[Quote:]

The one thing that old dialog had going for it, and I’m afraid that I never gave it its due credit,
is that when you hit the Search button, it would actually, you know, search your hard drive for files.

Well, that’s all gone with the new & improved Search dialog. Now, you get a bunch of even stupider questions to look at, but when you hit the Search button it immediately comes up with this:

Nothing found for query “manage.py” because the folder F:\ is not indexed.

Roughly translated: “I didn’t find anything because I didn’t actually look.”

Microsoft has a patch out:

That’s an awful lot of megs, to be sure - just how many words are we talking about here? Microsoft explains:

The words “Friendster,” “Klum,” “Nazr,” “Obama,” and “Racicot” are not recognized when you check the spelling in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008.

Woa. That’s over 11 Mb per word. That’s what I call “bloat”!

(Oh, and you need to reboot after applying this patch - cool!)

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Believe it or not, that headline is not a typo. John Coyne, Systems Engineer in the OEM Embedded Devices group at Microsoft, has posted a quick blog entry that broke the bad news: as of November 1, 2008, Microsoft will no longer allow OEMs to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel. That’s exactly 15 years after it shipped in November 1993! Poor OEMs have so much to put up with these days; first Windows XP, and now this!

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has of course been unavailable in retail and via client OEMs for years, but the embedded industry wanted to keep this ancient operating system around for much, much longer.

Well at least they can’t complain they haven’t had enough time to test their software on Windows 95 Embedded.

Yesterday I said the new Acrobat 9 for the Mac tried hard to emulate the beautiful windows experience Acrobat reader owners have.

Well, that was before I found out how great version 9 is for windows…

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Apple sells Mac OS X just as it retails music: it markets both products toward premium buyers at reasonable prices rather than attempting to force thieves to pay for a product they only want to steal. Microsoft failed in the music business with Windows Media because it tried to do just the opposite: force everyone to pay through the nose for expiring subscription music by using egregious DRM. Microsoft couldn’t force the thieves to stop stealing, and premium customers weren’t interested in being treated like thieves.

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There is a buy-it-now listing on eBay today where the seller is offering $630 in cash, which he will send electronically to the buyer through PayPal.  The current price for this listing is $715.  Why would someone pay $715 for $630 in cash?  Well, you may have heard that Microsoft recently launched a ridiculous “cash back” promotion in the hopes of bribing Google customers to switch to Microsoft’s search engine, Live.com.  Seems some resourceful people found a loophole in the system.  Apparently, you can get a 10-35% cash back reward for all buy-it-now eBay purchases if you access the eBay listing through Live Search.  So, people are simply selling cash and arbitraging the cash back reward.  Your move, Ballmer.

All the reliability of Windows XP and the affordability of Apple hardware: Citrix

[Source:]

(oh, and here is a download counter)

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And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd…

Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.

Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft’s heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don’t have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.

The numbers don’t get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That’s a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?

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Cell phones may be nearly ubiquitous in today’s world, but the number of people who have adopted proper cell phone etiquette
(or gadget etiquette in general) often seems to be far smaller. Microsoft has filed for a patent (patent application
2008/125,102) on technology it feels could address such situations via the use of what the company refers to as a “digital
manners policy,” or DMP for short. The patent abstract states:

The present invention includes methods and technologies for defining and administering device manners policy (”DMP”), propagating DMP, reception and recognition of, and compliance with DMP. Such policy may be used to communicate to various mobile and other devices the “manners” with which compliance is expected or required. Similar to some of the social manners honored among people, such as with “no smoking” or “employees only” zones, “no swimming” or “no flash photography” areas, and scenarios for “please wash your hands” or “no talking out loud”, devices may recognize and comply with analogous “device manners” policy.

Again Microsoft wants others to decide what your device can and cannot do. I think this is [dgtlmnrs.exe: WARNING: No Microsoft bashing. Post aborted.]

[Quote:]

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a unique sales pitch for the company’s Windows Vista operating system — if you don’t like it, you can turn it into Windows XP.

Referring to Microsoft licensing policies that allow customers who purchase an operating system to legally install predecessor versions on their PCs, Ballmer noted that the program allows customers who aren’t satisfied with Vista to use XP.

[..]

