. Wait for Service Pack 1 for the MWODfB if you’re in the market. Or, as Matt points out, wait for someone like Logitec to come out with a real product…
Sorry it didn’t work out Matt.
(one more reason to stay away from Windows)
Only O’Reilly can publish an article like Connecting Mac OS X to Windows PCs and do it well.
Perfect… just what I need to figure out how to get my email.pst file off my office PC and onto my office Macintosh, so that I can transfer it to my iPod, which’ll then let me transfer it to my iBook for burning to CD (so that I can have a copy of all my email from Outlook) for future recovery by me. I mean, that file is 778 MB and that’s just a little too big to put on our network file server and not have someone notice that I’m taking my email with me. It did compress to 480 MB or so using Drop Stuff for Windows surprisingly…
Work in a cross platform environemt or have one at home? Read the article…
This article at the Register give me just one more reason to stay away from Windows.
Win-XP Help Center request wipes your HD
A malicious Win-XP Help Center request can easily and silently delete the contents of any directory on your Windows machine, we’ve learned. Worse, MS has rolled the fix silently into SP1 without making a public announcement.
Moral of the story: If you’re using Windows XP, upgrade ASAP to SP1. If you’re not using Windows XP and are looking for a new computer in the near future, check out my personal favorites as an alternative.
I’ve been pretty quiet on the whole Tablet PC thing, mainly because I’m biased and will admit that, but I’ve been following it loosely. I’d like to point everyone to Dan Bricklin on Tablet PC: First Impressions as I (and many others I’m sure) consider Dan an authority and his thoughts are golden:
Back in the early 1990′s, I was heavily involved in the pen computing world. I co-founded Slate Corporation which developed application software for GO’s Penpoint as well as Microsoft’s Windows for Pen Computing and for the Apple Newton. I was exposed to software and hardware development, both at the OS and application level, and had experience using a wide variety of machines. With the release of the new Tablet PCs based upon Microsoft’s new software, I felt it was appropriate for me to comment upon that, given my perspective. You will find here my comments based on my general feelings as well as actual experiences using various equipment.
…
Bottom line so far
So, one day in, my verdict: I can’t see ever buying a portable laptop that isn’t a convertible — the benefits are too great for me. It’s a Tablet PC, not a Pen PC, and not a Clamshell PC, and that’s a win. While these are clearly still basically a version 1 or 2, they are still very useful. If you read a lot on a PC, and move your laptop around a lot, and have benefited from 802.11, and don’t mind using early software that works but is basic (like the original VisiCalc was), and are in the market for a new laptop, take the next step and move up to a tablet. Corporate evaluators must start learning about these systems, because as they improve and the price difference disappears, you’ll have to figure out how to configure them, what type of software to insist upon, etc. If you always wanted to do your composing with a pen, and expect handwriting to be as reliable as a keyboard, stick with the keyboard, and wait for “handwriting computing” to happen, if it ever does. It’s not that important. Tablet computing is. It will make reading on a computer even more pervasive. I think Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers who were willing to take a chance trying to advance the state of mainstream personal computing are to be commended for what they’ve done.
It must really suck to be a Systems Admin for a Windows based company. I mean really suck.
My company employs around 100 people. We probably have 110 – 150 total desktop systems installed throughout the building, plus a dedicated server room with anywhere from 10 – 25 servers. All of the machines in the building are running some flavor of Windows except for 4 Macs. There are 3 Macs in the Graphics/Art department and one in my office (I know, I’m a lucky bastard, but I had to bitch long and hard to get it).
Anyways… at 3:30 pm today, I was surfing CNN.com, looking for advertisers to go after (prospecting) and Norton Antivirus popped up a little warning window. It said something like:
-
Norton Antivirus has detected a Virus.
[some cryptic code for] Bugbear has been detected in this file:
C:\LONG\Ass\PATH\to\some\Printer\spool\file.xyz
This file cannot be cleaned.
[OKAY BUTTON]
-
(I added the URL above, it wasn’t hyperlinked in the window)
I thought, “hmm, probably ought to call the IT guy.” So I called him, told him my problem, and he told me to “just click OK.” So I did. Another warning came up, and he told me to click OK again. I did. He then said that I probably wouldn’t be able to print until they cleaned the computer.
