Warning: This is a totally nerdy blog post!

I’m getting more and more concerned that I’m turning in to a Windows fanboy!

A couple of months ago I got new laptop which had Vista pre-installed. Convinced I would hate it I tried to get the IT guy at the office to put XP on instead. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible so I had to get to grips with it.

To my increasing horror, I actually found that I was liking Vista more than XP. After a week I was converted and now I’ll never go back to XP.

I can’t understand why Vista got such a bad name – there is nothing wrong with it! It’s fantastic to use, more user friendly, easier to navigate and very fast!

Infact, Microsoft suspected it was the anti-Microsoft hype that was causing people to have a bad opinion of Vista (and to be fair, that’s what my opinion was based on), so they set up an experiment in San Fransico with 150 people who refused to use and upgrade to Vista because they thought it was so bad. Microsoft told them that they would be trialing their brand new operating system, the successor to Vista.

The result?

They all loved it.

The best part?

They were actually using an out of the box copy of Vista.

Conclusion?

People’s hate of Vista is based on media biased.

If that doesn’t make me sound like a Microsoft fanboy, I don’t know what will!

But it gets even worse.

Recently I lent my phone to my buddy in India. A Nokia N73. I really liked that phone. I had it for two years. I lent it to him for one day and he manages to lose it.

Sidenote: This is not the first phone he has lost, and it wasn’t the first phone I even lent him. He runs a multi-million dollar company, but since I’ve known him, he’s lost 3 phones.

Anyway, since he lost my phone, with all my contacts, all my photos (including the first match at Wembly!), all my notes, everything, he was only right and proper that he bought me a new one.

The phone I chose was a HTC with a touch screen, there’s no keypad, everything is done by touch. My buddy wanted to get my an iPhone, but there’s just something so wrong about it. Everyone seems to love it so much, and it’s considered cool to have one, but to me when everyone wants something, it loses it’s ‘cool’ appeal.

Anyway, back to the HTC phone. It runs Windows Mobile, which I was aprehensive about because everyone knows Nokia has the best usability and easiest navigation. However, once again, Windows exceeded my expectations! Windows Mobile 6 is great to use, the whole touch screen is really intuitive and even better, it makes me cooler than an iPhone user because not everyone has a HTC phone!

Me, a Windows fanboy? Never! Umm.

(sorry for the totally nerdy post guys!)

The Compact Disc is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary today. The BBC has run an article looking at the history of the CD from development to the present day decline as new media takes over. Some interesting facts about the CD…

• The original disc was going to be 11.5cm in diameter but Sony insisted that the disc should be able to hold the full 74 minute recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony so it was increased to 12cm to accomodate it
• Abba released the first commercial CD with their song The Visitor
• Research on using lasers to read the data on the CD began as far back as 1969
• Proof of concept using lasers was completed 12 years earlier
• Record sales of CD’s peaked in 2000 with 2.455 billion. In 2006 that figure was down to 1.755 billion.

Now that new digital mediums are taking over, the CD could become as obsolete as the 3.5″ diskette. With software companies turning to digital delivery of their products over the internet there could be a time when there is no need for CD’s. Even now, with music being downloaded by more and more people, could buying albums on a CD become a niche market like buying albums on vinyl?

The full BBC article can be found here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6950933.stm

Ever fancied yourself as a bit of a galaxy hunter? Ever looked up at the stars and wondered if you are alone out there? Well, never mind the second question, but if you want to help classify over a million galaxies, then Galaxy Zoo could probably use your help.

They have taken photo’s of around a million galaxies (each one contains billions and billions of stars like our own sun…do the maths, it’s not hard to realize there is going to be at least one other ‘Earth’ out there capable of supporting life) and need help classifying them all.

You have to take a short tutorial explaining the different types of galaxies (Eliptical or Spiral) and then have to take a nerve racking test to find out if your galaxy hunting skills are good enough for what they need. If you pass then you are allowed to start classifying real galaxies.

The whole concept of letting people around the world help out with scientific studies is growing in popularity. Classifying the galaxies has been difficult to do with computers because they are not adept at spotting patterns, and getting a few people to so the classification would take time and resources. By letting hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people around the world help out they can complete their study in months rather than years.

Continue reading →

It seems that if you are a 20 something in the UK you can’t have a conversation with someone for more than 5 minutes without the dreaded words Facebook being mentioned.

