Obviously these guys are Mac users

Orcas

Some tree-hugger, eco-vacationing in Argentina, got a thrill seeing some Orcas. Wait'll he gets a load of the real thing, courtesy Microsoft! It'll make those silly sea creatures look like so many big fish!

The What What Journal?

Most people I've talked to realize what perfection Windows Vista has achieved, but there are some cranks out there that insist they know better than Microsoft. Here's one guy, Walter Mossberg:

It has taken the giant software maker more than five years to replace Windows XP with this new version, called Windows Vista – an eternity by computer-industry reckoning. Many of the boldest plans for Vista were discarded in that lengthy process . What’s left is a worthy, but largely unexciting, product.

No, I've never heard of Mossberg, either. He must be some young pup just getting his start. He writes for some paper called the "Wall Street Journal."

Hey, Walter! Most papers cover more than just one street. Whole cities, most of them, like the Chicago Tribune, for instance. Some papers cover whole states, like the New York Times, or even whole countries, like the best example of fine journalism in the world, USA Today. If you have any doubt that USA Today is the best, ask yourself this question: how many newspapers are good enough to have Larry King write for them?

Anyway, I suppose if young Mossberg works hard and, more importantly, gets a clue about the greatness that is Windows Vista, he just might have a future in the newspaper biz.

Windows Experience Index

I have this really boss computer that I'm going to put Vista on. I ran Windows NT 4.0 on it for a long time, then I loaned it out to my crazy brother-in-law, who finally gave it back. I'm not sure what he did with it, but it boots up to something called FreeBSD, which I think is for running pirated arcade games, or something.

My brother-in-law's kind of a pinko freak. Listens to a lot of Joan Baez records.

Anyway, like I said, it's a really boss computer, but it's not the newest one you've ever seen. Luckily, Microsoft has thought of everything. Vista has this cool feature called the Windows Experience Index, which tells you exactly what to expect on any given computer once you've made the move to the world's greatest OS.

The scores run from 1.0 to 5.9, as follows:

A computer with a base score of 1.0 or 2.0 usually has sufficient performance to do most general computing tasks, such as run office productivity applications and search the Internet. However, a computer with this base score is generally not powerful enough to run Windows Aero, or the advanced multimedia experiences that are available with Windows Vista.

A computer with a base score of 3.0 is able to run Windows Aero and many new features of Windows Vista at a basic level. Some of the new Windows Vista advanced features might not have all of their functionality available. For example, a machine with a base score of 3.0 can display the Windows Vista theme at a resolution of 1280 × 1024, but might struggle to run the theme on multiple monitors. Or, it can play digital TV content but might struggle to play High Definition Television (HDTV) content.

A computer with a base score of 4.0 or 5.0 is able to run all new features of Windows Vista with full functionality, and it is able to support high-end, graphics-intensive experiences, such as multiplayer and 3 D gaming and recording and playback of HDTV content. Computers with a base score of 5.0 were the highest performing computers available when Windows Vista was released.

Anyway, I think this FreeBSD thing must've broken something on my computer, because it's not getting the scores it should. I mean, 1.0 is supposed to be the lowest score. For Pete's sake, this thing has dual Pentium II Overdrive 333 MHz CPUs (Socket 8, no less! You could use 'em as surfboards!)! That's not a minus 2.3 CPU score. And the video card is a state-of-the-art, dual-VGA Matrox Millenium G200. Windows Experience Index graphics score? 0.25. Cripes!

Well, I'm going to go ahead and put Vista Ultimate on it, and see what happens. I can't wait to fire up Mahjong Titans!

Zunetastic!

I've had my Zune for a week now, and it's way cool.

Naturally, I got the brown one. The color reminds me of something, but I can't quite put my finger on it. For some reason, it's cheaper than the black one. I ask you -- who'd pay more for the ugly one? Some people are just dumb, I guess.

I previously had a Creative Zen, but I wasn't happy with the color -- not brown!

I think the Zen was broken in some way, because all of the PlaysForSure music I had on it won't play on my new brown Zune. I called Creative for support, and I guess I got some brain-dead trainee, or something, because he laughed at me and then tried to blame Microsoft! Whatever!

So until I buy all of that music again, I guess I'll have to hang on to the non-brown Zen for a while. Luckily, I found a brown case for it.

Mac fanboys

As a noted expert on computers and operating systems, I'm often asked what I think about the latest news, controversy, rumor, what-have-you. A recent example is the uproar amongst the yammering Mac OS X "experts" (as if such a person could even exist!) about what Bill Gates had to say the other day. Here's one distorted view:

In his interview with Bill Gates in Newsweek, Steven Levy pointed out that many of the new features in Windows Vista are similar to features already in Mac OS X. Gates’s response:

I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise.

This is fascinating. In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.

Where do I start?

First, this bozo's web site is called "Daring Fireball." Who calls their own site that? If I'd known about this, I'd have called this site something like "Professor Neat-o McKnowItAll, Ph. D." or something cool like that.

Secondly, who are you going to believe, the world's richest man, or some random guy with a blog? I did a little digging, and guess what this Daring Fireball guy does for a living? He's a panhandler!

When you're trying to decide who's right, just ask yourself -- which of these guys is a bazillionaire, and which is a beggar?

Some people

I think everybody should just drop all other operating systems, and just get Vista. It's just the best. But apparently, not everybody has what it takes.

Here's one example:

I was given a beta CD of Vista. I finally got around to putting it on my Windows partition last month. The install went pretty smoothly - it had an option to upgrade the XP partition, preserving the applications and data already present.

I didn't really play with it long enough to form a firm opinion on Vista, but the experiment ended rather badly. Vista popped up a window telling me that the trial period had expired, and it was time to pay up. I had to go to work at that point, so I shut down the machine, brought it into the office, and booted it up again. Then, the "trial period expired" window and a browser window - supplied so that I could buy a license at the MS site - were the only functionality that Vista would enable.
I couldn't go to my desktop, Windows Explorer, a command prompt, or anything that would enable me to access my hard drive. Files that I had created under my paid-for XP were now inaccessible to me; no way was provided to copy them off before reinstalling XP. My hard disk was, in essence, being held hostage; paying for a Vista licence was the ransom.

I tried to reinstall XP from its CD while preserving the data on the partition, but I got some frightening error messages in the process and aborted before risking the whole partition.

OK, I see a million problems with this.

• Why have Windows on a partition? That's wasting all of the other partitions!
• She's running something called "Ubuntu" on the other partition. What's that?
• A beta version of Vista? News flash! It's out! Buy it!
• She uses some crazy language called "Python" instead of Visual Basic.
• She uses Oracle instead of SQL Server.

If you want just a toy computer, go ahead and put all of that junk on it. If you want a real computer, go Vista.

She is kinda hot, though. Go check out her picture.

Update:
I did some research (MSN search is awesome!) on Ubuntu and Python. It turns out they're open source! Fricking Commies.