Recently in microsoft Category


Yep, Windows Still Sucks

[ rakaur on Sun Aug 03 at 09:51 AM // category: apple, microsoft, software, technology ]

Just in case you were wondering. Let me share a tale with you.

A week or so ago my laptop’s hard drive died. I am currently poor, so that means my laptop is out of commission. This also means the only computer I have available to me is running Windows XP. And I am sad.

Since I was stuck with using Windows, I was left without my beloved Apple Mail. Since Dreamhost’s server-side mail filters catch next to nothing, I was relying on Mail’s client-side filter, which itself isn’t that great. Without even that, though, it was impossible to wade through my inbox. I’ll not shame Outlook’s spam filter with a mention.

So, I decided to move my mail from Dreamhost to “Google Apps.” I figured I’d move it over, use gmail’s web interface until I got my laptop back up, then enable IMAP within gmail and use Mail as normal, with the added benefit of Google’s spam filter, which is excellent. This in itself was not difficult.

The difficultly lies in the fact that I have around 10,000 emails, and I wanted to keep them. Not as easy.

Click here to read this entire entry.

-- rakaur // 2008.08.03 @ 09:51 AM

MICROSOFT SUX LOL

[ rakaur on Tue May 02 at 10:24 PM // category: microsoft, technology ]

I hate Windows. My only purpose for having Windows at all is games. That’s it.

So I’ve read about this “Windows Genuine Advantage” shit that pops up every three nanoseconds to tell you your copy of XP is illegal or something. Today I witnessed it install on my perfectly legal copy of XP Pro (I didn’t buy it personally, but the CD I have is genuine) and promptly proceed to tell me my copy was illegal. So I open Firefox to go find some way around it, and Firefox apparently updated itself at some point and now won’t open. Wonderful. It just sits there “Firefox could not be updated. Close Firefox and try again.” and by clicking “ok” I apparently mean “relaunch Firefox so it will do this over and over.” So I reboot, thinking that’ll let it update, but no. So, I try to uninstall Firefox, but no. The file is in use. I boot to safe mode and remove Firefox.exe. I boot to Windows and wander over to Windows Update in IE for it to tell me my copy of XP is illegal. So I go find some patch for WGA on torrentspy and IE suddenly lets me use Windows Update, which wants me to install WGA! So I do that, and now I get these annoying ass popups every ten seconds. So what do I do? I find a key in the registry that starts “WgaTray.exe” and disable it and restart. Suddenly my copy is genuine. Microsoft really is up on this whole “pirating” thing. So I then use IE to go get Firefox once again.

So, let’s see, I had to:

It takes my machine like 20 seconds to boot Windows. The “Windows XP” logo screen flashes and disappears. However, after using Unix and OS X which almost never requires restarts, it just pisses me off.

All I want to do is play games. I didn’t pay for XP, and I didn’t pay for the games, but even if I did that wouldn’t change the fact that it’s still a flaming piece of shit.

Fuck.

-- rakaur // 2006.05.02 @ 10:24 PM

On Mac, Windows, and Storage

[ rakaur on Thu Apr 13 at 01:29 AM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]

(If you haven’t noticed, I’ve given up on witty titles late at night).

I dunno what’s up with my laptop. Well, nothing, really, it works fine. It seems that after installing WinXP with Boot Camp it’s been a little flakey. When I boot it from power-off (which is rare, and I’ll mention that later) I get a question mark, then the Apple logo. It also takes longer for some reason.

I think the culprit is that when Boot Camp partitions it seems to be into a logical partition instead of primary (which is dumb, ‘cause I mean, they know it’s only two partitions anyhow). When you have Boot Camp revert back to one volume, I don’t think this undoes the logical-ness. Then again, it should only be the second partition, so I dunno. Google isn’t my friend in this case.

