Back when XP was the new OS on the block, the genius engineers at Microsoft discovered that a typical user only runs a handful a programs and that a clean desktop was the way of the future. Too bad they didn’t spend some time on trivial issues, like, um, boot time. One turn of the crank later, Vista introduced the craptacular sidebar.
Win 7 will remove the sidebar restriction allowing the eye-candy to run wild to any spot on the desktop. Take that, anal retentive types!
A friend of mine posted this on Facebook recently:
“thinks facebook is an ego-driven wormhole that contributes to our narcissistic society and is frankly disgusted by it. Oh, and by the way, good morning, I am now eating delicious bran flakes…”
That sounds about right to me. Until a few months ago, I pretty much considered Facebook (not to mention Myspace) only suitable for “kids” or at least people under 35. But I knew about a FB group from my old high school and an unexpected email from another high school friend mentioned that she was using it as well. So I signed up to see what all the fuss was about and quickly discovered that Facebook is the Devil . OK, well not really but they definitely seize as much control as possible and privacy / security concerns are rampant.
Not to mention that Facebook is a neo-con capitalist imperial venture. On the upside, things are questionable financially so maybe they’ll just go out of business. Doubtful, of course, but there’s still a chance that Microsoft will buy them which would just give me one more reason to consider leaving.
But for now, I’m hanging out. I’ve hidden the more egregious over-posters, results of games, and CAPITAL letter typers but still enjoying those random views into the days of friends and family members.
If an infinite number of monkeys could eventually write Shakespeare, how many Nigerian scammers would it take to string together a couple of plausible paragraphs trying to scam us? Not enough, at least not yet…:
THIS IS THE (F.B.I)
http://www.fbi.gov
fbi_cyberwatch_us@yahoo.com.hk
Robert S. Mueller
Executive Director FBIFEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION SEEKING TO WIRETAP THE INTERNET
Dear Esteem Beneficiary,
Have you receive your fund from the FedEx Courier Service Nigeria? Or from any organization claiming that they have your fund with them? We have been watching every transactions that you made from last year 2008 up till date and you have to know that we are also working to make sure that your fund which is supposed to be delivered to you some days ago can be immediately be delivered to you without any further delay or any kind of excuses.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not want any of our citizens to lose their fund and that is why we have been working every hour on our cyber watch department so you won’t get burnt by this scammers.
We are aware of every payment you have made on the transaction you are into to make the transaction succeed, yet the fund is still held down by the drug law agency and the immigration officer at the airport.
We want you to take note that our special investigation service diplomatic men are the one to deliver your fund of $5.8million to you without any further roadblock agencies.
The diplomatic delivery men are in Nigeria where your fund is originated at the international airport now, as soon as you get back to this email by applying to the instruction that is sent to you, the delivery will take effect immediately.
The payment you are to send now so that your fund can finally get to you is the sum of $400USD for the airport clearance of your fund due to the huge amount of money, and as soon as this has been sent down via money gram or western union international money transfer, the delivery will take immediate effect by the delivery diplomatic men.
You have to stop every transaction you are into and communication with other organization to avoid delay on processing of your fund and wrong contact that is why we at the FBI have email you to warn you that your fund is in Nigeria at the immigration office where the diplomatic men will deliver it to you personally as soon as the payment of $400USD is sent to them.
Get back to us at the FBI as soon as you receive this email.
Thanks for your co-operation.
Robert S. Mueller,
Federal Bureau of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001, USA
Photo: Kristi Evans
My friend Niel recently blew away Vista and installed Ubuntu because of stuttering media issues. I applauded the move and certainly considered it myself with a long standing wireless problem on my Thinkpad. A couple days ago, my desktop Vista machine, which has been reasonably solid, started having stuttering during playback. Pretty much any music or video playback over the web would stutter a bit with any other activity, browser, network copying or even just local disk access with Explorer.
So I turned up Mark Rossinivich’s blog post about Vista’s multimedia playback and network access. In a nutshell, Microsoft TRIED to improve media playback by adding a service (MMCSS) that increases the priority of the media thread. OK so far, but MMCSS seems to clobber some network connections. That I could live with, but it turns out that it’s not altogether bug free and the service itself can cause the media to stutter. Um, wasn’t that the whole point of the damn service? This all worked fine on XP, so why does Microsoft go trying to fix stuff that isn’t broken?
One reg hack and one disabled service later (thanks ZDNet) and the problem appears to be resolved. I’m still uncertain why this issue would suddenly turn up since I don’t allow Windows Update to run automatically and haven’t installed anything recently (…oh wait, I did install Raw Therapee the other day, could it be?…nah).
Photo: Kristi Evans
A little over a year ago my (not so) trusty HP dv4000 laptop crapped out. Barely two years old, it was almost perfect and I had bought it for a song. I mulled over just getting by with my desktop (which lives upstairs in my home office) and my “work” laptop which I prefer to not use for fun, not that anyone really seems to care.
I ended up getting a decent deal on a Lenovo R61i with Vista. Nice laptop, although I am not a fan of widescreens but I do watch some movies on this machine and figured it would be good for that. It took a couple of months to turn off and/or configure some of the more major Vista annoyances and for the past eight months I have been fighting just one…the S3 resume from standby takes from 30 to 60 seconds IF it comes back at all; mostly the problem appeared to be wireless related. One out of ten or so times, the HDD light stays on and that’s it, switch off time.
I tried everything, updated BIOS a couple times, Lenovo’s (IBM legacy really) clunky System Update, Vista SP1, etc., etc. Nothing helped. Since the warranty is a couple weeks from expiring, I called Lenovo and attempted to whine my way into an XP downgrade DVD pleading that I had put up with it for 11.5 months. After escalating to a supervisor, I pretty much had them talked into waving the $35 charge until they discovered that there was no DVD for this box nor was it even licensed by Microsoft for downgrade. Sh*t. I’ve been threatening just to overwrite their crappy preload with Ubuntu for months, but that would prevent my Netflix instant watching, at least half the reason for even owning this computer.
So…I made one last troll through Lenovo’s customer forums. Several people had reported random Wifi disconnects and other symptoms that they had fixed by getting rid of the craptacular Access Connections (which is actually the only one of the Lenovo/IBM utils that I kinda like). None of their symptoms correlated with mine, so I had not tried that. Since I was out of options, I gave it a whirl two days ago. BADDA BING, the dang thing has been perfect so far with no resume/reconnect taking longer than 5-6 seconds.
I’m obviously kicking myself for not trying it sooner, but pleased that it seems to be a fix…and keeping my fingers crossed that I didn’t just jinx it by writing this.
Has the pesky Smart Location Bar from Firefox 3 and its seemingly random results got you down, bunky?
Head over to http://www.pcmech.com/article/firefox-3-disable-the-smart-location-bar-sort-of/ to put things more or less back to the good old days of FF 2.0.
Just in case you weren’t paying attention in high school.
Warning, high nerd factor….http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBCmt_pJTRA
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