Ballmer implied that an extension for mainstream PCs isn’t in the cards because customers who want XP past June 30 can simply purchase Vista and exercise the downgrade option. “I don’t know how you can do better than getting both,” he said.

There’s so many funny comebacks to that remark, I’m not even going to bother…

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You’re gonna fend off Google and cloud computing with a touch screen?? Good luck. I do hope there’s a skunkworks Plan B in the labs. No wonder buying Yahoo “isn’t strategic.”

Oh dear…

[Quote:]

Steven Poole dissects the revisions Microsoft made to their “Five Misunderstood Features in Vista” paper. As a company, their copywriting is roughly on par with their user interface design.

(links to this, which you may want to go to directly instead of via the Quote link above)

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The Dutch Council of State will let loose the software it uses to convert proprietary document formats created in MS Office into Open Source documents which follow the Open Document Format (ODF) protocol.

The software, which has been developed by Council employee Marcel Pennock and uses existing plug-ins, offers an icon which centrally converts documents to either ODF of PDF in the background.

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This video shows a method by which a user can use a Linux distro called BackTrack to gain system access to Windows Vista without logging into Windows or knowing the username or password for any accounts. To accomplish this, the user renames cmd.exe to Utilman.exe — this is the program that brings up the Accessibility options for users without sight or with limited vision. The attack takes advantage of the fact that the Utility Manager can be invoked before the user logs into the system. The user gains System access, which is a level higher than Administrator.

Which just goes to prove, if you have physical access to a machine, usually it’s game over. Only full disk encryption with a boot password will help with this one.

something similar works with XP with C:\windows\system32\sethc.exe (StickyKeys).

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On stage Tuesday, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, and one of his reports, Mark Kroese, demonstrated how a single advertising campaign could cross several different types of screens, including PC, TV, mobile phone and–gasp–Zune.

The demonstration involved a music festival sponsored by Doritos. A musician participating in that festival might create a Zune Social profile containing a small advertisement for Doritos. Users could then become “friends” with this musician, allowing them to see his playlist and perhaps even download free songs on that list (paid for by Doritos). They’d also see a little Doritos logo embedded in the musician’s profile, which would appear not only in the Zune software, but also on the actual Zune device whenever they visited that profile.

Dear artists. The odds of me becoming your “friend” in a scenario like this: zero. The odds of me never wanting to have anything to do with when you ever again after participating in a stupid stunt like this: 100%.

Yet another proof that Microsoft sees you as an advertising venue - you are not the customer to them, you are the product.

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Word 2008 is so bad that it is driving me positively nuts. Yet I have no choice but to use it sometimes, and in such situations I need to try and reduce the mental pain as much as possible.

Inevitably, this process involves customizing Word, not to make it do things your way, but simply to make it do things the normal way, i.e. the way that every other Mac OS X application does it, which of course Word is incapable of doing on its own.

Case in point: a keyboard shortcut for the “Find Next” command. The standard behaviour in word processors and text editors for the Mac is the following.

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Best, worst or most hilarious iPhone skin ever? VistaPerfection 2.0 is a complete Windows Vista skin for the iPhone with over 90 icons, wallpapers, a dock, sound effects and everything else Vista like the Sidebar and Start menu.

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If the “Vista sucks” movement has a public face, it’s the Sony Vaio. No one knows that better than my new friend Jeremy Toeman. In May 2007, this 15-year Windows veteran replaced his old, beloved, XP-powered Vaio with a newer Vaio that came with Windows Vista Business installed. Practically overnight, he told me, his experience went from “awesome” to “awful.” The experience was so terrible, in fact, that after several months of struggling he finally surrendered, putting his $2500 Windows notebook in storage and replacing it with a MacBook last summer.

At first glance, Jeremy’s machine is Exhibit A in the case against Windows Vista. As Jeremy documented in a series of posts, this gorgeous machine was ugly in action: slow to start, sluggish when performing everyday tasks, crash-prone, and overloaded with annoying and unwanted software. But is it really a hopeless case, or was this system done in by the rush to market and a sloppy OEM integration?

It’s a Sony, so I guess you already know the answer. But when you do a clean reinstall, the actual results are pretty interesting. So Microsoft has a problem - their resellers are giving their product an awful image.

[example from the cleanup:]