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Too true sadly. Most designers sadly have never heard of developing a design concept before pushing the pixels on the screen. This is why so many designs suck so much.
Ugh! Finally. Thank you Google. Wave has been a total flop for anybody because nobody REALLY understood how to take Wave to an actual use. Google Wave basically was worse than LotusLive could ever be. Rest in peace, nobody will shed a tear for you, Wave… bye bye!
Tumblr: Help Report Sarah Palin’s Ground Zero mosque note to Facebook for being “Racist/Hate Speech.” Click-through to do it.
Update 7/22 11:40am: Refudiated.
I hate that people are freaking out about “censoring free speech,” etc. Facebook has a terms of service, and in that terms of service, it allows people to report a note, etc., for racist/hate speech. And this is exactly that.
Rauf’s statements after 9/11 actually seem spot-on… the US policies were absolutely an accessory to the crime of 9/11 and anyone who doesn’t think so has their head up their own, or the US’s ass.
I don’t like any religion, and Islam is no more justifiable than Christianity, but it is certainly no more justifiable - I don’t see Sarah Palin and her cohorts protesting churches being build amidst the remains of the Crusades, or in gay neighborhoods, or in Muslim neighborhoods, for that matter.
As much as Palin may want to hide it, she is being blatantly racist and is thinly veiling it behind “moral common sense,” which is just absolute nonsense.
inb4 everyone telling me to lay off Palin/Bush, etc., I say this: I will lay off these stupid politicians when they stop being mind-numbingly stupid. Obama demands respect because he is intelligent, and is getting shit done, albeit not as much as the left had hoped. But Bush and Palin and other Republican politicians have proved themselves to be complete imbeciles. As batshit insane as it is to me to associate Christianity to a political party, at least Bush Sr. and Reagan and etc. were intelligent people - lately, the Republican political machine runs on nothing more than fumes of racism, homophobia and ignorance.
OEM Windows 7 sucks. Original Windows 7 rocks!
People who know me would describe me as an Apple evangelist. My first computer was a Mac and although I have seen many Windows computers in my life (let alone the 500 Windows clients and 15 Windows servers I was in charge of for about 4 years for a big banking corporation years back), I have always remained faithful to Apple and its products.
When I started my own business together with my partner about 9 years ago, we scrapped together all the computers we had at the time, resulting in a mixed network of Macs and Windows machines. It did work. Sort of. Until a virus in a Windows machine erased the hard disc of the networked Mac server! Wow! That was something.
Finally we got rid of the last Windows computer in our company and something really cool happened: the entire network and all the machines all of a sudden simply worked! No major crashes any more, no virus problems, no printing or network scanning problems. And from about 1-2 hours per week in computer maintenance (mostly the Windows machines) and at least 1-2 hours not being able to work due to time consuming updates of the Windows machines, we eventually came down to about 15-30 minutes a month (!) in system maintenance, saving us big money big time.
But I’d like to say that I am not ENTIRELY averted to Microsoft Windows, and this little article is going to proof it!
It all started by installing Ubuntu Linux on some Netbooks around. These tiny, Atom processor based computers usually suffered a lot under the pressure of Windows. This is, why (up until recently) many manufacturers remained with Windows XP on these tiny machines to get at least some performance out of them.
But the experience was frustrating as a user. So installing Ubuntu Linux on these light-weight machines was a good idea really and it actually turned out that the machines booted up MUCH quicker and were much more reliable and even faster and showed more computing power running Linux than they did running Windows.
So I started to wonder why the hell PC manufacturers who built specifically for Microsoft Windows never complain to Microsoft and ask them to finally improve Windows because this operation system really steals a lot of performance and makes the user experience of their hardware really bad. Nobody likes to have their product being worsened by another product.
But then I took care of an EEEbox 1501 that was bound to be used as a home entertainment computer. It came pre-bundled with MS Windows 7. I was naturally suspicious of course, though I must say that I actually started to like Windows 7 a lot while running it inside Parallels Desktop on my Mac for testing and development purposes. I have had Vista before and it was a pain while being virtualized. When Microsoft published the first betas of Win7 though, I was already very impressed by the performance of the system running in a virtual environment compared to dreadful Vista.
