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November 2, 2009

From a dedicated Windows user

"I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life."

The Age: Better the broken Windows than life with the Mac monks (via @dirgayuza)

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Filed under  //   apple   funny   mac   microsoft   theage   windows  

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November 2, 2009

Without Gates, Microsoft outpaced by startups

"But the problem with putting nontechies in charge of tech companies is that they have blind spots. Gates was quick to recognize that the Internet represented a threat to Microsoft, and he led the campaign to destroy Netscape. In those days Microsoft was still nimble enough that it could pivot quickly and catch up on a rival. Since then the company has become bureaucratic and lumbering."

Newsweek: The Lost Decade (via @gartenberg)

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Filed under  //   businessweek   microsoft  

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June 21, 2009

It's the software, stupid

Mike Elgan writes for Computerworld

"The game-changers of the future will not be new hardware features, but new software and network capabilities."

Hardware will still matter to an extent as long as there is no engineering and feature parity across devices but in the broader scheme of things Elgan puts up a really good argument against hardware relevance.

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Filed under  //   apple   future   hardware   iphone   microsoft   network   palm   software   sony  

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May 17, 2009

Who you gonna call?

Hilarity at Microsoft Answers

When you wanna pirate Windows XP, go straight to the mothership, why the hell not? On the other hand, could have been a dare.

-via @andrewsayer

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Filed under  //   funny   keygen   microsoft   windows xp  

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May 13, 2009

Laptop Hunters eat your heart out

As always, Tuesdays have always brought something new to the Mac scene. Earlier today, Apple released a slew of software updates including Mac OS X 10.5.7 (both client and server), Safari 3.2.3, Security Updates for Mac OS X Tiger (also client and server), and an update to Safari 4 beta once you’ve installed the latest OS updates.


But really, who pays attention to those when Apple also released three brand spanking new Get a Mac ads during American Idol? People speculated whether Biohazard Suit, Legal Copy and Stacks were Apple’s responses to Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters series but given the timeframe, that seemed unlikely. Lo and behold, Justin Long and John Hodgman return in PC Choice Chat, Elimination, and Customer Care. Boom! Head shot. RIP Laptop Hunters.

In PC Choice Chat, PC hosts a radio show about helping people pick the best PC for them but he dismissed all the incoming phone calls because they turned out to be from people wanting to use Macs. Pay attention to Mac’s expressions as PC answers the questions, it's priceless.

In Elimination, PC brought along his friends to offer choice for Megan who is looking for a new computer with a large screen, fast processor and doesn't crash. Naturally they were all eliminated but listen closely to Megan when Mac introduced himself.

Customer Care brought back a Mac Genius into the series as PC reminisces the horror when trying to reach customer support over the phone.

While Apple’s Get a Mac series have always carried humorous undertones while taking potshots at the non-Mac side, these latest ones hit the home run.

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Filed under  //   advertisement   apple   getamac   microsoft   television  

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April 27, 2009

Okezone pretends a Microsoft ad is an article


Indonesian text behind the link. This is good for a laugh. 8 reasons for moving to PC by Okezone.

Some gems:

"Sembilan dari sepuluh komputer menggunakan sistem operasi Windows atau lainnya"
"Nine out of ten computers use Windows or other operating system"
Great, what does the other one run on, peanuts?

"Windows menawarkan lebih banyak jenis hiburan melalui beragam fitur yang dimilikinya dan bisa langsung dinikmati, sementara Mac tidak. "
"Windows offers more types of entertainment through its many features that can be immediately enjoyed while Mac does not."
You mean like Minesweeper and Solitaire?

"Beberapa situs hanya bisa diakses dengan sempurna melalui browser Internet Explorer yang ada pada Windows. Beberapa situs yang ada di internet membutuhkan aplikasi tambahan untuk bisa memunculkannya. Namun dengan Windows, hal tersebut tidak dibutuhkan"
"Some sites can only be accessed perfectly using Internet Explorer browser in Windows. Some sites on the Internet require add-ons to display them. But with Windows, it's not necessary."
So when you run Windows you don't need to install a PDF plugin, update your Flash plugin, install a QuickTime add-on, install a DivX or XviD plugin and all the other plugins on your browser?


[update] I've just discovered that that piece from Okezone was an incomplete and unattributed rip off of this piece by HarryMcCracken who also posted the opposite view, "Eight reasons why your next computer should be a Mac."

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Filed under  //   funny   indonesia   microsoft   okezone   pathetic   sad  

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April 7, 2009

Text Editors


Is it really that difficult to add word count into text editors?

