philcrissman.com

ilovecode has an interesting post about anti-microsoft ranting on the internet. I would be among those who thought that the name “Vista” was a stupid one, but then again I think the names of several prominent Linux distributions (cough*Linspire*cough) are less than ideal also.

I also really don’t care what they call it; unlike the blogger at ilovecode, I won’t be buying it no matter what they call it. Not because it’s a Microsoft product, but simply because I don’t need it for anything. In whatever capacity I might need to learn it’s new features (if there are any, other than eye-candy) for work, I can learn at work. The only way I can seeing coming by a copy is if I decided to buy a new pre-built PC, and it had Vista preloaded; I doubt that this will happen, mostly because I expect my next new computer purchase to be an Apple.

Where I do agree is that a lot (most? almost all?) anti-Microsoft ranting is just about as incoherent as any other highly dichotomized argument; lots of emotion, not very many reasons. I’ve commented on this before; I’m usually fairly platform-agnostic on an emotional level. On a practical level, I have my systems (Linux, Mac) that I prefer, but I don’t “hate” Microsoft, or anything like that. There’s certainly a lot of that out there, though.

Anyways, I mainly just linked to this because I thought it raised an interesting point; I tend to differ with most of the conclusions. In an economic sense, I can see where it is logically plausible to “thank Microsoft” for the competition which drives Macintosh OS and Linux to excel, but when it comes right down to it… I think that might be pushing matters just a bit. ;-)

Continue reading ‘Too Much Anti-Microsoft?’

I just upgraded the video card on my home PC; the integrated video is a GForce2 chipset, decent for older games. The new one bears the Nvidia logo, and the model number P118, which as near as I can tell is a 5200MX of some sort. It was free, and is better than the integrated video, so I figured I’d give it a whirl.

At first there was no appreciable difference, so I decided to upgrade the nvidia drivers. There was a problem the last time I tried to do this; that problem being that the newest nvidia drivers did not work with the GForce2, only newer cards. So, I had continued to use old drivers, which worked quite well. This seemed like a good time to upgrade; the newest stable nvidia version (I’ll have to find the number later) was my first stop.

These bombed out in a big way. I tried a newer (2.6.11) kernel, rebooting, re-compiling the drivers; no success.

Then I tried the newest of the new nvidia drivers, the version still masked as “testing” in the portage tree. After a reboot, these worked fine, and my framerates from glxgears are about triple what they were before, from 200-300fps to about 600-800fps. Very nice.

Continue reading ‘Nvidia Card Upgrade’

I’m bothering to say it because I have a growing feeling that Apple is going to be snowballing over the next year or so. For starters, we have folks like John C. Dvorak (PCMag) now saying “as much as x86 users to not want to admit it, the Mac OS is already better than Windows” (no kidding; I’ve been saying this for a few years, and I’m not even a Mac user per se). I’m not going to go searching for more quotes from tech pundits just yet, but this is something we’re hearing more… and more… and more of.

Not only that, but I’m just seeing it in the people around me, and various blogs I read. Terry Storch switched some time back. Scott Hodge has said he’s planning to switch in the near future. Several people I work with at church who have recently bought new computers have bought… Apples.

A co-worker of mine, who has been moderately anti-Apple in times past, has started recommending Apples to people who ask him what sort of computer to buy. Hello!

As for myself, a few years ago I would have hesitated to recommend the Apple to the average PC user. I would waffle, saying “Well it depends on what you want to do, price point, etc, blah blah….” That was before the $499-$599 Mac mini, which I would say changed everything. I think history will look back and say that the rise of the inexpensive Apple computer was a turning point in the shift in market share toward OS X. At this point, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend an Apple to anyone who was contemplating a new computer.

Even if you’re a Linux user; heck, who wouldn’t rather dual-boot to OS X than to Windows? Unless your actual occupation depends on supporting or developing for Windows (which a lot of people’s do… for now), what can you do with Windows that you can’t do on an Apple? The only apps for which I can’t use Linux–Macromedia Flash, etc–will run on Mac OS as easily as on Windows.

I used to recommend Dell to people; I think from now on, I’ll be asking them if there’s some reason they have to run Windows. If there isn’t… it might be time to get an Apple.

Continue reading ‘The Future of Apple’

Slashdot informs us that the betas for Vista and IE7 are available today… to MSDN subscribers. We are not, but we do receive betas with our TechNet subscription (which I have generally found to be Not Very Useful, otherwise). As soon as I get a chance, I’ll probably try out IE7; I’m hoping to be impressed. Not because I want to use it, but because I want to quit having to develop web pages trying to style them for a smaller common subset of standards… Hopefully IE7 will handle CSS much better.

VistaTech reports that the Windows Update page does not work with IE7. I know this is beta software, but you have to admit; that’s a pretty funny bug.

Paul Thurrott has a reasonably balanced review (reasonably considering that he runs a “Supersite for Windows”) of Vista here.

Continue reading ‘Vista/IE7 Musings’

Fluxbox is a small, lightweight, window manager for the X window system. I just set it up yesterday, and am looking forward to writing a bit more about the experience when I’ve had the time to do some more configuration.

It’s nice to try something new for a change. Check out the screenshots on their site for an idea of what it’s all about.

Continue reading ‘Fluxbox’