Archive for the 'Microsoft' Category

Windows 7 Taskbar Notifications

Friday, November 13th, 2009

With Windows XP and Vista, when an application wanted to attract your attention, it would flash its window in the task bar. When it stopped flashing, it would stay a fairly obvious orange colour. Windows 7 uses a different mechanism, and one I find far too subtle. Looking at this, you’re probably thinking “hey it’s […]

Why I Like Flash Video

Monday, July 13th, 2009

I like Flash video because I hate this:

Google Chrome OS

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Google has announced the Chrome OS. There’s been speculation for years about Google introducing an OS, but somehow the actual announcement seems anti-climatic. Maybe it’s because of the existing prevalence of Netbooks running Linux. It makes me wonder what Google stands to gain by doing this. This is a scenario that Microsoft has been working […]

Where is the Xbox 360 Lite?

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

The Xbox 360’s hardware has been a disaster since day one. I love my Xbox 360, but a lot of that love is in spite of all the things the 360 does to make me hate it. I’m on my 5th console (although this one seems to be a good one – I’ve had it […]

live.sysinternals.com

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Cool: http://live.sysinternals.com A direct link to a runnable version of the latest SysInternals tools.

Silverlight and Pluggable Codecs

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Flash has been doing video on the web for years now, and doing an awesome job at it. The Flash Player has a number of built-in codecs, and all the Flash video on the web plays in the latest Flash player, no hassles. And HD videos look great. Microsoft, on the other hand, has their […]

Windows 7 Performance

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Here’s some great news: Benchmarks of Windows 7 show that it’s not only faster than Vista, but faster than Windows XP.

Two UI “Features” I Just Don’t Understand

Friday, November 28th, 2008

One on the Mac, and one on the PC. First, the Mac. When you’re selecting items in a list by holding down shift and using the arrow keys, pressing the arrow in the opposite direction expands the selection the other way, rather than reducing the selection. Let me illustrate: Here’s a finder window where I […]

I Want an Xbox 360 on my Desk

Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

No, not at work. At home. This is how I played games before I got into console gaming. On computers. The Vic-20, Commodore 64, Amiga, DOS-era PCs, and the PCs are all systems I used for gaming. They all sat on my desk, hooked up to a monitor. They all had a keyboard, and most […]

Developer Conference Videos

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

Apple has made the videos from their latest WWDC available for purchase on iTunes, the way Microsoft did for the PDC videos. Except that Microsoft doesn’t charge you $999 to watch them. Crappy move, Apple.