Also, when I was forced to reinstall the other day, I noticed it installs a lot of shit I don’t need. Like, a lot of shit. Like, a bajillion languages that no one even speaks anymore. I think there’s a Latin.lproj file somewhere. I found some program that removes everything but American English from all installed programs, but I think the files for the stuff on OS X is still there. It’s a big deal because this shit is huge. It’s not gzipped or anything. I don’t know the format of the .lproj files, but it sucks. I freed up over five gigs of space by zapping these from my applications. How sad is that?

I’m thinking about reinstalling from scratch (backing up /Users/ and /Applications/ somewhere else, of course) and customizing my install. Also, I’ve installed and removed just about every piece of software for OS X out there, so I have a mind-blowingly huge amount of little application turds laying around in /Library/ and shit. I’m a filesystem clean freak, so I’d like to get rid of all that stuff.

“Plan to throw one away; you will, anyway” is usually a good policy. One of the few things ESR has uttered that I happen to agree with.

This doesn’t really fit here, but I said I’ll mention it so I will. Evidently, my MBP uses two watts of power while powered off, and two watts of power while in sleep. It has a 60 watt-hour battery. I’m not sure on the math here, how long can it go powered off or asleep at that rate? System Profiler says the full charge is 5846mAh. So, right, my point was I almost never turn it off, I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. If it draws the same amount of power, then who cares?

I’m also thinking I’m giving a great big “fuck you” to Gentoo and killing it and installing WinXP on my desktop, mostly for games. I’m really fucking sick of having to edit ten files just to do anything in Portage. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about all my shit though. I’d hate to squander a 200 gig drive on Windows. I store all my stuff on it, and I’d like to keep it on something other than NTFS. Maybe I should swap it with my backup drive in cyndane or something. I’m not sure on this. I don’t want my stuff on some MS filesystem, that’s for sure. Hopefully soon enough most of it will be gone though, since burning DVDs from AVIs actually works on my laptop (as opposed to Nero Vision) I plan to just burn all my video to disc, and delete the AVIs. Just about 60% of my stuff on that drive is video. The rest is mostly music, and that’s on iTunes anyway.

Good luck finding time to do this stuff though.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.13 @ 01:29 AM

X vs XP

[ rakaur on Sun Apr 09 at 08:54 AM // category: apple, microsoft, software, technology ]

I guess this is kind of interesting.

It’s also totally bogus. I haven’t even viewed the “Final Score” page, but I’m pretty sure Windows wins. Either these people have a bias toward Windows and they lean that way, or they have a bias toward OS X and err on the side of Windows to make it look otherwise.

First off, they leave out all of the iLife applications because “it’s not part of the operating system” but then include seperate downloads for Windows that you can get, and that’s ok. First off, I’m willing to bet that over 90% of computers with 10.3 and up have iLife on them. If not, they’re probably in the education market anyway.

In “Legacy Application Support” Windows vastly outscores OS X because it has “support for 25 year old programs.” No, it depends on 25 year old programs. There’s a difference. I personally commend Apple for trying to phase out legacy garbage that stifles innovation, which is exactly how Microsoft wants it. Apple supported 68k for eleven years after they switched to PPC. They supported OS 9 up until the Intel thing. They’ll support PPC for a long, long time. The site says something like “you could argue that OS X’s support is impressive given the situation,” and pretty much goes on to say “but we don’t give a shit. Windows wins.”

The “Audio Playback” section is retarded. They both score the same, but I swear to god I don’t know a single soul that uses WMP. Everyone and their grandma downloads Winamp or something else because WMP is an atrocious giant retard-friendly massive heap of an application that does absolutely nothing but crash every time I send it to “toolbar mode.” The first thing I do on a Windows install that I expect to be doing audio on is install something other than WMP. iTunes isn’t a fantastic application either, but at least its usable.

The “Video Playback” section’s pretty stupid too. They put Windows way higher because you don’t have to pay for a pro version. Yeah, because Microsoft never bugs you to buy shit. Get real. Again with the WMP thing. QuickTime is far more usable.

