One customer’s nightmare getting a refund on Vista.

My laptop was stolen, so I went down to Best Buy and picked up an HP dv6815nr since it was on sale for $599.99+tax. After powering it up, I was confronted by the Microsoft Windows Vista EULA and the HP EULA.

If you take the time to read the Microsoft EULA it is disturbing to say the least. But I won’t get into that here - many others have bashed this EULA to bits. Notice that there is no option to not accept their terms - you agree, or else… Or else what? I stared at the screen, and decided it was time to take the leap to Linux.

I found an 800 number on the HP website and made Phone Call #1 Read the full story on Equiliberate.Org

From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X—Part III

 

“…All things considered, Apple is offering an attractive platform. The APIs are robust, the tools are good (and getting better), the design philosophy is coherent, and the platform as a whole has a direction. The company will continue to improve and refine the experience for users and developers alike.

But it’s not without some regret that I move away from Windows. There are good things that come out of Microsoft. I like Visual Studio a lot, I think Office 2007 is fantastic, and there are parts of the .NET platform that could be very good. I think Microsoft could—and should—do better.” Read the full article on ArsTechnica.Com

Windows 95 Architect Is a Happy Mac Convert

Software engineer Satoshi Nakajima, the lead architect of Microsoft’s Windows 95, picked up a Mac for the first time two years ago.

He was so impressed, he says he’ll never touch a PC again.

Satoshi loves Apple products so much, he started a company in April, Big Canvas, to develop for Apple’s iPhone platform full-time.

“We have chosen iPhone as the platform to release our first product (for) several reasons,” explains his company’s website. “We love Apple products… You need love to be creative.”

Based in Bellevue, WA - right next to Microsoft’s home turf of Redmond - Satoshi spent nearly 14 years at Microsoft, serving as the software architect of Windows 95 and 98. He also oversaw the development of Internet Explorer 3.0 and 4.0. While at Microsoft, he developed the third largest portfolio of intellectual property of any employee at the company, according to his bio. Read the full story on CultOfMac.Com

Vista: Victim of Enterprise Malaise

Windows Vista probably deserves a break, but it won’t be getting one from Major—what Microsoft would call—milestones aren’t driving enterprises to radically change their Vista adoption plans. Even I’m surprised. I expected the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or the end of Windows XP OEM sales to mean something for Vista adoption. Nope.

If Vista were a person, it might have an insecurity complex from all the rejection—and for good reason. Not since Windows Me has a Microsoft operating system seen such cool market reception. Based on a recent eWEEK survey of more than 400 IT decision makers, enterprises aren’t lessening their resistance, even when there is good reason. Read the full article on Microsoft-Watch.Com

Vista: DOA in the Enterprise

The year-to-year, or wave-to-wave, surveys are yet another dismal pronouncement on the state of Vista adoption among businesses. The numbers are grim, and there’s not much spin I could put on them, even if I were so inclined. I’m not. The data should always tell the story-and there’s a whopper here.

The really bad news for Microsoft: the number of business PCs running Windows XP increased from 2007 to 2008-three times the increase in the percentage of PCs running Vista.

Perhaps worse: The majority of businesses waiting for Vista-meaning those running older Windows versions-migrated to XP instead. Microsoft had counted on Windows 2000 and older versions to go to Vista. The newest Windows saw some conversion, but XP got much more.

Windows Vista Adoption

Worse still: By the end of 2008, the majority of businesses will have just 9 percent of their PCs running Vista. The number only rises to 28 percent in 2010.

Welcome to the world of continued Windows XP dominance. Read the full article on Microsoft-Watch.Com

Mac OS X market share surges 32% in one year

Apple Inc.’s operating system market share has increased by nearly 32% in the last year, according to data collected by an Internet metrics company.

Last month, Apple’s Mac OS X accounted for 7.94% of the operating systems powering computers that accessed the 40,000 Web sites Net Applications monitors for its clients, the company reported yesterday. A year ago, Mac OS X’s usage share stood at 6.03%. Read the full story on ComputerWorld.Com

Classic Clips: Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft Over XP

From Gizmodo.Com:

“With Bill Gates saying good-bye to Microsoft this week, we’re realizing more by the day how much we’ll miss the guy. And when reading through the many interviews floating around this week, we came across this jewel from 2003. A leaked memo from Microsoft, it’s several pages of Gates just laying into his design and programming staff for—among other issues—his personal experience when trying to install Windows Moviemaker. And it’s a very fulfilling read if you’ve ever been frustrated by a Microsoft product.”

Head on over to Gizmodo to see this jewel for yourself. It includes such wonderful quotes as: “The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)” Gizmodo.Com

Microsoft: Don’t like Vista? Turn it into XP

 

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, responding to a question about the support for XP off the shelf, said that customers can buy Vista, then downgrade to XP for free. “I don’t know how you can do better than getting both,” Mr. Ballmer said Tuesday in Washington D.C.

