Archive for September, 2007

Vista Kicks Ass

Posted in Computers on September 30, 2007 by themaroon

Nice article about Vista on eweek via Hacker News. As I said in the comments there, I find all of the anti-Vista sentiment perplexing. My theory is that it’s just due to shoddy OEMs like Dell trying to use it to polish the proverbial turd.

I bought it the day it was released and installed on both my desktop and Lenovo X60. The desktop died long ago (due to a faulty hard drive and my own laziness) but the Lenovo is still going strong. I haven’t had to reinstall once, and with XP I typically would have 3 times by now.

I don’t have any idea what’s involved in an upgrade for a large corporation running lots of Windows XP machines, so it’s quite possible that Vista is rather uncompelling for that market. But for someone buying a new PC, I’d recommend Vista wholeheartedly.

First there’s the aesthetics. It’s a much better looking OS, and that alone will increase your enjoyment factor significantly. It’s visually stunning, especially if you’ve got the graphics horsepower for the aero glass effects, and we’re visual creatures. That sort of thing is never to be underestimated. Not that I’m in favor of the style over substance approach that Apple uses, but a little more prettiness definitely goes a long way.

Then there are a dozen little ways in which it’s more enjoyable to use. Networking has been greatly simplified. No more running a wizard on every PC, it just automatically detects the network. And when connecting to a new wireless network it just asks you whether it’s a public one, a work one, or a home one and configures security settings accordingly. That probably doesn’t mean much to your average Hacker News reader (in fact it might be a tad annoying to them) but it means a lot to their parents.

The sidebar is a nice touch. The most common comment about that is “they stole that from OSX”. So? If it’s a good feature, why not? OSX took plenty of cues from Windows, yet it’s actually possible to read an article about Apple without some moron pointing that out.

The search is great too. No more wading through long lists of programs, just type the first couple characters and hit enter. I realize that this and the sidebar are possible in XP given some third party apps, but most people don’t know that, and even if they do it’s undeniably better to have that functionality built in at the OS level.

Navigation in explorer is much improved. Let’s say you’re viewing something in your program files. Suppose I’m editing some images in my Full Tilt poker folder. When I’m there in explorer I see at the top C:>Program Files>Full Tilt Poker>Images . Each word is a link, so with one click I can go back to Program Files or C:>, rather than having to hit up or back a couple times or dealing with the address bar.

I like the built in, easy to use rating system for media. Media Center has been given a beautiful overhaul too, though I can’t really comment as to its functionality since I don’t record with it anymore. Bluetooth in XP can often be like pulling teeth, in Vista it’s a snap. I find the control panel layout to be more intuitive. I could go on and one with one little feature after another that I like better.

There are a few warts undoubtedly. I’ve found the most commonly cited one, driver support, to be a non-factor, but then maybe most people have older hardware than me. Either way, I could definitely name a few things about Vista that I dislike. But as a whole the OS is much more enjoyable, and anyone buying a sufficiently powerful PC (and you really shouldn’t be buying any less nowadays) would be a moron not to get Vista on it.

Of course, I also steer people away from Dell, which almost every Vista hater I’ve encountered is running. The difference in build quality between them and Lenovo is roughly equivalent to the difference between Kia and Lexus. (In this equation I guess HP would be Toyota). It should come as no surprise that almost every Windows user at Y Combinator this summer (which there were very few of) had a Lenovo.

So buy a good PC, and get Vista on it. Or hell, buy a Mac if that’s your bent. But don’t believe the anti-Vista hype. It’s just the bleating of mindless Apple fanboys.

6 Comments »

Guns vs. Ninjas

Posted in Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot on September 20, 2007 by themaroon

A lot of people seem to be in favor of gun control. Oddly enough, it’s usually liberals too. That’s always seemed inconsistent to me. Conservatives normally seem to be hell bent on eradicating civil liberties for “the greater good” while liberals run around spouting their favorite Benjamin Franklin quote about how bad of an idea that is. Except on the gun issue. Why the exception there?

What both sides never seem to mention is the ninja. That’s the real reason we need guns to remain legal. Without firearms, ninjas and their throwing stars would be more or less unstoppable. That’s why guns were invented in the first place. To stop ninjas. If we took away guns, and still let ninjas with their superior firearms roam free, our government would certainly be overthrown in a matter of hours.

Just a thought.

3 Comments »

Are Conservatives Just Plain Stupid?

