I found Eric Sink’s blog via some references from Joel Spolsky’s blog. This is a nice post about the problems with whiz-bang technology.
Yesterday, I referenced what it was liking living with Vista
Today I ran across an Apple ad mocking Vista. Unfortunately, they pretty much got it right.
I’m hoping for an update that fixes this. Please, Microsoft?
OK, I’ve had Windows Vista installed for 9 days now and my verdict is … it’s not worth upgrading. Vista is supposed to be more secure than XP but this manifests itself in really annoying ways. The screen flashes black and a box pops up that must be dealt with. That’d be great if it were only for important things but it happens all the time!
I’ve had it happen when I want to change the smallest system setting. I’ve had it happen while downloading files. C’mon, get out of my way.
I’m having trouble doing backups with Quicken. Intuit probably had to do something so that they could force writes of data every time you changed something so that it wouldn’t be lost. But wow, this was coming for a while.
I wanted to look at Vista before thinking about Mac OS. It’s tough, though, because you can get a 17″ HP or Dell laptop for $1000 less than a 17″ MacBook Pro. Granted that it might take another $250-$300 to bring the laptops up to apples-to-Apples (heh) specs but that’s still a lot of money to spend on an OS. Guess I could be one of the elite then, though.
Makes me wish for FreeBSD or Linux. But I don’t really want to deal with an ugly, clunky windowing system as well having to reboot to run the few Windows programs I need.
I installed Vista on my home desktop machine on Friday. I’ve already been bitten twice by the new “off” button with Vista. I’m going to have to figure out how to change its default behavior.
I enjoy reading Joel Spolsky’s articles. In Choices = Headaches - Joel on Software he talks about the problems with Vista:
Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between
nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items.
He thinks that’s too many. So do I.
I’ve had this article on my hot list for a while. In /Message: Human Scale, Neighborhoods, and MySpaceaphobia Stowe Boyd writes well about some of the issues with online sites like MySpace or Facebook and even proposes some solutions to the problems they have.
Human-oriented social contexts should allow users to control scale: how many people can access what aspects of my on-line persona, what sorts of communication are available based on what degree of connection, and so on. If I want to limit my profile on Facebook to only current students of my university, I should be able to do so. If I want to rectrict access to my music playing habits to only those people that I know, then Last.fm should allow me to.
Good stuff.