Microsoft LOVES its own products!
I have had the chance to live with final versions of both Office and Vista for a few weeks now. I’ve been using them long enough that they have become second nature to me. I no longer think to myself, “Wow — this is a great new feature.” I just use it. Even so, I marvel at how much easier Office 2007 has made my work. (For the record, Office 2007 also works perfectly with Windows XP.)
That's great, chief; it might even hold some credibility if, say, you maybe didn't work for Microsoft.
Ready for some fun? Because the news has been a veritable barrage of silliness over the last few weeks.
Let's start with Bill Gates.
This is the richest man in the world, and in theory ought to be able to understand the market, and the things that people want, and be aware of the state of technology.
So why is he gleefully expounding about "innovations" that the Japanese have taken for granted for years?
VOIP, internet TV, programming a la carte over the internet, all of these are things that have been the standard - mandated by law - in Japan for several years. And yet somehow Bill Gates thinks that we're so unaware of this that he will give a serious interview claiming that these things are new, and revolutionary?
But it's more than this. Gates' company has spent nearly seven years in development of what would become Windows Vista; it has been the biggest software development program in the history of mankind. Hundreds of thousands of man-hours have gone into Vista, and the end result is an OS so secure that you can't play PopCap Games on it, because they're not family-approved. They're not? And here I thought all the countless Arkanoid clones would surely be rated "E." Of course, this only happens if the company can afford to have their games reviewed by the ESRB.
Most websites can't.
Which means that the Vista parental controls - which are conveniently all or nothing - block PopCap, and a ton of other sites, because they have no ESRB ratings, and are therefore assumed by Vista to be non-kid friendly.
I mean, it wasn't enough to change the terms on the Vista Upgrade Edition coupons they gave out to try to build initial interest - AFTER handing them out - so that Upgrade Edition purchasers will not be able to perform a "clean" install of the software. No. Crippling your product without telling anyone isn't exactly customer-friendly; but I'd bet that if Vista were in fact as secure and yet usable as its publicity has been claiming, people would overlook these little problems, as they have always done in the past, in favor of the new features.
The real problem is that it's NOT secure, or usable. Firstly, User Access Control stops your work entirely to demand your attention when you try to perform any operation it deems unsafe, which is most things the average user does with a computer. Making a change to a file on the hard drive, for example. I only personally do that a few HUNDRED times a day. I don't know about you; but for me, the blitz of confirmation dialogs would prompt me almost immediately to turn the feature off completely, thus making the machine totally unguarded against threats, and requiring me to purchase and run exactly the type of security software Vista's security features were obviously designed by a trained, typing bear to eliminate.
Secondly, and more worrisome, is the fact that even with the Vista security features in place, the OS is STILL full of holes. It was released to the public on Tuesday. Today is Thursday. Microsoft just acknowledged today the existence of a security hole allowing a hacker to take complete control of a Vista computer using its own built-in Voice Recognition feature - one of the very features used as a selling point in the Vista publicity campaign.
Even news copywriters trying to come up with nice things to say about Vista can't manage it; they're forced to list as "Vista features" things that are in fact in Internet Explorer 7, or Office 2007, rather than OS features, and they're forced to admit that Vista itself kinda, well, sucks.
Let's see, what did the nice man at Canada.com say?
UPDATE: Okay, I feel lied to. My Vista Ultimate is now fully up to date and I've just spent the past hour trying to figure out how to access these nifty new features, such as Group Shot and the video desktop, which is apparently called Dreamscene. It ain't happening, which means I'll be putting in an annoyed call to Microsoft tomorrow. Stay tuned..
This, he says, after literally hours of downloading to get the patches which Microsoft didn't bother to ship with the retail version.
Great Job!
If you look back, Microsoft has made a practice of copying "features" from other companies, re-engineering them poorly, renaming them, and then loudly touting them as "innovations," which they were when their actual inventors thought them up, thanks. Internet Explorer 7 didn't come up with tabbed browsing, guys. Mozilla, and Firefox, have been using tabs for years, as has Opera, and Netscape. In fact, IE has been the only browser WITHOUT tab support for quite a while. Very innovative, they way they run to catch up.
I would recommend not buying Vista unless you have absolutely no choice. Don't support this senseless company and its shoddy products any more.
Moving right along...
It's always nice to know that there are politicians who are really honest and all about straight shooting, right? I bet when I said that, you thought about John McCain (R, AZ), didn't you? It's only natural; he makes the claim that that's his mission in life every time there's a camera on him. Try taking a look at what he really does, instead. It's very interesting viewing.
To share the love, although the Hillary For Prez campaign has already gotten the video removed from YouTube, (which apparently doesn't like McCain either, as they let the video about him stay,) this site has a great rundown of the things Hillary has said about her vote to go to war in Iraq. Also very interesting reading. Since the video is gone. Way to man up, YouTube.
In an amazing story, bloggers are helping to get a gross miscarriage of justice overturned. See, there's this 17-year-old boy living in Georgia, named Genarlow Wilson. He had the horrible lack of good sense to have his 15-year-old girlfriend give him a blowjob.
I can't imagine WHAT he was thinking.