Posted in Stupid Shit I Found On The Web on September 9, 2007 by themaroon

Maybe not, but this study would definitely suggest something near it.

4 Comments »

Thanks Apple

Posted in gadgets on September 7, 2007 by themaroon

So I think Apple’s announcements yesterday were actually good for my under ten million iPhones sold by 2009 hypothesis/wager. The iPod Touch (which was somehow obvious, brilliant, and stupid at the same time) is going to cannibalize the iPhone. It has to.

As I’ve said 100 times, they made a product that only the BlackBerry set can afford (even still, after the price cut) but designed it in such a way that they cannot give up their BlackBerry. They’ve tethered it to a two year contract (making it ungiftable) and they’ve excluded the only other group of people who want this phone and can afford it (geeks like me) by not having 3g data. They’re selling only to fanboys, and even most of them were hesitant.

And now, on top of it all, they’ve made an iPod that has everything good about the iPhone (Wi-Fi, browsing, various iPod functionality) and none of the bad (AT&T), and threw in double the storage for good measure. Don’t get me wrong, it’s brilliant, because the BlackBerryers were all carrying an iPod anyway and they’re all going to upgrade to the Touch. But Apple had a lot of people sitting on the fence about the iPhone, and I have to think the iPod Touch went ahead and pushed them right off.

In some ways, I actually want the Touch. I’d love to have Google Reader look that sweet in my pocket at all times, and I’ll tell you right now, if they somehow make something like Google Gears for it (so I can read my RSS feeds when out of Wi-Fi range and sync when I get back in) I’m sold. Unfortunately Wi-Fi isn’t near ubiquitous enough yet for that to be useful, and by the time it is, Wi-Max will be a better option anyway.

I’d also love to have a media player with such a nifty interface and beautiful screen. I’m currently using a Zen Vision W, and while I love it, it’s just too bulky for day to day use. I can’t pocket it. And the interface is a step back from the Vision M, resorting to buttons. The multitouch screen would have to be significantly more enjoyable, even if it gets a little smudgy at times. I never leave the house without my Oakleys, so I’m never too far away from a microfiber bag to clean it with.

Unfortunately I just can’t bring myself to buy that product. There’s just too much annoyance involved. All of my music is in WMA format, so I’d have to convert it. Most of the best stuff is lossless at least, so the conversion shouldn’t be too bad, but it’s over 60 GB of tunes, which I then have to store twice. I’d have to convert it all to AAC, which is a respectable codec but useless for any other player I might own. I’m too much of an audiophile for mp3, which would require such a high bitrate that I’d have almost no music on my little 16 GB player.

Which leads me to problem number two, which is iTunes. That software is the biggest steaming pile I’ve ever encountered. Apple fan boys make fun of Microsoft and their overweight programs all the time, but iTunes is the very definition of bloatware. I’ll take Media Center over that (and WinAmp over both) any day. It took me forever to figure out how to select the songs I want out of my massive media collection and load my 4GB nano, whereas any Windows friendly player is as simple as dragging and dropping. I have a feeling iTunes’ syncing is pretty nice if you’ve got some giant 160 GB iPod and can continuously load your entire collection (and I have to give kudos to apple for pushing the storage capacity long after everyone else seems to have given up) but if you’ve got a nano and are a real music fan, you’re doomed.

And I will only buy music from iTunes when they make it DRM free and lossless, and if that did ever happen I probably still wouldn’t get it there since it would be cheaper on a competitor’s site. Until then I’d simply buy the CD and rip if some music is so compelling that I have to own it. I’m a Rhapsody guy, so I don’t really buy much music anymore, but if I did, that would be how I’d get it.

There is also the fact that all TV shows online (bittorrent is my personal cable company) come in XviD or DivX, which the iPod won’t play. So it will require massive amounts of conversion, or me also owning the Zen W. I don’t need or want two video players.

On a slightly more humorous note, I was looking around through some boxes in the basement and my office yesterday and realized I own 6 mp3 players. They are (with ratings, appropriate to when they were released):

4 gb iPod Nano (7/10)

60 gb Zen Vision W (8/10)

30 gb Zen Vision M (9/10)

5 gb iRiver h10 (2/10)

20gb iRiver H120 (10/10)

40 gb iRiver H340 (7/10)

I’ve also got a number of other items that can play mp3 files (Sony PSP, my car, a Treo650 and a Motorola Q). I’ll be visiting the local I Sold It On EBay franchise tomorrow. Think I’m tossing all but the Vision W. I’ll use my Moto Q for the little here and there music, and the Vision W for long hauls, and the rest can go towards whatever nifty player Creative comes up with next.