I went ahead and ran Norton’s Live Update command, which should make sure that I’m totally up to date. I then started a system scan on my entire hard drive after closing all of my files and programs. About a minute into the scan the IT guy’s assistant (I guess we’ll call him the mini-IT guy, though, he’s not really ‘mini’ in any sense of the word) called and said “John, we need you to shut down your comptuer. It’s trying to print to every machine on the network.” I said “sure thing… no problem” and shut down my computer.
Not more than 5 minutes later, our entire network was down. They pulled the physical connection to our T-1′s and effectively stopped all work at the office. At this point, it was about 3:45 pm. In 15 minutes, the entire company came to a halt. All because someone wasn’t being diligent, or didn’t have time to be diligent.
They still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of things when I left the office, but they still did’t know how the virus got into our network. They were pretty sure it didn’t originate with my computer, but they aren’t absolutely positive yet. They were really busy going through all of our servers trying to ensure that things were working and were clean on those when I left, so that we can actually operate as a company. I’m sure they’ll be there for a while. There are only two of them, and I have no idea what their plan for ensuring that all of the desktop workstations are clean will be, but you can believe I won’t be turning on my PC tomorrow (which really sucks, as that’s where all of my email and documents are… I only use the Macintosh to test advertising campaigns and surf the web generally).
It must really suck to be a Windows IT person.
[ps. I was able to continue working by turning to the Mac, booting up Excel and working on some calculations that I needed to work on for a project I've been working on every few days anyways. Beware the Bugbear. Buy a Mac]
I just read about a new Pocket PC coming out from Intermec on Gizmodo.
Ever get so frustrated with your gadgets that you wish you could just throw them against the wall? Maybe you need the Intermec 700 Color Pocket PC. It’s designed for use in the field, can “withstand multiple 5-ft. drops to concrete,” and is sealed against rain and dust as well. The rugged little gadget has a 3.8 inch color screen, can read bar codes, comes with built-in 802.11b, and can be configured for Bluetooth and GSM, GPRS, and CDMA as well.
The Intermec site is unreachable by myself at this point, so I’ll not point to it (Google doesn’t need to index my link to them, if they can’t keep their site accessible). Cool Tools has a little more info on it than Gizmodo though. I don’t care if it’s a Pocket PC, which means it runs some flavor of Windows (I’m not that biased). Also, I’m thinking it could work for me on my weekend job (think I get to wear fatigues once a month for a couple of days) and that would be terribly helpful. My trusty old Palm IIIx (I know that its old as shit) has held up quite well throughout its Army life, but its got a habit of dumping all its memory if it gets to hot, can’t hold up to much rain, and the screen doesn’t tolerate all that much sand before I start scratching the hell out of it.
Something that’ll let me use Word and Excel in the field (and could take the beating I’ll be giving it) would be quite nice…
I talked to my techs today about our ad server platform, and believe it or not, they actually have plans to move it over to a Linux based solution (same software, new OS) sometime in the next 6 months or so…
Which translates to “We hope to have it moved over in 6 months, but realistically, we we’ll get around to it next time it bites us in the ass, cause we’re so damned busy with other stuff right now it’s not funny.”
But, I’ll take that over “nah, we actually like Windows – it’s much easier to administer” which was their story 6 months ago… heh. Funny guys those Windows administrators.
Oh, and today was slightly better, but I’m still emotionally drained.
Today was a rough day.
I got up late, checked email, answered a few personal emails that had to be answered, and headed to work. I arrived about 20 minutes late, but my boss was out of the office all day, so while I was late, there will be no reprocussions…
I’m the guy responsible for all advertising sales and trafficking at my day job, and I was already ‘behind’ on the days tasks at this point. As I started checking my office email (on the PC which takes about 10 minutes to fully boot up, vs. the Mac on my desk which takes like 5 seconds to start up since I can leave it on all night, and even then it only takes like 2 minutes to boot up from a fully powered down mode) I got a phone call from our tech team. One of our ad servers was crashing and restarting itself every five minutes, and had been since 9am. He wanted to know if we had changed anything, and if I knew what might be the problem.
