Windows – Page 3 – WiredAtom

Can the PC Industry Survive Apple’s Boot Camp?

Apple never seizes to amaze the high tech industry with its top secrecy of projects and strategies. While most of us hardcore Apple and Steve Jobs fan weren’t surprised, Apple sent another shock wave into the PC galaxy with its introduction of Boot Camp.

The Mac-friendly cluster of the media thinks this is an ingenius idea on Apple’s part to have a trojan horse in the PC world to give the Mac-shy PC buyers no more reason to buy another box from Dell, HP or the like. And by doing so, since Mac OSX is already pre-installed, there’s no reason NOT to try an use it. Hence the great victory of the trojan. The same media cluster also thinks that since Apple is still a hardware company at heart, this strategy will help drive Apple’s hardware sales off the roof (somebody lend me $3000 for some AAPL shares!).

And of course there are also some doomsday predications. Some people think this will spend the end of Mac OSX as we know it. Why would developers want to invest the resources in developing anything for Mac OSX when Windows can also run on Macintosh hardware? This would also erode Apple’s own software business!

I told Murdza that maybe this is the final duel — Steve Jobs is now openly challenging the world to come and see what Mac and Mac OSX are made of. They are confident in saying that, “Look, we think our sh*t is so good that we will even HELP YOU run our competitor’s software on our hardware. And you know what? You will swtich.”

I foresee a lot of dual boots in the coming months. But perhaps the true ingenious of this strategy is still not revealed to the public. Once Boot Camp becomes part of Apple’s next release of operating system (should be due out first quarter of 2007), many of us think that maybe Apple will make it so that Windows will run side by side with Mac OSX without any kind of rebooting, having Windows run at near-native speed, like Mac Classic did under OSX for a couple of years (Darwine comes to mind). Now, THAT would kick ass!

More Evils of Microsoft

An excerpt from Cringely on behalf of PBS:

There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MITs, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MITs — a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive position in the history of employment because accepting that job meant that Allen got only 36 percent of Microsoftâ€™s founders shares, compared to Bill Gatesâ€™ 64 percent.
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But during one of those last long nights of working to finish-up DOS 2.0, something happened. I have heard this story from two people, each of whom was a friend of Allenâ€™s and in a position to know. Each told me the same story the same way. I am not staking my reputation on the accuracy of the story, but I am saying I have it from two good sources. Paul Allen certainly wonâ€™t confirm or deny it, so Iâ€™ll just throw it out for you to consider.

During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.

Gulp….

This is far worse than the rumor of Steve Jobs pocketing money without Woz’s knowledge.

Are business geniuses inherently evil?

via [MacDailyNews]

Microsoft is A Cry Baby

It’s hard to imagine why people keep using Microsoft products when the alternatives are obviously so much better (except for the poor souls who are locked in to the platform because their preferred software vendors, ahem, Autodesk, don’t know any better). Here’s another reason why Microsoft is really, truly, incredibly evil.

Worst yet, the U.S. government is playing into Microsoft’s hands for something that is clearly a punishment for Microsoft’s own antitrust behaviors. Double standards?

What if Microsoft Redesigned Apple iPod Packaging?

via [MacDailyNews]

Microsoft Sells Service to Protect Windows from Harm

According to this article from Yahoo News, Microsoft is serious about protecting its users… for a fee…

A new security service from Microsoft Corp. will charge users $49.95 per year to better protect its Windows operating system from spyware, viruses and other Internet attacks.

Microsoft plans to release the product in early June.

Called Windows OneCare Live, the subscription service will compete with security products made by traditional Microsoft partners, including Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc. â€” although the software giant insists that its aim is not to run those companies out of business.

Wait. Wait. Wait… So basically Microsoft is saying, “Screw selling a secured operating system. This is great business opportunity! Let’s charge $50 for the ‘real patch’ and we’ll be rich!”

WTF!

This is brilliant! If you can’t make something good enough, sell your users something else to patch it! So the past 15 years has been a set up, building everything up to this point. If Microsoft hasn’t been able to make its own operating system safe and secured, what makes people think their service will? Do people in their board room even think about that?

When I mentioned the article to Kyung, he responded, “they are taking advantage of their own deficiency.” And then he reminded me of the infamous Blue Screen of Death often seen on Microsoft products. People were experiencing BSOD so often that they might as well put ads on them to generate some revenue…

I thought Mac users are the suckas who eat up everything Apple makes… It looks like all you Windows users are the idiots here for using something that’s broken and spend more to make it work the way it’s supposed to… How do you people sleep at night? (Because I know Microsoft exectives will sleep just fine.)

via [MacDailyNews]

Windows Vista is Over Before It’s Even Started

Microsoft released a security patch for its still-in-beta next-generation operating system, Windows Vista, over the weekend.