According to InformationWeek on Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer’s comments suggest that Microsoft doesn’t see the license provision as a loophole to be exploited by disgruntled customers but, in fact, is endorsing a program to spur sales of Vista.

Despite Microsoft’s claim that 140 million copies of Vista have been sold, enterprise customers have had problems with Vista’s onerous hardware requirements, incompatibilities with older applications and driver issues.

According to Paul McDougall with IW, this raises the question of how many copies of Vista are actually in service because of the special licensing provision. Some PC makers, including Dell, have “pre-downgraded” the PC from Vista to XP before delivering the PC to the end user. Read the full story on InformationWeek.Com Found via TheMacObserver.Com

 

PC sales are way down. Macs way up.

“…Consider this: Apple’s retail market share is 14 percent, and two-thirds for PCs costing $1,000 or more.

Should I repeat those numbers? The share data is for first-quarter brick-and-mortar stores, as tabulated by 

the NPD Group. Apple’s market share is but one measure of success. Sales growth is way up, while Windows desktop PC sales are way down.

“In notebooks they’re growing two times the market,” said Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry 

analysis. “Windows notebooks are pretty much flat right now.”

For the first quarter, Windows notebooks had “zero percent” growth year over year, Stephen said. By comparison, Apple notebooks had “50 to 60 percent growth.”

On the desktop, “They’re up 45 percent,” he continued. “The [overall] market is down 20 percent. Windows desktops would be down 25 percent.” The figures are also for first quarter.

I spoke with Stephen earlier this afternoon. He remarked: “iMacs are growing and the Windows desktop ain’t. No matter how you look at it, Apple is outperforming Windows.”  Read the full article on Apple Watch

PC gamers shun Vista, sticking with XP

Games like Crysis benefit clearly from the DX 10 upgrade, but that benefit hasn’t been enough to push gamers into upgrading to Vista. Historically, those are the very first computer users, living on the bleeding edge, to upgrade to new hardware and operating systems. The statistics from Valve, whose Steam system lets gamers download titles from the web and which collects system information in return, shows that Vista still has less than a 15 percent market share among these users.

That’s roughly in line with the total consumer market, but it’s a real surprise considering the advantages Vista’s DirectX 10 offers gamers. There’s no way to run DirectX 10 on XP, so the only way to get the very best PC gaming experience is to run Vista. They should theoretically be lining up to buy Vista in droves. Read the full article on Yahoo Tech

 

InfoWorld’s “Save XP” Petition

 

“…Millions of us have grown comfortable with XP and don’t see a need to change to Vista. It’s like having a comfortable apartment that you’ve enjoyed coming home to for years, only to get an eviction notice. The thought of moving to a new place — even with the stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, and maple cabinets (or is cherry in this year?) — just doesn’t sit right. Maybe it’ll be more modern, but it will also cost more and likely not be as good a fit. And you don’t have any other reason to move.

 

That’s exactly the conclusion people have come to with Vista. For most of us, there’s really no reason to move to it — yet we don’t have a choice. When that strong desire to stick with XP became obvious in spring 2007, major computer makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard quietly reintroduced new XP-based systems (but just to business customers, so as not to offend Microsoft). Come June 30, however, even that option goes away.” Read the full story and sign the petition at InfoWorld.Com

From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user’s conversion to Mac OS X—Part II

“…I want to write nice applications. I want to be able to concentrate on my own code rather than fighting the API the whole time. I want my applications to fit in with the OS and work in a way that’s consistent with first-party applications and even other third-party programs. I want this because I think it leads to better software; it means I can spend my time creating innovative and useful software that people enjoy using. I really want to do this, but you know what? On Windows it’s just too damn hard.

Microsoft has had good opportunities to do something about this, but they have been systematically squandered through a combination of ineptitude, mismanagement, and slavish adherence to backwards compatibility. The disillusionment I feel is incredible. I enjoy writing programs, but I don’t enjoy writing for Windows. And while once it made sense to stick with Windows, it just doesn’t any more. There’s now an attractive alternative: Mac OS X”  Read the full article on ArsTechnica

 

Why ‘No Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy

Once confined to marketing departments and media companies, the Mac is spilling over into a wider array of business environments, thanks to the confluence of a number of computing trends, not the least among them a rising tide of end-user affinity for the Apple experience.

 

Luckily for IT, many of those same trends are making it easier for tech departments to say yes to the Mac by facilitating IT’s ability to provide enterprise-grade Mac management and support.

“We’re seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs,” notes David Plavin, operations manager for Mac systems engineering at the U.S. IT division of Publicis Groupe, a global advertising conglomerate. There are so many requests that Plavin now supports 2,500 Macs across the U.S. — nearly a quarter of all Publicis’ U.S. PCs.