We hadn’t and I had no idea…
We started talking about possible causes and the symptoms that he was seeing, and all I could think about was the clients that we were supposed to be serving ads for, as well as the visitors to our website that weren’t getting a good experience. We discussed possible causes like recursive DNS timeouts being too long, caches being too large, possible memory exceptions, buffer overruns, attacks, and more. I offered some possible solutions (just reboot the machine is my favorite, and had already been done with no solution) and nothing seemed an easy solution.
Continue reading ‘Absolute day from Hell’
I loaded this website up today in IE 6 on my Win2K box at work (for the first time), and guess what? It doesn’t display over half of the site… I have no idea why this happens, but its pretty annoying to know that this might have been happening since the day I launched. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that this site is pure XHTML and CSS, but it works fine on a Mac, in all of the browsers I can find… Why wouldn’t it work on IE 6 on a PC?
If you’ve been reading, and don’t see anything in the content area of this site, below the “Powered By” tag on the right sidebar, then you’re missing a lot of the content of this site. If you care about that, then read the archives… they seem to display in full … or when you come here, drag the IE window just a little wider or skinnier than it was when the site ‘fully loaded’ to get the rest of the site to display. I hate Windows sometimes (and yes, I realize this may be entirely my fault and not IE’s at all).
If you’ve got a suggestion on how to fix it, let me know via comment.
HOW TO: Quickly Lock Your Desktop by Clicking a Shortcut on the Taskbar in Windows XP
Summary
You can create a shortcut on your taskbar that immediately locks your computer. When you click this shortcut, it is the same as pressing CTRL+ALT+DELETE, and then clicking Lock Computer.
Create a Shortcut on the Taskbar
1. Right-click the desktop, point to New, and then click Shortcut.
2. In the Type the location of the item box, type %windir%\system32\rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation, and then click Next.
3. In the Type a name for this shortcut box, type lock computer, and then click Finish.
4. Drag the new shortcut to the Quick Launch toolbar that is located next to the Start button.
NOTE: If the Quick Launch toolbar does not appear, right-click an empty area on the taskbar, point to Toolbars, and then click Quick Launch. If you right-click an empty area on the taskbar and you do not see the Toolbars command, click Lock the Taskbar.
(ed. site looks like ass in Mozilla 1.1 on a Macintosh… just wanted to point that out — not really sure that I expected it to look good, but at least to be readable)
(Doesn’t that title sound pornographic? It might be construed as such in some circles.)
ZDNet’s commentary on the latest offering from Microsoft is pretty good.
“It comes as no surprise that Microsoft jumped on the 802.11b bandwagon. With the company’s Xbox push into online gaming, the addition of home entertainment functionality into Windows XP, and upcoming products such as wireless smart displays, it’s clearly to Microsoft’s benefit to make wireless networking as easy–and prevalent–as possible.”
Duh, Apple pioneered the ease-of-use in wireless a long time ago with their first Airport, and have done nothing but improve it since then. The one thing you can’t do easily with an Airport is configure it from anything but a Macintosh.
The neatest thing about the MS Wireless Base Station is that you can (seemingly) configure it with a Macintosh, which to me is in Microsoft’s favor, as their pricepoint is much nicer than Apple’s Airport.
“… if you need to configure the base station from a Macintosh or other non-Windows PC, you must use the Web-based management tool.”
Looks like a cool appliance, though it doesn’t neccesarily stack up to the Airport in my opinion, and bravo to Microsoft for [finally] making one. I’m actually quite impressed with their hardware offerings to date, as I only use their mice on my Macintosh, and have been thinking about buying an XBox in the future… though my PS2 is quite enough for me right now.
[via Gizmodo]
A couple of weeks ago, I read a post on Joel’s weblog from January about Knowledge Management and a software product called Six Degrees, that was coming out from Creo (made up of the guys that were the real brains behind Quark back in the day).
