Archive for January, 2007

Wikilobbying

This is the word from Stephen Colbert, wikilobbying. This is pretty funny, wikipedia, the encyclopedia where you can be an authority, even if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. He even mentions the fact that Microsoft got caught trying to pay a blogger to edit the ODF/OOXML article to correct what they say are inaccuracies.

Vista Gaming Performance Compared to XP

Ryan Shrout at PC Perspective has done a great review comparing the performance using the latest video drivers from NVidia and ATI for Windows Vista and comparing them to performance of the same cards on Windows XP. While AMD came to them to ask what their testing plans were, he said he had to pry a driver from NVidia and said you could tell AMD had been working on theirs longer.

Because of these dramatic changes to the graphics system, both NVIDIA and AMD have had to spend significant time redeveloping their graphics drivers to work with the new Windows Vista operating system. Both NVIDIA and AMD (and ATI) have been working on Vista development for YEARS and we have been hearing claims of having the best “Vista Support” from both camps nearly as long. But now that the day of redemption is actually here, who will come out on top?

I decided to take the retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate, got the latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA as of Friday and began to spend my weekend testing. What is important to note here is that my intention is NOT to compare the ATI Radeon cards against NVIDIA GeForce cards — rather it was to compare the gaming experiences provided by ATI and NVIDIA on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Should gamers worry about upgrading to Vista right away or should they wait for driver stability and performance to catch up with the Microsoft vision? Read on to find out. Source: Windows Vista Gaming Performance – NVIDIA and ATI Compared

The review says in conclusion don’t be scared by all the doom and gloom you have read concerning video gaming in Windows Vista, as the number are comparable to the XP numbers, and while NVidia had the edge in performance over AMD, this is mainly because NVIDIA has the GeForce 8800 series of cards available and AMD’s R600 has not been released yet, so the poor driver performance did not hurt them in this test, but will probably be a different story once the new card from AMD has been released.

Gmail and Google Docs Become More Integrated

Those folks who use Google Docs and Spreadsheets, you will be interested in this, the people who work on Google Docs have integrated it with Gmail. What was a very convoluted process before, if now a one click deal. Right beside the download link for attachments in your emails will be a link that says Open as a Google document. It’s a lot easier than it was, check it out.

We know many Google Docs & Spreadsheets fans are also Gmail users. We’ve heard from scores of you since we launched Docs & Spreadsheets, and the most common request is for more integration between the two products. It comes as no surprise — everyone gets heaps of docs in their email. Until recently, if you received a document attached to an email message and wanted to import it into D&S, it was a convoluted process — download the attachment to your desktop, then upload it to D&S. No more. Now the Gmail team has launched a one-click import feature that you’ll really appreciate.

Whenever those of you who use Gmail receive a spreadsheet or a document in an email, you will see a new link next to the “Download” link that says “Open as a Google document.” Click on that and the attachment will automatically be imported into Docs & Spreadsheets and added to your personal document list where you can make changes, invite collaborators and search for it later. We hope you like it. Source: Docs & Spreadsheets integrates with Gmail

Pretty cool, now if only the folks at Gmail would give us ALL the option to pull in our other email address to Gmail, I would be happy.

Todays Windows Vista Stories

No, I don’t mean stories featuring Windows Vista, I mean news stories about Windows Vista, it’s features, reviews, liked it, don’t like it, whatever. Ed Bott posted an article today called Windows Vista’s three killer features, and if you ask me, he couldn’t of picked a more boring set of features to crow about. The first one he talks about is interesting in the fact that some of the big competing programs, like Google’s Picasa, do it differently. He’s talking about Windows Photo Gallery and the fact that it stores the photos metadata in the photo itself, while Picasa and Apple’s iPhoto use sidecar files.

Windows Photo Gallery. Ho-hum, right? Just another lightweight program to import photos from a digital camera? What most reviewers miss is Photo Gallery’s support for the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP), developed by Adobe and used in a variety of professional-strength photo-editing applications. When you tag a JPEG or TIFF photo with keywords in Windows Vista, those tags are stored directly in the file as metadata, which you can use to search, sort, and filter images in Photo Gallery. That’s a great leap forward from Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa, both of which store metadata in sidecar files rather than in the image itself.