Since it opened it’s doors to the general public in September 2006 it has seen a wild fire like growth in the UK. I don’t feel as if MySpace ever really cracked the 2nd generation of internet users (people that came online around 1995 – 2000), certainly amongst my circle of friends MySpace was never mentioned. With the garish profile pages, unreadable fonts and eyewatering backgrounds it was something that I feel appealed more to the teenagers than us college grads (being the sophisticated grownups dontcherknow).

Now here we are, July 2007, not even a year after Facebook opened it’s doors to the general public and I think 70% of my year group from high school is registered and a fair amount of people from my university. Most of my mates from back home have a profile and it’s growing day by day. Considering that there are were an estimated 1.3 million UK users in March 2007, I reckon there must be 2 million or more now.

So, with the meteoric rise of Facebook, certain types of users have emerged, which one are you?

Continue reading →

My friend bought a new laptop the other day after his old died on him (shows a blank white screen on startup – anyone have any ideas?). So he toddled off to the local PC World to have a look at the laptops. I seem to remember a time a few years ago where desktop PC’s took up the floor space and laptops were confined to one or two rows. Now laptops dominate the floorspace.

While browsing the laptops, I came across a Compaq Presario with the following spec:

1. 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo Processor
2. 2 GB RAM
3. 120 GB HDD
4. 256 MB Shared Graphics
5. 15.4″ Widescreen LCD
6. Dual Layer DVD +/- ReWriter
7. Vista Home Premium

All that for just £599 – an absolute bargain. Since I’m still using a beat up old Compaq with a PIII & 256MB RAM I knew that they make good sturdy laptops; which is more than can be said for the Toshiba my friend was using. So eventually after a bit of umming and ahing he took the plunge and bought the new Compaq (and I don’t know how I walked out without one, I was this close | | to getting one myself). He got a right touch on it too, getting £20 knocked off for signing up to their ‘care’ plan – which was free and can be cancelled at any time.

So he gets it home and spends the necessary hour or two installing and setting it up (I want to know, can you really take a Apple Mac out of it’s box and be on the internet in 5 minutes? Is it really that easy?!) we both noticed that it seemed a little…sluggish.

He had installed the latest version of Zone Alarm and Webroot’s Spy Sweeper and removed a lot of the none essential components and software. Even with 2 GB of RAM the system just seemed a little slow – like 1/2 second too slow, just enough to notice it. We timed the start up time and it came to 2 minutes to start up Vista with the ZA and SS installed. By contrast, my crappy old laptop which runs XP professional on a mere 256 MB RAM and hasn’t been tuned up, scanned or defragged in centuries, started up in 1 1/2 minutes.

The situation was even worse for shutting Windows Vista Premium down, it seems to go on for an eternity. This is for a brand new machine with Core 2 Duo and 2 GB RAM remember.

I called up another friend who had just bought a top of the range desktop PC and he said that just running Vista and Norton AV his computer takes up 1 GB of RAM…and that’s when it’s idle! I can’t see how you can buy a machine and run Vista normally with less than 2 GB.

I’ve been seriously considering buying a new laptop, and as I said earlier I was so close to getting one the other day. But after seeing the (non) performance of Vista…I think I’m gonna pass. If I do get one, I will have to find a company that still ships a machine with Windows XP or else I might have to be forced to uninstall Vista and get a copy of XP myself.

Update: I’ve done some further reading and research. It seems that start up and shut down times on Windows Vista that can be timed in milleniums is a common complaint amongst users. Some point to driver problems or software incompatibility.

Just read an article where the author fiendishly attacks the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars and various Steven Spielburg films.

You can read the article here

While the article is quite humourous, the part I like the most is this bit…

“What Jackson is essentially pandering to…is his audience’s adolescent reluctance to engage with the real world. A grand quest to save Middle-earth from the forces of evil is an ideal escape from the more prosaic realities of finding a job and paying the rent, while forming a cosy boy’s club with your hairy-toed mates can’t help but appeal compared to the thorny practicalities of flesh-and-blood relationships”

Man! I love LOTR and other escapist stuff like Star Wars, Back to the Future and the cool Discworld novels. There’s nothing like escaping the real world for a few hours and become immersed in a battle between good and evil.

I’m not sure how I’m going to pay the rent this month though…oh, and I don’t have a ‘proper’ job. Looks like the author hit the nail on the head 😀