My company hasn’t embraced Vista. We have been ordering Windows XP “downgrades” for months and staving off the inevitable as long as possible. Today I received in a machine that I needed to set up for engineering, and it came in with Visa Business. A mistake, but I figured as long as I had it here, I might as well mess around with it. So far I am not very impressed. There hasn’t been any crashing to speak of, so that much is good news, but annoyances abound, and many of the things I hated about XP are still there.
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Its been more than a year since I first wrote that Street View had quickly turned Google’s otherwise slick and useful 2D web-based mapping into a 3D street-level peep-show par excellance. Since then I’ve had an image in my mind of a white van with the Google logo on it cruising around imaging all those streets for some reason. I guess if I had been really interested I would have found some stories like this one that revealed early on that they were actually using a VW bug, but I didn’t know that. When I discovered a couple street view images with the car still in the image, I thought I had discovered some big secret…
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I’ve been hearing from a guy at work over the years about Bill Gates’ philanthropy and how I shouldn’t be such a Microsoft-hater since he’s obviously such a good guy as a philanthropist. Today when I read that one of my heros Richard Stallman was asked by the BBC to write a column about Bill’s recent step down from M$ and that he was less than generous to old Billy boy, I had to do some investiGate-ing. Stallman’s article is mainly about how…
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I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta on the Thinkpad (the machine running ubuntu) for about a month now, and I like it. It’s a lot faster than Firefox 2, which is certainly welcome since Ff2 isn’t even as fast as IE in my opinion, and since we’ve been standardized on Mozilla for many years at work, its been a common complaint (I really don’t care since we also haven’t had any virus problems in all these years either). Firefox 3 is due to be released in the next couple weeks, and if you’re already using Firefox, you might enjoy taking a look at what’s new in the next version. If you don’t use Firefox already, here’s a good time to try it out. The plugin architecture is fantastic, offering all sorts of neat addons that help you do the jobs you need to do, as well as blocking ads and malicious scripts.

Caveat: I have no hands-on with Microsoft’s Windows Vista as yet so I do not speak from experience really, on this topic. I attended one of those Microsoft Vista launching shin-digs at a swanky hotel before it’s release and was treated to it’s obvious eye-candy, and I’ve read a great deal about it - but have avoided specifying any new machines with Vista for work. I’ve bought at least 7 machines since Vista launched, so I had the opportunity to grab a copy, but really haven’t felt the need to ‘move my own cheese’ so to speak. However, it certainly appears that the anti-Vista sentiment is growing. More evidence of this landed in my inbox yesterday…

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