Just a heads up to my fellow World of Warcraft players, especially those of you who use a Mac. You know that SteelSeries MMO Gaming Mouse that came out a few days ago? It doesn’t ship with Mac drivers, meaning that you’re not able to use all 15 buttons as intended. (That’s even when using fancy, multi-button mouse drivers like SteerMouse.)
In other words, the mouse isn’t nearly as useful to Mac users right now as it is to Windows users. (Windows users can download the drivers from Steelseries’ Web site.) Mac drivers are said to be on the way, but we’re looking at around one month from the mouse’s release till the drivers are released.
Meanwhile, I have to install Wow on my Bootbamped MacBook just to be able to use it properly for the review I’m working on. Shouldn’t be more than a few days till that “drops,” though.
The guy in this video, Richard Blakely, is a good buddy of mine from my Gizmodo days. Sadly, it seems the meth has finally addled his brain because this odd video for 3GJuice.com styled after Ballmer hawking Windows 1.0 makes me think he’ll now do anything for money.
Dick, if you need a place to stay while you get cleaned up, our garage is mostly empty. Call me.
I recently bought a Macbook to replace my aging Windows XP laptop. I figured that, like any new computer migration, I would load the applications I needed and then copy the data from my old laptop to the new one. I have a large USB thumb drive and a couple external hard drives, so no sweat – just use them to migrate everything.
So when my brother told me he would lend me his Targus File Transfer Cable for Mac, I scoffed. Who needs this unnecessary cable when I can just as easily use my external drive to copy data from one laptop to another. Plus, I was skeptical of the software. It would probably be crappy and limiting, when I just want file-level access to my data. Read More
If you don’t want to buy a new Dell PC to get the Windows Vista Ultimate (RED) edition, you can pre-order the standalone operating system over at Amazon for $219.95. If you’re a lucky college student like me, you can purchase the OS at a discount price of $64.95 at The Ultimate Steal. The OS is expected to be released on December 15th but it looks like you can download it now at The Ultimate Steal. Read More
Humanity has finally arrived. After so many false starts—Ancient Egypt, Classical Athens, Caesarian Rome, Catholic Spain, Napoleonic France, Victorian England, to say nothing of the Asian empires—we now look to Finland, the epitome of civilization.
Yes, there’s now a Windows-powered coffee maker. Windows XP, even. It even has an 8-inch touchscreen, for touching. That you can program it over the Internet—brew a pot at 6:00pm so that it’s ready by the time I get home from work—only adds to its grandeur.
I could have done without the ‘behind the scenes’ type photos of Jay Maynard and his junk, but his impression of everyone’s initial reaction to his costume makes up for it. What a nerd. :)
The description from the YouTube page is as follows:
Without the networks and communities created by the PC, the world might never have even heard of the “Tron Guy” or internet phenomenons just like him.
The above is a scan of some Windows Vista promotional material. But, is that an old MacBook Pro this perfect family is using? Now, Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on silver laptops chassis but wouldn’t it have been wiser to have something more distinctly PC?
Did you hear the news? Microsoft is looking to ship Windows 7, its Hail Mary of sorts, by mid-2009, with the goal of having it pre-installed on most machines by the holiday shopping season.
So, come next Christmas, you could be using Windows 7! So that’s sorta neat.
I’m a little fuzzy on what exactly MinWin really is, but from what I’ve read it seems to be the nucleus around which the Windows UI, APIs, and everything else revolve. It’s not exactly the kernel because the kernel itself is not contained entirely within MinWin. Think of MinWin as the indivisible Windows: no dependencies, bootable, application-ready, and altogether about 25MB. That Windows 7 ASCII thing you’ve seen around? MinWin.
What role it might play in Windows 7 is as yet unknown; after all 7, runs on the Vista kernel and although streamlining is a selling point of the new OS, nothing has been said about any ultimate stripped-down mode or what have you.
Here’s my fantasy: remember when you could restart into DOS mode back in 95? What if you could restart into a mega-minimal mode that essentially runs a single app, with filesystem and device access but only as many bells and whistles as the application requires. Every one of your 256 cores dedicated to one thing, be it Crysis or HD video editing. I’m sure that’s not it, and I’m probably missing the point of MinWin, but wouldn’t that be awesome?!
The attendees to Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference all got to take home a build of Windows 7 to get a feel for and dig into a little bit. Unfortunately, some of the features talked up by MS at the event weren’t exactly… well, present in that build. One big one that appeared to be missing was the new task bar. While poking around looking for other new features, this intrepid developer found that there was a series of restrictions placed on enabling the new taskbar.
