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[Uploaded via flickr by Thomas Hawk] With Microsoft’s stumbling with the lauch of Vista has come a litany of stories about the demise of Windows as the IT industries richest franchise. However it’s death, if evident, will be slow and painful and will be a result of lots of small cuts, not a wholesale shift to...

Copyright © 2008 Miss604 - Rebecca Bollwitt. If you are not viewing this post through the Miss604.com feed then this content has been republished without permission. Visit the original article at http://www.miss604.com/2008/06/firefox3-themes.html.I’ve been using Firefox for about four years and they recently unleashed Firefox 3 which touts: Increased security, wicked-fast loading times, heightened security, and new UI improvements, including default themes for different operating systems and new download manager [wiki] not to mention basics like tabbed browsing and spell-checker. I’m a fan of “add-ons” like the Delicious Toolbar and Firebug, and I use to be all over themes although not since my days of being a Windows user have I truly tricked out any...

Update: According to Microsoft, the first video is an inside joke — poking fun at such cringe-worthy corporate videos. Suuuuuuure it is. Whatever makes you guys feel better. Original post: The following video will likely make you cringe, even if you aren’t a Springsteen fan — and even if you aren’t a Windows fan (thanks to David Crow and MG Siegler for this one): But is it as bad as the following one, or better? At least this guy can sing: Share This...

No offense intended but Preston Gralla’s post - “Five Reasons Why Vista beats Mac OS X” is 100% link bait. In fact, it’s so blatant link bait that even Henry Blodget, who’s a master of link bait, would be embarrassed. Maybe Gralla should try to come up with a more substantive list of reasons before blowing out his “list”. Reason #5, which suggests that Vista is better than OS X because of Steve Jobs, is particularly dumb. Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac OS X, Vista...

So, funny thing: this morning, I was looking to see if VTech had finally gotten around to releasing an update for its cordless VTech phones with respect to making them Vista compatible, so I googled “vtech skype vista support”, because I’m too lazy to sort through their own site.  You might recall me ranting about why Vista enrages me, and using the lack of drivers / support one of my chief beefs.  Anywhoo, I thought perhaps another site had found a solution, perhaps someone blogged about it.  Funny thing was that my own rant ranked #7 on the google search So I am showing you this not just to show off that this blog has ranking for some pretty obscure terms, but that blog post on my blog outranks VTech itself when it comes for what I think is a relevant search...

A lot of people seem surprised by Microsoft’s decision to drop the retail prices of Vista, including a whopping 30% reduction for Vista Ultimate. “It’s sort of an odd move,” said Gartner analyst Michael Silver, while NPD Group’s Chris Swenson opined “I can’t remember a big price cut like this.” Boys, welcome to the new and exciting world of OS competition. Gone are the days when Windows dominated the landscape while Apple struggled on the edges, and alternatives such as Linux were embraced by a small, ultra-geeky group. Today, Apple is booming while Linux is - surprise, surprise - moving, if ever so slowly, into the mainstream. Who knows, maybe IBM will bring back OS/2 given the revival in the OS landscape! Microsoft may have sold 100...

You may have heard that Vista SP1 is coming / has come / will destroy you / devour small animals / capture all of your bases. There’s some more news that installing it will likely render even *MORE* programs unusable. Well, if you could see me now, my eyes have rolled so far back into my head that I am actually seeing my own ear wax (which isn’t that difficult, as I have a prodigious amount, according to unconfirmed sources). And that groaning that you’re hearing isn’t the enormous effort its taking for my eyes to do this anatomically impossible task. Nay, its the frustration I am feeling with Microsoft. I ranted once about Vista, and at the time, my biggest beef were the software incompatibilities. Looks like with this major update, I can look to even *more* of...

If you want to be perfectly honest, the much-anticipated (ultra-hyped?) launch of Apple’s new operating system, Leopard, has been a mixed success - perhaps a 6 or 7 out of 10. For all the excitement about 300 features (Time Machine, blah, blah, blah), Leopard is not a mind-blower. It’s a solid upgrade, which has already seen a major bug fix less a month after its release. What has been most interesting about Leopard is the perception among Apple users that it should be wonderful, it should be completely bug-free, and it should blow Microsoft’s Vista out of the water. After all, this is Apple we’re talking about - the plucky under-dog that has persevered through its dedication to design and function, and, of course, the brilliance of Steve Jobs. The reality,...