Apparently, now he can't either; the illegitimate sex act has landed him in jail for a ten-year sentence, as well as permanently slapping him onto the sex offender lists, despite the fact that the act was caught on video, and even the judge and jury clearly saw - and SAID IN COURT - that the act was clearly voluntary on the part of the girl.
Still; free will is irrelevant in a zero-tolerance society. Off he goes to jail, and this is where bloggers come in handy. A ton of bloggers, like my friend Becky, have raised such a ruckus about this case - Becky is a former prosecutor, so she has some idea what she's talking about when she calls it a miscarriage of justice, by the way - and the end result is that the Georgia state Senate is trying to pass a law to get him out of jail.
Becky said - and I agree with - the following:
First of all, Mr. Wilson should never have been charged. As I understand it, the girl was not only not coerced, she initiated the whole thing. Their ages and relationship was not the kind of thing the statutory rape laws were designed to prevent. And, even if the stick up his ass prosecutor had felt a law had been broken, and he had a public duty to do something, then I am certain there would have been some stupid thing like sexual mischief that could have been charged, rather than rape.
She also - and again, I agree fully - called the prosecutor an asshole.
Once again, moving right along...
A few days ago, some girl whose father was a early responder on 9/11 went to meet with the President to ask about the effects of 9/11 on those "at ground zero," and to do so, missed school.
I would have thought meeting with the President would be a big enough deal that the school would let that absence slide, but no; they gave her shit about it.
Until she showed them the pimp hand. Apparently, realizing that the administrators of here school were as magically fucktarded as administrators everywhere these days, her parents had the good sense to ask for a note.
And thus, a 12-year-old girl got to give her no doubt annoying principal a note written and signed by the President of the United States asking for her absence to be excused.
You don't see THAT every day, let me tell you.
You don't see Katie Holmes every day, either. This is because her apparent conversion to Scientology, and her marriage to now-notorious crazy Tom Cruise, have apparently made her a Hollywood pariah, and as a result no-one will hire her.
I bet after the divorce she will do better research before dating.
I will admit that porn is not offensive to me. I know a lot of people who scream loudly that it's a horrible thing, yet the sales numbers seem to declare at least SOME of them total screaming hypocrites. That notwithstanding, I was actually unaware that any particular performer had created such a "body of work," if I may be excused for using the term, that it warranted the creation of its own cable channel.
I was woefully ignorant.
Apparently Jenna Jameson is the first to reach such a lofty height; she is getting her very own, all-Jenna cable network, featuring round-the-clock pay-per-view display of an endless rotation of her movies. That's actually sorta depressing.
In news of the really, really gross, this woman went to the doctor complaining that she just couldn't lose weight no matter what, and was desperate for a gastric banding operation. The surgeons opened her up, only to find that she actually was 93 pounds lighter than she had claimed - after they removed the 93 pound ovarian cyst that she had somehow been unable to notice on her own.
She apparently thought she was just really, really fat.
In fact, she was carrying around a sac containing 12 GALLONS of fluid (LGT a really icky picture of the nasty thing.) That's gross, and evidence of complete lack of attention. Anyone paying any sort of attention to themselves should have caught on; it would have felt different from the rest of her body. This begs the question - woman, do you ever WASH? If you run soapy hands over your belly, you would have noticed a place where the sensations were a bit different. Maybe a bit numb; maybe a bit painful; but different. The tissue would have felt different.
This exact phenomenon is why people do breast exams; it's possible to FEEL A LUMP WITH YOUR FINGERS, you know. How do you miss a growth of that magnitude?
I so want to tell the surgeons, "You can't cure stupid."
...Especially if you refuse the vaccinations for it.
One of the leading Muslim doctors in England is advising Muslims to avoid vaccinating their children, and instead breastfeed their children until they are two years old.
That'll sure stop the measles.
The good news, of course, is that if they get cancer, they can just eat more hot food. Medical studies now show that capsaicin, the chemical compound that makes the habanero pepper so wonderfully piquant, and is used in pepper sprays the world over, actually kills cancer cells without damaging surrounding tissues.
Yeah, that's right, hot food cures cancer.
More studies are being done, but preliminary research looks promising; maybe one day the jalapeno farmers will be responsible for a final cure for cancer.
...And you thought I was nuts for eating things spicy!
Better watch the content of your food, though, if you live in Britain. Apparently, childhood obesity is now a sign of child abuse; "fat police" are checking schoolchildren, and any kid over a certain weight ratio is taken to foster care.
That's right; your kid likes to eat a bit too much, and that means that you are EXACTLY THE MORAL EQUIVALENT of the parent who beats their children bloody in drunken rage. And, in fact, more likely to reap consequences for your actions, as children who are beaten are often ashamed, as though they had done something wrong, and often try to hide the signs of abuse, resulting in many actually abusive parents escaping punishment. It's hard to hide the fact that you're fat; so the parents of fat children are more likely to be punished, in fact, than actual child abusers.
You know, I had a few bad things happen to me when I was a kid.
I've also been fat most of my life.
You know what? I'd take the fat, any day, over going back to being a kid again. Being fat doesn't equate to child abuse. For anyone to claim it does is an insult to anyone who's ever actually been abused.