And Plavin is less of an anomaly than you might think. Buoyed by increased interest in the consumer arena, Macs are cropping up in more and more organizations, in large part because end-users are pushing for them. Read the full article on InfoWorld.Com

 

From Win32 to Cocoa: A Windows developer’s conversion to Mac OS X

“A couple of Gartner analysts have recently claimed that Windows is “collapsing”; that it’s too big, too sprawling, and too old to allow rapid development and significant new features. Although organizations like Gartner depend on trolling to drum up business, I think this time they could be onto something. “Collapsing” is over-dramatic-gradual decline is a more likely outcome-but the essence of what they’re saying-and why they’re saying it-rings true.

Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it-that’s the argument. The truth is that Windows is hampered by 25-year old design decisions. These decisions mean that it’s clunky to use and absolutely horrible to write applications for. The applications that people do write are almost universally terrible. They’re ugly, they’re inconsistent, they’re disorganized; there’s no finesse, no care lavished on them. Microsoft-surely the company with the greatest interest in making Windows and Windows applications exude quality-is, in fact, one of the worst perpetrators.” Read the full article on ArsTechnica.Com

 

Ballmer: Vista is ‘a work in progress’

 

As PC users clamor for Microsoft to continue to support Windows XP, company CEO Steve Ballmer called the Vista OS “a work in progress” at an annual Seattle event on Thursday.

“It’s a very important piece of work. We did a lot of things right and have a lot of things we need to learn from. You never want to let five years go between releases,” he said.

While Microsoft recently extended the date when the XP software will be available for low-cost PCs, it doesn’t plan to listen to some other complaints, including that Vista is too big. “Vista is bigger than XP and it’s gonna stay bigger than XP,” Ballmer said. Read the full story on MacWorld.Com

 

IBM contemplating switching to Macs?

“IBM’s Research Information Services division is investigating the possibility of moving a significant number of employees to Apple’s Macintosh platform according to a report acquired by RoughlyDrafted.
“In line with IBM’s external strategy of offering a true ‘Open Client’ that may be Windows, Linux or a Mac,” the document noted, “[Research Information Services] is focusing on providing an IBM application stack on multiple Operating Systems, rather than be confined to one or the other.”
The first phase of the pilot program was conducted between October 2007 and January 2008. During this phase, 24 MacBook Pros were distributed to researchers and used as the primary notebook, with the employees’ existing ThinkPads acting as backups if needed.
Of the 22 of 24 who responded, 18 said that the Mac offered a “better or best experience” compared to their existing computer, one rated it “equal or good,” and three said the Mac offered a “worse experience.” Seven reported having no or marginal prior knowledge of using Macs, while 15 reported having moderate or expert knowledge of the platform.” Read the full story on RoughlyDrafted.Com found via MacRumors.Com

 

One Page Crash Course in Switching to the Mac

[Within] you’ll find the My First Mac guide on how to use your new Mac when all you know is Windows. Of course this topic can go deep and take months or even years of training, so we will stick to the top dozen or so issues that new Mac users run into that makes them want to throw their Mac through the window. Read the article on MyFirstMacCom

 

Windows XP fans don’t want it to XPire

 

A petition to “Save Windows XP” has drawn more than 111,000 supporters — and continued shots across the Microsoft XP vs. Vista bow, a battle that began with Vista’s release last year.

The operating system succeeded XP, which came on the market in October 2001. Despite Vista’s much-improved security measures, it has met with criticism and some reluctance by consumers and businesses that don’t want to make the switch.

Among the concerns about Vista are the amount of computer memory and space it requires, its seemingly slower speed and frustration over the fact that third-party drivers for some printers and other devices are still not available from the companies that make those devices. Read the full story on… MSNBC (?!)

 

Vista downgrading: What are your rights?

Talk about a catch 22. Did you know that in order to be allowed to downgrade Vista to XP on a new computer, Microsoft expects you to have one of the more expensive editions of Windows Vista that most OEMs don’t even put on their machines. It’s true. Have a look at this official Microsoft one-sheet explaining the intricacies of downgrading from Vista that’s come bundled with a new PC.

You’d have to add $180 to the price of a Dell Inspiron 530 in order to have the right to use XP instead of Vista.

See the one sheet on Microsoft.Com

Top Analysts: Windows collapsing under its own weight; Radical change needed

 

Microsoft’s Windows juggernaut is collapsing as it tries to support 20 years of applications and becomes more complicated by the minute. Meanwhile, Windows has outgrown hardware and customers are pondering skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7. If Windows is going to remain relevant it will need radical changes.

That sobering outlook comes courtesy of Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. Half of a full room of IT managers and executives raised their hands when asked whether Microsoft needed to radically change its approach to Windows. Read the full story on ZDNet.Com

 

Former Mac hater reflects on his switch to Mac

“…While I am not a card carrying Mac fanboy (it does have issues like any piece of technology), I wanted to try and summarize why I like the Mac so much now that I’ve been using it heavily for the last two months.

