It would seem the geekworld’s favorite helper-to-hate, Clippy, has gotten a job at Google’s GMail division. You can see his influence in the new look, with it’s unhelpful way of showing and hiding buttons, assuming you can’t keep track of who your friends are by name, nor really want to see your big screen monitor actually full of useful information.
Hopefully someone will notice, and fire his ass, before it’s too late =p
Bought a new hard drive and started rebuilding one of the PCs at home; even found the original OS restore discs that came with it. Got Vista installed and started the update process. All went well for the first two days of updates, but then I got the box to the point it wanted to install Vista SP1. No problems for me, go ahead I’ll check on you in the morning. Oh look, it’s a pre-blue screen error on bootup about ntoskrnl.exe being missing or corrupt.
And of course neither repair nor rollback look like they will fix the problem. Time to see if I have a 32 bit vista box that has successfully applied SP1, and can ‘borrow’ it’s copy of the .exe.
sigh.
Gah, stupid microsoft.
I canceled my xbox live account months ago, in response to their homophobic practices. Today I get spam from them letting me know about some new pricing model they are coming out with. The mail basically says “yeah, there’s no unsubscribe option because you gave us money once, so the law can’t stop us, so we aren’t going to even let you ask us to stop, screw you!”.
Yeah, that totally makes me rethink my plans on never subscribing to xbox live again. Not.
UPDATE: The xbox-live-support-by-email-tech suggested calling 1-800-469-9269
Posit a world where open source software triumphed over Microsoft.
Would all the billions saved in corporate spending of MS Office, et al, have resulted in a windfall for charity comparable to that of Willy G?
I suspect not. I suspect that any ‘savings’ would have just been spent on business development, or dividends.
I went to watch Victor/Victoria tonight, and the xbox died before the title screen came up.
At first I thought it might just be the HD DVD drive, but no, it’s all dead =(
If you watch American TV, you’ve probably seen the little girl who stitches some photos together as part of one of the cute “I’m a PC” ads. Since I love photo-stitching, I wanted to check it out.
It turns out to work much better than my old standby, autostitch. My first attempt is the Ghandi statue on SF Bay, which autostitch couldn’t handle. I’m going to do some re-attempts on pano that were successful under autostitch, see what they look like under the MS version (Live Photo Gallery).
1. Some sort of problem with the 1st-reboot virus scan between win7 and Avast Home, “interactive login failed”
2. Sound system doesn’t turn off main speaker automatically, when headphones are plugged in. It’s a multi-step manual process.
3. Sounds only play when the window is in the foreground, at least for the WoW installer.
4. The “Send Feedback” tool requires you to not just have a windows Live ID already set up, but for the LiveID to already be fully setup to give Win7 feedback (a BUNCH of non-obvious links to follow on the “connect” site), and won’t give you any feedback about why it’s failing to send your feedback, just keeps sending you to the username/password prompt. I thought the network was broken or I’d forgotten my password at first.
The install process was very smooth. It re-formatted the old C: no probs. Of course, HP hasn’t put out any drivers that will install under 7, so none of the specialty buttons work, and I haven’t tried using the burner…I forget if win7 has built in dvd playback, or if I’ll still have to install a 3rd party app for that. I saw the note on windows update about WMP killing mp3s, so I set all the local ones to read-only.