3 Comments »

Hate Facebook

Posted in Stuff That Pisses Me Off on September 4, 2007 by themaroon

I’m starting to hate Facebook. Seriously. For a long time I loved it. It’s like MySpace, but minus the “come see me naked on my webcam” spam (one nice thing about the subprime collapse is at least the mortgage spam has dried up), the two minute page load times, the annoying songs that play when the page finally does load, and the backgrounds that make text illegible. In fact, it was pretty much better in every conceivable way. Until they added apps.

Apps have ruined the whole site. Before it was like, you were hanging out with some friends, and maybe the topic of Facebook came up. And one of their douchey friends was like “what’s your email, I’ll add you.” So you’d give them your email, because what else are you going to do, and they’d friend you, and that was probably the end of it. Then a few weeks later, you’d unfriend them and hope they didn’t notice, or that you just never saw them again.

But now there are Facebook apps. So when your douchey friend of a friend adds you, they then proceed to bite you turning you into a werewolf, a vampire, a zombie, or some other mythical beast that just happens to spread memetically. Then they give you a few fish for your aquarium, a garden with a tomato plant and a mouse, a free gift (some crap like a pool floatie that you wouldn’t even use if it were real) and update their mini-feed to let everyone know that they’re going to the Green Day concert and they’re so excited. And all of their douchey friends do the same, bombarding your mini-feed with crap you don’t care about.

And you can’t just give said douches a fake email, they’ll just think “oh, he probably just forgot which email he uses there, I do that sometimes” and then find you on your mutual friend’s friends list. And you know you have to accept, because what if you see them again (and maybe there are some hot chicks in their profile to look at anyway) but can you maybe get away with only letting them see your limited profile? I mean, you def don’t want anyone you don’t really know who is already trying to bite you into zombieness getting your phone number, but then what if they’re like “dude, why did you limit me?” That could get uncomfortable.

Facebook should have an annoyance filter. Then I can get my mini-feed back to what it should be. All I want to see is when a friend adds another friend (in case it’s a hot chick, obv), when someone sends me something, and maybe a birthday or two.

Also, if Word auto corrects the word “douchey” to the word “douche” one more time, I’m throwing this laptop out the window.

3 Comments »

Things I Would Do If I Were The World's Richest Man

Posted in Pointless Words of Wisdom on September 3, 2007 by themaroon
  1. Offer Tiger Woods a $200 mil per year contract to be my butler. Sure, he’d say no, and he’d go on making $100 mil a year golfing, and take his rightful place as the widely acknowledged best golfer of all time. But he’d have to live the rest of his life knowing he could have made twice as much money folding my laundry.
  2. Commission Sam Adams and Stone Brewery to make 40 oz. bottles (in that same Colt 45 shape) of all of my favorite, seasonally appropriate brews, then fill my fridge with them like in that Dr. Dre video.
  3. Have a money burning furnace. It would probably cost a lot to pay someone to shovel Franklins into my Franklin stove without simply absconding with my fuel, but it would be worth it.
  4. Invent the autonomous underwater crab harvester. A small machine that, when set free, trawls the ocean floor looking for various tasty creatures, throws them in a basket and brings them back to me. Then I’ll never turn on Discovery HD hoping to see Planet Earth only to find some crappy show about how hard it is to be a lobster fisherman again.
  5. Found a country. Imagine a land with ubiquitous Wi-Fi, and where having an IQ of under 115 means you’ll be deported.

What would you do if $100 billion dropped into your lap?

2 Comments »

Early Results On My iPhone Bet

Posted in gadgets on September 2, 2007 by themaroon

Courtesy of think ThinkSecret via Yahoo:

Sales of Apple’s iPhone, while solid, have failed to keep up with the company’s internal estimates. Think Secret sources report that Apple scaled back its touch-screen orders for the unit by half in August to avoid sitting on too many parts.

Far from game over, but I’m off to an early lead. After seeing my cofounder’s iPhone in action for a couple weeks, and having every call made to him be virtually incomprehensible, I’m not surprised.

Also, who the hell cares about unlocking this thing? It’s on every tech blog five times a day, despite the fact that it doesn’t matter. Hooray, now you can switch it from AT&T (while still paying your two year contract) to T-Mobile, trading one turd carrier for another. Enjoy that, morons.

Make it work on Verizon and you’ve got something.

2 Comments »