I am notoriously bad about backing up my computer. And my main home machine went down this past week. The hard drive actually physically died. The motor went out or something. It's the machine that had all the baby pictures on it. Every picture that we had taken of our 2 children since they were born were on that computer. And the hard drive was dead. Luckily, I had been making backups thanks to those new portable USB drives that you can get at Best Buy or whatever, there's really no exc...
This is what my Windows XP desktop looks like this month. Now, if you're new to customizing Windows, you may wonder why it looks so different. My day job at Stardock includes being Product Manager of something called Object Desktop. It's a desktop enhancement suite that allows you to customize the heck out of Windows. Corporations use it to create secure desktops or branded desktops. Individuals use it for all kinds of reasons including just making Windows look cooler or maybe more produc...
Alexa.com is a great site for figuring out (roughly) how popular a website is. It's not perfect, especially on sites that don't get a lot of traffic. But as sites get more popular, it does tend to show a good relative ranking.. . WinCustomize.com is one of the sites I administer on. It gets nearly 2 million unique visitors per month. Oddly, in the last couple of months it's relative ranking has been dropping (i.e. bad). This has been strange because the sites's raw traffic has increas...
The release of iTunes has really sparked an on-line debate over the future direction of the music industry. You see it on websites, forums, news groups, heck my friends and I, who are not exactly music nuts have been debating it too. However, the pattern in discussion seems to mix business and sports. Let me explain: In sports it's a win/lose proposition. One way will win, another way will lose. In business, the goal is win/win. A winning strategy is merely one that generates more...
Apple is going to get rich off of iTunes on Windows. Let me just start with that. I downloaded iTunes for Windows. I've used it on my Mac for awhile and it's basically identical on the PC to its Mac incarnation. And it makes sampling of music, purchasing, and downloading so seamless at such a reasonable price that excuse for pirating music is gone. This makes it so easy and convenient that people will be buying music in vast numbers. It's a win-win situation that I think will eventually...
I'm wearing my Register shirt as I type this so given I'm already apparently a tool of The Register I might as well go all the way and point you to an article John Lettice there has written about Microsoft's seeming obsession with Linux. Personally I think Linux is crap. At least from a desktop point of view for getting general office productivity done. But as a server, Microsoft needs to worry. I think they have an uphill climb to win the argument that Windows is less expensive than Linu...
According to this article at The Register , TabletPC sales are terrible. Which is not surprising at all to me. What is surprising is that they are trying to blame Microsoft for the poor sales. The OEMS basically have 3 main reasons why TabletPCs aren't selling: Cost. Microsoft is over charging for the Tablet PCs version of Windows XP. Marketing. Microsoft isn't marketing Tablet PCs hard enough. Bundling. Microsoft isn't delivering compelling software to make Tablet PCs sta...
What is it with Mac users and their tendency to think that everything was invented on the Mac? I've been seeing this a lot over the past few weeks as features of Longhorn have gotten leaked out. Compositing? MacOS X. XAML? There's an equivalent on Mac too. Name something on Windows and you're told it showed up on the Mac. Which is a pretty tall attitude for people who only recently seemed to have discovered preemptive multitasking or threads. Did Apple "rip off" the idea of preempti...
I'm going to write something more in depth once I get a better feel for Panther (10.3). I like my Mac. It's a fine machine. But Macs, since going to OS X (including 10.3) feel much more sluggish. I also find them very limited in how much you can change them in how they work. If Apple hasn't thought of it, you're not likely to be able to find a tool, freeware or otherwise, that will let you change its behavior. I also find the lack of freeware for it to be a major downside. I buy hundr...
When I first got my iMac I confess to having been quite disappointed. For one thing, MacOS X Jaguar was kind of crummy in my opinion. Mac users tend to be a fanatical lot and as a result tend to live in denial about the short comings of the Mac. It's like they have this unspoken rule not to publicly speak about all the problems Mac users deal with. Not being part of that cult, I had the audacity to point out the short comings here on JoeUser (will put together a list of links shortly to those...
So now that Panther (MacOS X 10.3) is out the Mac users are out again trying to convince "pee-cee" users to "Switch". The problem is, Mac advocates have no credibility at this point. They've spent it long ago. People don't like being lied to and the most vocal of Mac fanatics regularly and massively crossed the line between exuberance and outright dishonesty. Anyone who has debated in the OS wars long enough has seen what I'm talking about. Over the years argued that things like pre-emptive m...
The skin library file server over at WinCustomize took a hit today when the primary library hard drive died. Luckily, we do regular backups so it's not a total loss but very likely will lose a few files in the process. How many remains to be seen. Most of our stuff uses RAID in redundancy mode but unfortunately, because of the sheer size of the library, it's not really practical (on a budget) to do that. But boy I wish we had that set up tonight. I guess it's better tonight than say Thursday....
Did it just happen one day? That the editors of InfoWorld and PC Week (before it became eWeek), got together and decided that instead of having interesting magazines that they would instead focus on covering only the dullest stuff out there? Was it their goal to transform their magazines from thick, content rich material to being largely pamphlets that resemble more of a specialty Miller Freeman type publication that only a tiny select group would find interesting or useful? Loo...
So as I get into Panther (OS X 10.3) I'm increasingly annoyed at the $129 upgrade price. Not that Panther isn't a good upgrade but Apple has pretty much made it clear that it is a specialty shop. You're not just buying a computer, you are buying membership into an elite club. But for most people, cost matters. As a Mac and Windows user, my view is that while the Mac has some nice features, it s not nearly worth the cost involved. I mean come on, $129 for 10.3 from 10.2? That's ridiculous....
Back in 2001 Microsoft's early betas of Windows XP contained a user interface dubbed "Watercolor". But only months before the operating system shipped Microsoft completely replaced it with an entirely different look and feel called "Luna" which became known as "Windows XP Style". That move has created speculation that current Windows Vista look and feel, called Aero glass, would be replaced by a different look and feel later in the beta process. However, this week's PowerU...