But I haven’t yet had a chance to see Windows 7 perform on an actual machine.
So I had a look at Windows 7 on the EEEbox and actually liked it. Well. Sort of not liked the fact that the stupid thing is spending WAY more time in constant updates while booting or shutting down. This finally frustrated, yet even annoyed me enough to put Ubuntu on the little home entertainment PC.
Now this brought me to a strange fact of Ubuntu, which I am actually quite shocked of: in order to watch US television over the Internet from Europe, one needs to VPN to a US location which I do using StrongVPN (can highly recommend them!). So the ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS sites see you are coming from a U.S. IP-address and not one from outside the United States.
I had it running on that update crazy Windows 7 which came pre-bundeled and OEM “value added” with tons of software and stuff nobody needs. It ran pretty smooth.
On Ubuntu, the experience was ENTIRELY different though. Network Manager’s PPTP extension is in charge of VPN connections. And it appears that there are speed issues. You can read about it on the Internets, there are several users who complain about this issue. But no real solution was ever given. So on a 3 Mbit DSL line, the VPN throughput shrank down to 0.4 Mbit. Too slow for decent IP TV watching of course.
After lots of analysis, I came to realize it must have something to do with the MTU size and other bits in Ubuntu Linux. Also Network Manager and its GNOME panel app was something I never really liked a lot anyway.
So I was stuck. Now the EEEbox ran on Ubuntu, quite nice actually, Ubuntu really discovered all the fancy hardware that is built into this nettop (and this must have been a challenge, as the EEEbox like most nettops uses quite some not so “out-of-the-box” hardware and components!). But VPN would be a thing I would not get up to the speeds I required.
Of course I had gotten rid of the recovery partition on the EEEbox, too. Yes, beat me for that, but hello, it eats a lot of space and I have got a genuine Windows 7 DVD I bought for the Parallels Desktop virtualizer and on the EEEbox is a genuine Microsoft registration number.
I gave it a second thought. Well, I should REALLY give Windows 7 another try. It runs so smoothly in my virtual environment and doesn’t show all of the update madness at all!
So fresh install. Entered the product licence code off the EEEbox Genuine Windows Sticker, and it all worked, got activated smoothly. I was happy with the result.
After the installation I was highly surprised to see even if some legacy drivers were still missing, the entire EEEbox worked like a charm on this fresh Windows install! Wow! That’s not bad!
However, I still downloaded drivers and stuff from Asus, but spared out the entire application extras they put along, also I did not use the Asus Wireless Driver, as Windows could handle the wireless network component out of the box with no problem at all!
Of course, I knew I had to bring Windows 7 up to speed, so I started Windows Update next. And I was surprised!!! Just 2 important and 3 minor updates. And they all went smoothly and did not kill the machine!
My conclusion now was clear: it was that DARN OEM Windows packed with all sorts of “making something good quite bad” extras from Asus.
And I had my answer: it is not Windows 7 to blame for bad performance on some machines, it is in many cases all that OEM crap vendors built ontop of Windows.
Why do so many wireless network card vendors need to put own user interfaces up to a system from Microsoft that is very nice and well working? I don’t understand.
So all this “making things better than Microsoft” results in corrupting Windows, making things actually worse, and putting a computer into a nightmare of a situation once it comes to updating the entire shit.
I googled around to find that I was not alone. Many system administrators in companies even flatten their new company PCs to get rid of the entire OEM shit they originally shipped and next do a plain installation of Windows.
By the way, did I mention that the computer self test rated the EEEbox at 3.2 using the OEM Windows 7 installation and a 2.5 using a clean install of Windows with only little proprietary drivers where actually really necessary?!
So next time you go nuts over your computer: buy a fresh Windows 7 from Amazon, trash the crazy OEM version, get rid of all the gimmicks nobody needs and enjoy a much better performing computer!
What are your experiences?
Patti Labelle Sings the Alphabet. Too cute to be true!!! Thank you @2bscreen ;-)