Windows Speech Recognition. You probably haven’t heard much about speech recognition in Windows Vista. If you did, it was probably thanks to a demo that went awry last summer and was widely reported. That’s a shame, because the built-in speech-to -text conversion software in the final release works exceptionally well for controlling the Windows interface and dictating text.

Windows Desktop Search. Yes, you have lots of third-party desktop search options for Windows XP. I’ve tried them all and never found one that was reliable enough for daily use. What makes Vista’s search so useful is the fact that it’s integrated directly into the operating system, so you can search in the Start menu, in Control Panel, in Explorer windows, and in common dialog boxes. I miss this capability most when I sit down at a Windows XP machine and try to find a specific Control Panel option. It also just works. I haven’t had to rebuild indexes or mess with search settings on any Vista PCs in my office. Source: Windows Vista?s three killer features

Stewart Butterfield from the Flickrblog says a good reason to get Vista is because several of the wallpaper files include ones from Flickr members.

One good reason to consider an upgrade to Vista, Microsoft’s just-released upgrade to Windows: the default set of desktop wallpapers it ships with include several from Flickr members. Long Zheng has a blog post with some examples, and Microsoft’s Raymond Chen has more details.
Reportedly, Microsoft experience designer Jenny Lam considered around 10,000 images, combing traditional sources and commissioning a few photo shoots, but is happiest with the ones that came from Flickr members, like these from Hamad Darwish. Source: A Key Benefit of Vista

While it may be nice that their members created several of these files, it is definitely not a reason to upgrade, but the images he shows on the blog are definitely very good.

Nail Kennedy says no one is lining up for Windows Vista in San Francisco.

Earlier tonight I attended a Windows Vista launch event in San Francisco and was surprised to find not a single person in line to buy the software less than an hour before launch. CompUSA stayed open late to provide hands-on demonstrations of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista and Office 2007 but for most people I talked to in the store the event was a learning experience and a chance for some special sales and discounts. When I left about 45 minutes before Vista officially went on sale to consumers there were no eager customers ready for launch. Source: No one is lining up for Windows Vista in San Francisco

Seriously, was anybody expecting anyone to line up for a copy of a Windows Operating System? Sure, there are going to be Mac fan boys who line up for anything, and I don’t mean that it’s not worth lining up for, but he said he figured there would be a few to compare to the 200+ that were at the last Apple OS X event. I’m not surprised at all. Most people who are really into Windows probably have been using it for awhile and anybody else who would want it, would they line up? I want a copy of Windows Vista, but not bad enough to wait in line for it, I’ll be ready when my copy comes in the mail. And besides, how much ridicule would someone have to take from people for waiting in line for a copy of any Microsoft operating system?

Is Google TV for Real?

I’ve just been reading about this whole Google TV thing that has been going on, where this guy named Mark Erickson in a video from Infinite Solutions, shows you how to get an invite to the next big beta from Google, Google TV. It’s a pretty good hoax for lots of reasons. Google buying Youtube, Google wants to own all forms of advertising so they will get to TV sooner or later, as more quality content is created online, they will be able to translate that over to TV, and soon we will be watching TV on the Internet and the Internet on TV. Both videos that were created by them are high quality, especially the second video as it actually looks like he is accessing a Google TV site. Both videos are below. Is it real, probably in some other form, but this is one well done hoax and should get an A for effort at least.

Now watch the second video here, it looks to me like they created a movie and he is operating the mouse and keyboard like he is controlling the computer, notice how they don’t show his hands and movie at the same time, and even went as far as to show him entering the wrong password once because he is nervous. He even grabs the monitor once and moves it around and says there is no way he can fake this, he’s not ILM, Industrial Light & Magic.

It would be very easy to fake the address in the IE address bar, and as people noted at Techcrunch, there are no DNS entries for tv.google.com, and they have another video of a guy that says he copied every link and emailed all of them to himself and it worked for him on the 114th try, hehe. This is starting to sound like a poor mans DOS attack, by getting thousands of people emailing themselves multiple times and logging in and out many, many times, it overloads there servers. Several times tonight I have received errors because gmail was unable to perform an operation.