I’d like to think of myself as pro-Microsoft.  I know it has its fair share of detractors amongst the geek community (at last poll: 95% of them, which had an error rate of +/- 5%), but I figure as long as you know what you’re getting into, as I feel I do (most times) it does the trick.  Well, anyway.  Last week I upgraded to Vista. By “upgrade” I mean, I actually bought a new PC as I was sick and tired of using a five year old piece of hardware.  Elitest to some, I know, but it had just gotten unimaginably slow to use.  I mean, I shuddered every time I right-clicked in explorer because I knew I was in for a 30 second wait.  Or, even worse, trying to create a “new folder” in the windows explorer area.  That’s about a 45 second wait.  As I...

Symantec CEO John Thompson has no plans to upgrade to Vista (”I see no need for it for what I do online today. The machine that I use is the one provided by our company, and we have not made a commitment to migrate to Vista and therefore there is no reason for me to use Vista.), which is not surprising given the security enhancements within Vista move Microsoft one step closer to going mano-a-mano against Symantec. Meanwhile, Microsoft declined to comment on speculation a new version of Vista is slated to be released in 2009. So do you plan on upgrading to Vista any time soon? Is there enough in Vista to convince you to jump early on the bandwagon? Having used Vista, I think it’s just fine. The look and feel are slicker, the security features are better (albeit somewhat...

Speaking as the owner of "The Taint" -- that's my name for the laptop given to me by Microsoft -- I can say that this Mac ad is only a mild exaggeration of the "Cancel or Allow" dialog boxes that you'll often see when running Windows Vista: (This article was cross-posted to Global...

As part of the more than $500-million worth of advertising and marketing that Microsoft has been doing to promote Vista, the company paid to build a state-of-the-art home made entirely out of ice in the public square at the corner of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto (no doubt they got the idea from this place). A local blog called Torontoist (part of the placeblogging network started by Gothamist) has some pictures and a description of the 1,800-square-foot “home,” which comes complete with a working ice toilet-paper-holder, an ice bed and even an ice microwave (presumably good for only one use). The home took 270,000 pounds of ice to construct, and has computers running Vista and Office 2007. Classic comment from the website: “I can’t help but think that this is...

Vista is a nice upgrade from Windows XP but it’s hard a ground-shaking product even after five years of development and 50 million lines of code. The lack of enthusiasm has been muted (highlighted by the WSJ’s Walter Mossberg who described it as “worthy, but largely unexciting product”. So what can Microsoft do to get people talking about Vista, which has many attractive features and far better security? How about spending $500-million on advertising, which makes the $150,000 or so that Microsoft spent sending free laptops to bloggers look like a drop in the bucket. Over the next little while, it is going to be impossible to avoid Vista. There will TV commercials, billboards, magazine, newspaper ads and public transit vehicles featuring Vista. Even Bill Gates is...

The comic panel on the right (taken from this Achewood comic) summarizes what I want to say to the folks behind Windows Vista. Yes, I think that it's got some improvements on Windows XP, but the annoyances I've had have eclipsed the steps forward. In the second installment of The Tainted Vista Review -- my review of the controversial Acer Ferrari Laptop that Microsoft sent me -- I write about my experiences trying to get the laptop to recognize its own Bluetooth...

When the New York Times’ Walter Mossberg talks, people listen. So, I suspect many people at Microsoft must be somewhat disappointed with Mossberg’s take on Vista, which is sees as a “worthy, but largely unexciting, product”. “Vista is much prettier than previous versions of Windows. Its icons look better, windows have translucent borders, and items in the taskbar and in folders can display little previews of what they contain. Security is supposedly vastly better; there are some new free, included programs; and fast, universal search is now built in. There are hundreds of other, smaller, improvements and additions throughout the system, including parental controls and even a slicker version of Solitaire.” My take on Vista is pretty much the same as...

I don’t want to be a gigantic wet blanket or anything, but looking at the top of Techmeme right now makes me despair for the future of the human race. Okay — that might be a bit of an exaggeration. But seriously, do we really need to get that excited about the fact that the latest and greatest upgrade to Microsoft’s 15-year-old operating system has been sent to the place where they burn it onto CDs or whatever? But of course, saying that isn’t cool enough, so we have to use an acronym and say that it’s “gone RTM” (for Released To Manufacturing”) or “gone gold” or whatever the heck they call it. And for all the bitching and moaning about Google getting love for every Web 2.0 release it does, there seems to be an awful lot of...