Nuts. The OS is not even in the market yet, and already the company is busy patching the hell out of this baby. I can’t imagine how many more holes will be found once it’s out in the wild with millions of people poking around under its hood.

I say Microsoft should ditch Windows and annex one of those Linux flavors and go all out. Pretty much everyone else’s doing it…

via [MacDailyNews]

Craziest Computer Mods

I don’t build PCs anymore (ah~ good old days… NOT). But this reminds me of the sleepless days of installing Windows NT on various hand-built PCs. I hated Windows NT with passion. But thanks to Microsoft (and lack of documented compatibilities in the NT days), I also became pretty damn good with Windows systems administration in general.

via [Slashdot]

Name That Tune!

If you are anything like me with the music (who knows very little about), you will appreciate the convenience of being able to know what song is being played on the radio at all times, that is, if you are listening on your Mac or PC.

Name that tune with Tunatic

Tunatic is a tiny software that is capable of identifying pretty much any modern song within seconds of listening to it. It analyzes the music that’s being played, compare the data with a server and fetches the name of the song and the artist. The downside of this software is that it relies on the speaker of the computer (I guess that can be the upside if you are listening to the conventional radio). That means if you speak when it samples the music, it will take your voice into consideration… not good.

All in all, this little app has been able to identify most of the music I threw at it (nothing fancy though; it failed to identify non-English songs as well as Jazz). Another application the company makes is Tunalyzer, which is an app that sits in the background and analyzes everything in your music folder and sends the meta data back to the database that Tunatic uses. The idea is to sample as much music as possible with the right tags that people give to their music.

Internet Explorer Got No Style

Homework from my “Human-Centered Interactive Design” class at SCAD’s e-Learning program is killing me. I wonder how I ever survived being a full time student at SCAD before. I like the class and all, but the amount of work has been overwhelming on top of my classes from UC.

The main motivation behind this post is to complain about Microsoft (again). The latest project is to implement an interface I designed into a working flow of wireframes. That’s the easy part. But inevitably, it was so easy to take that extra step to style the template just a little nicer since I am using CSS for everything anyway. And boy, what a bitch Microsoft Internet Explorer is to style for. Elements/styles that work for other browsers just don’t work on stupid IE. I guess this is not news for anyone who’s worked with CSS for longer than a few hours. But it’s annoying as hell.

Since I was checking my homework via Windows IE, I also checked out my blog to see how everything looks since I did quite a few improvements. Sure enough, the announcement tag line for Bryan’s new pictures below the header was somehow under a white block. A trip to the stylesheet fixed that. But again, it’s annoying. I wish Microsoft can stop being so damn cocky and start conforming to the web standards already. Jackasses.

MythTV-Like App for Wintel?

I didn’t think something like this would exist for Wintel, but it does. After sending back the video capture card to Buy.com, I gave up on MythTV (for now). But knowing something like MediaPortal exists for Windows is comforting (for Windows users). But the whole me doing MythTV was so that I could do away Windows altogether.

Switcher’s Friend

Outlook2Mac image If you or know anyone who’s considered switching to the Mac but was held back because they couldn’t figure out what to do with their gazillion emails and attachments, Outlook2Mac is the answer.

A while ago at my last job, I had to look for a solution to easily transfer everything from the CEO’s dying Sony Viao laptop to her spanking new 12″ PowerBook. It took me a while to exhaust all solutions on the Outlook (and the attachments) issue. Finally I broke down and bought Outlook2Mac. It’s one of those life-saving specialty softwares you think you’d never use.

All that work, though, went to waste. She soon switched back to an IBM Thinkpad and just didn’t see the usefulness in her PowerBook. She claimed that it was an unreliable piece of metal. But I think its unreliability may have something to do with her knocking it against walls/tables/grounds a few times.

Cracking Windows “Genuine Advantage” Check

Within 24 hours of Microsoft launching its mandatory piracy check during Windows update procedure, the process was cracked.

Before pressing ‘Custom’ or ‘Express’ buttons paste this text to the address bar and press enter:

1
javascript:void(window.g_sDisableWGACheck='all')

It turns off the trigger for the key check.

What else is new? Bring it on, sucka.

UPDATE: Here is another way to do it.

[Via boingboing]

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