I have been a Windows user and software developer since 1992, and a DOS user and developer since 1984. I used to hate Macs and as recently as 9 months ago my avatar on one of my forums was John Hodgman (the PC guy from the Mac ads).

Now I really enjoy using my Mac and am drifting away from Windows as a platform. Here’s why:

Read the full story on David Alison’s Blog found via SwitchingToMac.Com

Windows Exploit leads to “amazing amount” of stolen Pentagon data.

“…the intrusion was first detected during an IT restructuring that was underway at the time. By the time it was detected, malicious code had been in the system for at least two months, and was propagating via a known Windows exploit. The bug spread itself by e-mailing malicious payloads from one system on the network to another. The messages themselves were spoofed and appeared to be legitimate missives from other employees. Once the recipient opened an infected e-mail, the worm sent that person’s password and other login credentials back to home base.” Read the full story on Ars Technica

Criminals Attacking Myspace, Facebook Internet Explorer Plugins

“According to the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog, cyber criminals are populating the Internet with Web sites designed to exploit several recently-discovered security holes in a half-dozen widely used ActiveX plug-ins for IE 6 and 7, most notably the one offered by Facebook and MySpace to help users upload photos. The sites, advertised via links in email and instant message spam, also ‘probe for other vulnerable IE plug-ins, including two recently discovered from Yahoo! and one for QuickTime (this one attacks a vulnerability Apple patched just last month). The sites also throw in an exploit against a six-month-old IE flaw.’ The article notes that the SANS Internet Storm Center has released a GUI tool to help users safely deactivate the vulnerable plug-ins in the Windows registry.” Found via Slashdot.Org

PC Magazine: “[Apple's Mac OS is] by far the best operating system ever written.”

“…After three months with Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard Version 10.5, I have three main things to say about it. First: Despite minor problems, it’s by far the best operating system ever written for the vast majority of consumers, with dozens of new features that have real practical value”

“ If you’re in the market for a new machine, it’s time to look seriously at a Mac, especially now that all Macs can run Windows along with OS X through the built-in Boot Camp feature that lets you install Windows and Leopard in separate partitions. Even better, third-party software from Parallels or VMware make it possible to run a Windows program in a window on the OS X desktop. It’s even possible to set up OS X so that Word documents automatically open in the Windows version of Microsoft Word.”

“I’ve found Vista to be a major disappointment that tends to look worse the more I use it. I still use Windows XP for getting serious work done in long, complicated documents. But OS X is easier to manage and maintain and I vastly prefer OS X to Windows for Web-browsing, mail, and especially for any task that involves graphics, music, or video. Leopard performs all such tasks even better than previous versions did—and Leopard is the only OS on the planet that works effortlessly and intuitively in today’s world of networked computers and peripherals. Leopard is far from perfect, but it’s better than any alternative, and it’s getting harder and harder to find good reasons to use anything else.” Read the full review on PCMag.Com

Mac customers 81% “Very Satisfied” compared to Vista Basic’s 15%.

The chart above says it all but you can still read the full story at BaltimoreSun.Com. Found via SwitchingToMac.Com

Business Open Source Use Up 26% in One Year

CBR is reporting that open source use in the workplace is continuing to grow at an astonishing rate. Up 26% since last year, businesses are using 94 different open source tools to get the job done.

“[OpenLogic's] breakdown of licenses for the top 25 packages found that Apache, not the GPL, is the most common license. 62% of the packages use Apache, 27% use some variant of GPL and 4% each use BSD, CPL, Eclipse, MPL and Perl licenses (since packages may be released under two or more licenses, percentages total to more than 100%).”  Read the full story on CBROnline.Com found via SlashDot.Org

UK education agency says no to Vista, Office 2007

“The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) has published its final report (PDF) on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. The agency is largely sticking with its interim recommendations that schools steer clear of Vista in existing deployments and Office 2007 altogether.”

“…Becta recommends against deploying Vista in current setups, saying that the upside of such upgrades aren’t worth the cost. According to Becta, only 22 percent of school PCs in the UK are capable of running Vista “effectively.” Read the full story on ArTechnica.Com

Sales Pitch: “We remove Vista” [pic]

“…the sign appeared in the window of A&D Computer, across the street from the town square. Shop manager Aaron Kaplan said they were prompted to put it up because so many people were having problems with Windows Vista, including compatibility issues with older software and trouble adjusting to the interface.”A lot of people didn’t like using Vista, and a lot of the manufacturers forced people to go up to Vista,” he said.

What was the demand for the service? “We had a lot of people coming in and asking about it,” Kaplan said. “Of all the signs we put up there the last two years, at least, we probably got the most response out of that one. A lot of people coming in.” Read the full story on SeattlePI.Com