“Video Editing” is shit too. They leave out iMovie and iDVD because it’s “not part of the operating system omg.” Neither is WMP, you idiots. In fact, it’s illegal to have it bundled with Windows in some countries. Even without iMovie and iDVD, QuickTime can do far more movie-centric stuff than WMP. iMovie is so ungodly vastly superior to Windows Movie Maker I can’t even go into it.

“Photo Importing.” One word, iPhoto. Yeah, it’s part of iLife. Shut up. Same goes for the rest of the photo stuff.

“Web Browsing.” For some reason they think IE and Safari score the same. Go figure.

“Email, basic.” Somehow Mail only scores one point higher than OE. Go figure.

“HTML Editing.” They call OE a WYSIWYG editor. Need I say more?

“Chat, basic.” Yeah, like MSNM is anywhere comparable to XMPP.

“Advanced Conferencing.” Yeah, because whiteboard is a critical part of IM.

“Games.” I’m sorry that OS X doesn’t provide solitare, and thus a way to throw millions of hours of productivity down the shitter.

The entire “Files & Folders” category isn’t even worth my time. They somehow go on long and forever about Windows Desktop Search, which isn’t even provided in Windows. Right, you can use that but not iLife. Even if they keep it in seperate scores, if they’re going to pull that shit they should include iLife and put it in seperate scores. Like anything in Windows is even remotely comparable to Spotlight.

The entire “Graphical User Interface” category is a complete shitfest too. They only mention Exposé in “Working with Open Windows,” while it should also be in about half of the other categories where they just ignore it. They make a huge deal out of zoom, and that window resizing is only in one spot. They’re obviously used to Windows ideas, and anything else seems foreign. I’ve used about a billion different window managers, and Aqua is far from the worst.

There’s somehow only a three point difference in “Command Line Interface.” Have you people even USED anything other than Windows? There’s an entire separate operating system in OS X’s command line, it’s called Unix. It comes with so many things that Windows can’t do you can’t even compare them. Seriously, this is a huge point they’re just completely oblivious to. People made a living writing shell scripts before there even was a DOS. What in Windows compares to bash, sh, tcsh, perl, python, ruby, ipfw, sed, awk, or anything else in /usr/bin?

Windows wins vastly in “Remote Control” somehow based on the fact that Remote Desktop comes with Windows. What about SSH? Yeah, I know a ton of people that make a living using RD on Windows boxes as compared to people that make a living using SSH. Oh wait, no I don’t.

Yes, I obviously like OS X more. At least I don’t pretend to be unbiased.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.09 @ 08:54 AM

More Drama Than an Episode of Montel

[ rakaur on Wed Apr 05 at 04:43 PM // category: apple, hardware, microsoft, software, technology ]

So, as I’m sure you all know, Apple released Boot Camp this morning, which is software that allows you to install XP natively on an Intel Mac. To be more precise, the firmware update they released just prior allows the BIOS emulation XP needs (in fact, the XP cd will boot and run fine without even touching Boot Camp). Boot Camp serves to make drivers and partitions for XP. First, it burns you a CD with (almost) all of the drivers Windows needs to operate on Apple hardware. Everything works, excluding the Apple Remote, ambient light sensor, sudden motion detector, and other minor things such as this. All the big stuff works: Airport, Bluetooth, the eject button, the trackpad (though I have yet to figure out how to right click in XP with just the trackpad on my MacBook Pro). Well, the trackpad kind of works. Scrolling, acceleration, etc do not.

So of course, I had to try it. Pictures (and a movie of it booting) are here. It’s the fastest XP’s ever been for me, but then I haven’t used it in ages. I installed it, and it got around to nagging me about antivirus and 38 Windows Updates and blah blah, so I promptly booted back into OS X and haven’t touched it again. I’ll probably delete it soon, as on an 80G drive I need those 10G back.

-- rakaur // 2006.04.05 @ 04:43 PM

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