One issue I have as a writer is choosing the right tool for the job. It may sound simple enough, all I have to do is key in some letters on screen to do my work which means for most purposes, there is no real need to use anything more sophisticated than the simplest text editor. Being on a Mac this means using TextEdit. However there are bucketloads of word processors out there ranging from free to seriously expensive and some of them do the same things in different ways.

TextEdit is, believe it or not, quite a capable word processor. Aside from basic formatting options such as setting your text to italics, bold, or underline, change the font size or color, you have the ability to add proper lists, table, insert a hyperlink into a string of text, adjust kernings if you wish, and many other options that most people wouldn't consider using even when they use a super power editor such as Microsoft Word or even Pages.

Indeed TextEdit had been my weapon of choice for a while until I realized that I needed to do word count (duh). Up to earlier this year, Apple's Pages doesn't even have the simple ability to show a live word count on the main window. In Pages '08 you had to have the Info tab of the Document section in the Inspector window opened. If you had to open another section of the Inspector Window, gone is your word count view and you’ll need to go back to the info tab to see it again which means abandoning your current operation or wait until it’s done before you can recheck the number of words you’ve put in.

I did however discover a neat little app called Word Counter which allows you to enter text into it and it will tell you how many words and characters are in your block of text. Its power however lies elsewhere. It is in actual fact, a crazy supercharged companion to a text editor that lets you do all sorts of word count calculations and even readability analysis in its latest version, 2.10, released in February of this year. It also works as a plugin for a number of text editing programs such as Pages, Word:mac, TextEdit and others, and it also reads PDF.

For some time, the combination of TextEdit and Word Counter served me quite well but after a while the lack of integration caught up to me because as great as Word Counter may be, it’s still a separate app. Sure, I can have it set to auto launch at startup and since I rarely reboot my computer that point is almost irrelevant but I still have to keep Word Counter visible at all times when I work.

My next search uncovered an app called Bean. Discovering this app was a revelation. Nevermind that this application is not much more than a wrapper for existing technologies within Mac OS X, it looks a lot more useful than TextEdit with a visual style more akin to Pages. It is also smaller and faster than TextEdit. Primary reason for using this? It had live word and character counts at the bottom of the window. At a time when all I needed was a simple word processor that does plain text and rich text formats as well as word count, Bean was a blessing. A cool part of it was live viewer resizing. You could grab the bottom right corner of the application window and drag it to resize the magnification level of the document. This was an added bonus that stood out. Did I mention it’s free and open source? 

When Apple released Pages ‘09 as part of iWork ‘09 suite, they had added live word count at the bottom of each document window and included a full-screen feature which blacks out the entire screen aside from the document, the word and page cont, as well as iTunes window. It even hides Mac OS X’s Dock and Menu Bar. If you use Word Counter, its floating window will remain on screen. Pages’ format bar and Mac OS X menu bar are still accessible in this mode by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen. You can go back to the standard view by pressing escape on your keyboard.

At this point, Bean has become my text editor of choice, followed closely by Pages ’09. I love Bean’s style and Pages’ full screen mode. Thanks to Word Counter’s progress tracker, it remains a useful tool when I need to keep the length of my writing in check. Bean runs on both Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard and is also friendly to PowerPC Macs. For those looking for a simple, fast, and handy text editor, it's hard to go past Bean.

I have deliberately left out Microsoft’s Office:Mac because I was specifically looking for simpler alternatives to it, but if you prefer to use Office, thanks to Microsoft’s new licensing scheme, you can actually buy the Home+Student edition, previously named Student+Teacher edition, it costs roughly Rp. 1.8 million and hands you three licenses for use in three different computers as long as you don’t use it for business or commercial purposes. 

While Neo Office and OpenOffice are fine free and open source alternatives, for my purposes neither offer features that stood up to differentiate themselves enough from Microsoft’s Office.

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Filed under  //   apple   bean   editing   iwork   microsoft   neooffice   office   openoffice   pages   text edit   word   word count   word counter   work  

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January 19, 2009

The Whole World in Your Palm

In the technology world, there are no bigger trade events than the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and the Macworld Expo, usually held in San Francisco, both of which happen to occur in January of every year. At least twice in the past, the events ran in the same week, creating a nightmare for technophiles who wanted to attend both.

In 2007 in particular, just about everyone in the technology scene wanted to be in San Francisco on the same day.

What was it that got technology bigwigs and journalists making a special trip that morning from the glitz and glamor of Las Vegas, Nevada, all the way to chilly San Francisco, California?

Read more at Jakarta Globe

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Filed under  //   android   apple   article   google   iphone   jakartaglobe   microsoft   nokia   Palm   rim   smartphone   webos  

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