I was intrigued. Here promised to be a product that could really help me get my job done faster, and more efficiently, and it ran on Windows and Macintosh. I downloaded the eval version, and fired it up on my Windows 2K box at work. It took about 30 minutes to crawl all of the data on that machine, and index it. So far, so good. Then I started using it. Or trying to, I should say. First of all, the software requires a J2EE runtime environment installed, and it’ll do it for you, if you need it, but it doesn’t check the version number of one that’s already installed on your Windows box. It also doesn’t uninstall the older version, if it installs a newer version for you. Also, it doesn’t handle large amounts of information very well. Lastly, I hate my PC, so I tried troubleshooting it for about a week (the demo version mind you) but I never got it to work properly. Don’t get me wrong, it looks promisiong, but I’m not interested in helping them test it right now at work (just too damned busy) — but they were superb in offering me help, support, and requesting feedback on my progress. Angie, the customer service person that was helping me probably deserves a lot more than they’re paying her.
Then just this week, I was reading on Andy’s blog about ZOE. I was again intrigued. I downloaded it on my Mac at home, doubleclicked it, and whammo! it just worked (typical experience for Mac users, but you PC users might have a hard time believing that. really, it just works). I’m super impressed by its abilities, and need to spend more time with it to get more comfortable with it, but if it continues to work well after I start putting massive amounts of data into it, I’m freaking sold! (oh, but wait, it’s free). Andy loves it thus far, and I’m liking it, so you might want to check it out. (yes, it should work on a PC, check the FAQ)
Amazon is Big Brother, posted over on the Amazon Weblog shows us all one more reason to not use Windows. The fact that they’re installing Alexa things by default (which was under serious attack by privacy organizations since they launched) without telling anyone anything is typical of the Windows mentality. Netscape 4.x embedded Alexa stuff also, but they at least told you what it did, and how, before you downloaded the software. Not so with IE 6 SP 1. Beware the Redmond Machine.
I finally downloaded and installed NetNewsWire Lite on my laptop. Prior to today, I was only using it at work, as I haven’t had a full day at home to need it, but I do today. I’d like to note some recommendations for Brent, the author, that I’ll be emailing him, so I figured I’d blog them as well (in no particlar order):
- Have a way to publish my ‘subscriptions’ to a server somewhere, so that when you install the software on a new machine, you can click one button, maybe ‘grab subscriptions’ and it’ll go to the server, find your file/list, and download it, and update your list… including any groups you’ve got, anything (maybe this is a feature for the paid version, maybe not)
- Quit installing any feed that doesn’t provide at least some descriptive text in their RDF feed as default (like MacCentral, or MacNN)
- When I unsubscribe from a feed, that feed should disappear from the two right content windows, as it is now, that feed stays live, while your selection moves down… sort of confusing, and not accurate.
- When I drag a ‘site’ to a group, it automatically drops that group open, which isn’t what I’d prefer, and then it puts that dragged site at the top of the list… I’d like it to go to the bottom, like the way bookmarks default to the bottom of a folder/group in Mozilla and/or IE. Use the default behavior of other apps unless you really have a great reason not to.
- Allow users to drag an entire group from the ‘sites drawer’ to their subscribed to list.
- Allow me to turn off the ‘verification’ of the addition of a RSS Feed when I drag and drop it into my list of subscribed sites. This should be a prefernce setting, as some users might like this behavior.
- When a user addds a new feed, automatically upgrade it to the central server, so that you can integrate it back into the products ‘sites drawer’ as you release new upgrades (this should probably a preference, so that privacy concerned users have the option of participating).
- Let me break apart the ‘three window panes’ so that I only have to display that which I want to display. I’m thinking it’d be nice to just leave the display (bottom right) window open all the time, in the back ground, so that I can go read everything, when I have time, and at other times, I’d just like to have a list of the sites I’m subscribed to open, so that I can glance quickly at the list of sites, and the number of headlines they have that are new.
So far, thats about it. I’m sure that as fast as Brent is releasing updates to this beta software, I’ll decide I want more… and I’ll try to blog it here. As a side note, there are plenty of News Aggregators for Windows, and I’d recommend you try them out sometime… they’re quite useful. If you’re on a Mac, NetNewsWire is the best, if not only, one out there.
[later]Pineapple seems to be another Mac OS X news reader… downloading now, will report back.