It turns out that the build checks if you’re in an allowed domain and you’re not a temporary employee or vendor. So essentially the taskbar is supposed to be insiders only. The guy made a workaround which you can find at the page, but he warns that the reason the taskbar is locked is probably because it’s not finished: it’s a mishmash of old, new, and incomplete features. Instead of branching a PDC build and stressing the compile times, they just added in these pretty serious protections so that people wouldn’t have easy access to something that wasn’t ready to go.
This is completely beyond my abilities as a whatever, but perhaps you’re handy with The DIY? It’s a step-by-step on how to create a USB-based remote control receiver. Or, in English: you plug this doodad into your PC and then you’re able to use a remote control (“channel changer” or “clicker”) to control your media player.
The methodology can be applied to Windows, Mac and Linux-based systems.
The best part is that the whole setup costs $12 to create. Even I have $12!
It’s fair to say that many folks are cautiously optimistic regarding the prospects of Windows 7. One reason why, I believe, is its improved ability to run on netbooks. (Vista is sorta unruly on netbooks, as you might imagine.) Laptop mag did the heavy lifting and installed the Windows 7 beta (which is easy to find on the usual BitTorrent sites, by the way) on the Asus Eee PC 1000H.
Surprise, surprise: Windows 7 works quite well on the little guy.
With only a 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1GB of RAM, the Eee PC 1000H was able to boot into Windows in just under one minute—58 seconds, to be exact.
All-around performance seems to be good, too: only about half of the netbook’s RAM was eaten by the operating system. Running fancy applications like Skype and GIMP—calling GIMP fancy must be some sort of sin—also worked well. They even managed to play 720p video with only a few bumps and bruises.
Not too bad, then. And just think: we’re still at least one year away from Windows 7’s release, which is plenty of time to optimize the operating system’s code.
Microsoft, we’re secretly rooting for you. Don’t screw it up. Again.
Read this line and you’ll understand how Joe Wilcox (and pretty much everyone else online) over at eWeek feels about Windows Vista:
Vista is headed to as quick a death as Microsoft can give it. Someday soon, some gun-toting Microsoft executive will lead Vista out back and “Pop!”
Screaming “Vista sucks!” is by no means a novel idea, but Wilcox uses, you know, evidence to support his claim, that Vista is dead to Microsoft. For example, Microsoft didn’t bleat endlessly about Vista licenses sold during last week’s earnings call. Is that because sales are down, or because sales weren’t as impressive at last quarter?
There’s also netbooks, the tiny half-laptops that, for whatever reason, people are snapping up. Needless to say, RAM- and graphics-hungry Vista doesn’t exactly run well on netbooks, which is why so manufacturers offer XP or Linux in lieu of Vista. If Microsoft can’t sell its fancy operating system to manufacturers of netbooks, where is growth going to come from, Mars?
This is why, by the way, Microsoft is so bullish on Windows 7—ignore that whole Vista thing, ’twas but a minor setback.
Microsoft just made its first cloud OS, dubbed Azure, officially official. The system allows developers and hobbyist alike to collaborate together on a flexible and interoperable application platform. Applications created within can run from the cloud or even enhance non-cloud based applications with the hive-like features.
Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
The entire service is an open platform that supports not only the Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net Framework, but also Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python. The service isn’t up and running just yet, but curious geeks can register to be part of the Community Technology Preview.
PCs and Macs are always poking and stabbing at each other; Genius Bar this, everyone uses Windows that. Can’t we all get along? Everyone knows which one is superior.
You may have noticed when we looked at the top 10 tech items being sold on Amazon the other day that there were no Vista-based laptops on there. That’s because the Vista laptops are more like top 25 material. After all, the high system requirements have prevented many people with desktops from making the switch; so it’s natural that notebooks would have an even lower pickup rate. Although it’s worth considering that laptops are more often upgraded “whole” (i.e. a new machine with Vista pre-installed) while desktops have a little more inertia in the household. There’s a lot more info out there to collate (pick-up rates at Best Buys and stuff are probably way higher) but Amazon is a valuable metric.
Looking at what’s available there… I don’t see how they can even run Vista on this thing.
Windows 7 might be on its way sometime soon, but Vista should get SP2 before the new OS drops. According to some ZDnet sources, Redmond is aiming to update Vista first so it will be interesting to see if any new Windows 7 features come with it. Details should drop from Microsoft about the upcoming service pack within the coming months but there isn’t any firm release date as of yet.
Week dragging on? Can’t wait until Friday? This soothing gallery of BSODs in public and unexpected places should ease your suffering. The funny thing is that although these can be taken as signalizing a fundamental instability in Windows, I think of them more as a sign of the ubiquity of Microsoft products and computing in general. It’s a sign of the times, however you want to interpret it.
The attendees to Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference all got to take home a build of 
