Is Vista Really People-Ready?

It's really weird not being extremely busy and yet being in Austin. I'm sure things will get crazier soon enough. For now, I'm just looking forward to Thursday! Anyway, I really hate picking on Vista, because I think everyone is too mean to Microsoft. However, I heard a term a couple of months ago: "people-ready." Mircrosoft claimed that Vista was "people-ready", but it doesn't sound like it from this article. I chose to highlight this article because it's not fanboy dribble like a lot of the stuff you see out there, and you can tell that he spent a lot of time with Vista before becoming irritated with these problems. It's funny that he brings up the copying problem, because it pisses me off, too. Why does a whole copy process or delete process die because one file in your selection has issues? Can't it be more graceful? What's more disturbing though is that they claim to have freed Explorer from Internet Explorer, but they really only did this in namesake. They obviously transferred the same UI over for opening files from some Internet Explorer shell, and it looks worse than what we currently have. And why is it that Windows search still can't match grep on Linux? Grep has been around for forever, and yet there's no equivalent for it in Vista. Despite his annoyance with the Start Menu though, it looks like a drastic improvement, and I don't think that they necessarily made the Network Connections box any worse than it is in XP. I would almost consider issues like this to label it not people-ready because they clearly didn't put the time in to polish it. They need to fire that entire leadership Windows team and hire people who understand what it means to set up a proper schedule for software development.

On the bright side, Microsoft Office 2007 is still a bang-up application and you can get more details on it here. I haven't mentioned its strengths in a while so I felt that this article is a perfect recap of what makes the upgrade special. Also, things are looking up for the Zune: word is that we can expect a flash-based Zune (i.e. an iPod Nano competitor) later this year, likely near the holiday season. Supposedly, we'll also see Zunes with actual WiFi capabilities rather than the crippled firmware on current Zunes, which may finally give it some attractiveness against the iPod. Speaking of music, if you're tired of your music being too loud or too soft on certain tracks, you may like MP3Gain, which will level everything out for you. I'm going to try it out myself, because iTunes will only do it within iTunes, and I want my songs universally leveled. isoHunt has come back online! Not sure how, but I guess they raised enough money to buy some new servers? I mentioned last week that Blu-ray is screwed for having shunned the porn industry, and the New York Times even did a piece about how porn stars are trying to beautify themselves further so that you can't see the little details in HD! I think it's kind of a funny article to see in the NY Times, and am curious as to whether their customers will really care that much about the issues they describe. If you have a laptop and you use it to take notes, you may want to check out this list of top note-taking applications. I'm tagging it myself so that I can check it out when I get a laptop later this semester; the apps look really neat. Lastly, I've always wanted to find card tricks online, and now that I have I just have to share. Check out this list of videos of simple magic tricks and how to do them.

Just a couple of things in movies. David Koepp is speaking with Colombia Pictures to possibly pen a script for Spider-man 4. Nothing is confirmed yet, and no word that anyone would even return for a fourth movie, but I guess they liked the third enough that they felt they could convince everyone to return with a great script. Let's see if it works! The only other thing is the announcement of nominations for the Razzies, and it looks like we had some pretty bad movies this year. Win or lose though, they're all losers at heart.

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. Did you make any resolutions this year?
Just to get a good internship and to try to date some cool girls (I know single ones exist around here somewhere). Oh, and to stop cluttering, as always.

2. If so, which one do you think you'll really stick to? If not, is there something you're going to try harder to accomplish?
The good internship one.

3. Do you have a fear of any small rodents/insects/etc? If so, please share.
Mainly just roaches. They're so gross and just, gross. The thought of them crawling on me makes me cringe.

4. Share something exciting that's going on in your life.
Nothing, really. I'm going to Copa on Thursday, that's the highlight of my week. I'm still scared out of my mind about getting an internship for the summer.

5. Did you wonder what happened to Monday Madness these past few weeks?
Well, I missed posting for a couple of Mondays, so not so much ;) I actually did the super old one last week.