This just gets better and better. New video found via CenterNetworks “confirming” the accuracy of the hoax. This guy says he got it to work on his 114th login, after copying numerous links on the Gmail settings page. Source: Google TV – An Elaborate Hoax

Google Blogoscoped has got the official word from Google, just in case you had some doubts left in your mind.

Alas, Mark’s “Google TV beta” is simply a figment of his fertile imagination. But great entertainment for all of us here at the Googleplex. Source: Google TV (Hoax)

I admit I tried it and logged into Gmail probably 30 times to just make sure before I posted, so I was part of the problem as well. Erik even has another “great video” called How to Increase Your Wi-Fi Signal where he tells us to wrap an Ethernet cable around a cell phone and plug the other end into your computer and it will boost your wifi signal, and, he ads, you can coat a salad bowl with aluminum foil to get an even better signal, two hole bars better, hehe. That Erik, he sure is funny.

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Microsoft “Helping Us Out” Yet Again

If you are like me, you like to a reinstall of your systems whenever they start to slow down or develop problems, or just to try something new, but it looks like Microsoft will be blocking that to. While most people will use an upgrade license to just upgrade their system, lots of us like to do a fresh install on an upgrade, and in the past this has been possible because you could just supply your “qualifying CD”, the install CD for the previous OS, and away you go. Not sure if this is to prevent users from getting a really cheap copy to install on a different machine, since most manufacturers will send you and upgrade disk if you purchased your pc in the past couple months. I have an upgrade copy coming for my laptop, so I will be seeing for myself really soon I hope.

Microsoft’s quest to closely control the way Windows Vista can be used on PCs has taken a turn for the worse as new information indicates that the company is breaking tradition when it comes to Windows Vista upgrades. With Windows Vista, users will not be able to use upgrade keys to initiate completely new installations. It is a change that will affect few users, but enthusiasts will certainly be amongst those pinched.

One again, Microsoft appears to have made licensing decisions without considering how people actually use their products. Last fall the company trotted out changes to its retail licensing that would have punished users who frequently upgrade their PC hardware had the company not relented. Now Microsoft seeks to complicate our ability to start a crisp, new install with an upgrade version. Why? Source: Ars Technica

This will “probably” prevent users from getting a free copy of Vista for a different machine, but will surely cause them some more bad press from enthusiasts, much the same way they did when they tried to change the licensing terms, which would’ve prevented some users from upgrading their machines more than once. Luckily they relented after many users, of which some were beta testers, complained about the new terms. This time, I doubt there is anything they will do.

From the KB article;

You purchase an upgrade key for Windows Vista. Then, you try to use the upgrade key to perform a clean installation of Windows Vista by starting from a Windows Vista DVD. However, Windows Vista does not let you perform a clean installation by using the upgrade key, and you cannot upgrade to Windows Vista.
Back to the top

CAUSE
This problem occurs because Windows Vista does not check upgrade compliance. Therefore, you cannot use an upgrade key to perform a clean installation of Windows Vista.

RESOLUTION
To resolve this problem, use one of the following methods.

Method 1
Upgrade to Windows Vista from an earlier, supported version of Windows that is already installed on the computer.

Method 2
Purchase a license that lets you perform a clean installation of Windows Vista.

Verizon Told Steve Jobs No Thanks

Looks like Verizon passed on the iPhone from apple a couple years ago, saying Apple wanted to much, including a percentage of the monthly cell phone fees, say-so over where it could be sold, and even say-so on whether a iPhone would be repaired or replaced, kind of taking Verizon out of the loop and surely making it harder for anyone to support the phone. I can hear the phone calls now, “What do you mean I have to call Apple now, can’t you all fix it?”

Among other things, Apple wanted a percentage of the monthly cell phone fees, say over how and where iPhones could be sold and control of the relationship with iPhone customers, said Jim Gerace, a Verizon Wireless vice president. “We said no. We have nothing bad to say about the Apple iPhone. We just couldn’t reach a deal that was mutually beneficial.”

Verizon’s decision to pull the plug on talks sent Apple into the waiting arms of Cingular, which will be the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone. The multifunction device is expected to ship in June and cost about $500.

The problem? While Apple and Verizon stores would have it, Wal-Mart, Best Buy and other Verizon distributors could have been left out. “That would have put our own distribution partners at a disadvantage” to Apple and Verizon stores, Gerace said.

Customer care was another hitch: If an iPhone went haywire, Apple wanted sole discretion over whether to replace or repair the phone. “They would have been stepping in between us and our customers to the point where we would have almost had to take a back seat on hardware and service support,” Gerace says. Source: Verizon rejected Apple iPhone deal

This is one of those items I will probably never have, I have never liked phones, and certainly don’t want to spend over $100 dollars on one, let alone $500, plus monthly fees that will likely be jacked up some because of Cingular having to give part of the monthly cell phone plans. I’m not an Apple hater by any means, love the iPods, looking forward to trying out a Mac pretty soon, but I’m certainly not an Apple fan boy either. The only way I will ever try one out is if it shows up in a box at my door one day, so, I probably will only see one if someone I know gets one. I don’t think I will see one for a long time.

Office 2007 Review Part 2

If you have read any of Paul Thurrot’s reviews on any of his sites, you know they are usually detailed, in-depth reviews, and the Office 2007 Review is no exception, as a matter of fact this is part 2 and part 3 will be coming sometime in the future. The short of it, he says upgrade, it is well worth, if you are already a power user, you may have to relearn a few things, but it is worth it, and if you aren’t a power user, the upgrades Microsoft has made will put you well on your way.

Some of the most popular Office 2007 applications–Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and, to a lesser degree, Outlook–have been updated with the new Ribbon user interface (in Outlook, only sub-windows like Mail Message have been updated). These applications have a pleasant graphical sheen of newness about them, but the improvements are not just skin deep. Unfortunately, these new Ribbon-based applications also make the non-updated applications–and, actually, Outlook–look sad by comparison. Once you’ve used the Ribbon, going back to a menus and toolbars-based UI is actually pretty painful. Hopefully, the rest of the Office suite will be updated to the new UI in a future update.

As a writer, Web developer, and heavy email user, I’ve always looked forward to the evolutionary improvements in each new Office release. With Office 2007, the improvements, for the first time ever, are revolutionary and will impact all users. The new Ribbon-based user interface is the key improvement, and will make the power previously hidden inside Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint more readily available and accessible, thus turning a generation of casual Office users into power users. For this reason alone, I strongly recommend that new and casual Office users consider upgrading as soon as possible. The Ribbon is an absolute win for all users, however: Though today’s power users will have a bit of relearning to do, the results will be worth it. If you thought you knew any of these applications inside and out, think again: You’ll be surprised to discover new and interesting functionality yourself. Source: Microsoft Office 2007 Review Part 2: What’s New?

Here is a screenshot, it looks great, I can’t wait to get a copy of it.

27 Conference Call Tips

If you are like me, you hate conference calls, it’s usually one or two people talking, or droning on and on, but if you can’t meet someone it’s almost the next best thing. WebWorker Daily has put together 27 tips for all of you conference callers out there and here is the first one.

Whether you call them conference calls or telecons or excruciatingly dull time-wasters, multi-participant phone conversations are as important to most web workers as email. If you can?t meet face to face or arrange video conferencing, the conference call is the next best thing. But just as with email and instant messaging, people don?t always agree on how to use them as effectively as possible as a tool for collaboration.

Try these tips for your next telecon whether you?re the leader of the call or just a participant. And share your own ideas for making conference calls worthwhile and productive in the comments.

1. Get the dial in. If you?re leading the call, it?s your job to make it easy on the people calling in by setting up a dial-in or otherwise getting everyone together on the phone. If you?re an employee, your company may have already chosen a conference calling service for you to use. Otherwise, you can use a variety of online services including foonz, FreeConference.com, and LiveOffice.

These services and others like them allow you to set up a conference dial-in for free, but long distance charges will apply. They also provide premium services such as toll-free numbers for US and Canadian callers. For example, FreeConference.com will provide a toll-free conference dial-in number for $0.10 a minute per caller. Source: 27 Tips for Teleconferencing

If you would rather try video conferencing, you should check out the free trial available from GoToMeeting
.