Eye candy; two words that accurately describe Vista. My main gripes with Vista are the layering and hiding of many features that previous Windows versions have. The most obvious to the new user has to be changing the background/display settings. When right clicking on the background there no longer resides a ‘properties’ option, but instead a window for themes/visual settings exists. The old properties menu has been butchered to only show the first two tabs, with settings having its own window. After getting over these setbacks of ‘hidden’ options, I really like Windows Vista.
The lack of anti-aliasing support for the windows + tab replacement for alt + tab, and in the new photo management application is very annoying. Speaking of the photo manager, I’d say it’s almost as good, if not better than iPhoto, and is multitudes better than Pisca. Web 2.0 inspired tag organization along with other methods makes organizing photos a snap. One photo belongs in three tag categories? that’s fine and supported. This is particularly useful for creating slide shows for special events with pictures from different categories. In the slide shows that have about 10 different themes that can be chosen from so far, the edges of some photos, when using a theme that lays the photo down at an angle causes sever aliasing along the edges. This better be fixed by the final release.
Other minor gripes are about Foobar2000 not being able to play files, it is shut down because of an access violation. Songbird also fails to load due to missing DLLs. I guess I expected a heavily optimized application such as Foobar2000 to not load at all. Running in compatibility modes didn’t resolve the problems with these audio applications.
As a linux user, I see many ideas from linux desktops migrated into Vista. What comes to mind is the ‘protected’ administrator mode, and new user folders. Even as an administrator in Vista, programs don’t automatically run in administrator mode. Just as in linux with root users, Microsoft is migrating away from everyday users being able to do everything to their system. While this is a good idea, I constantly find myself needing to run applications as root in Gentoo to do the things I need to do, but that’s because I am typically doing server administration. Now in linux every user has their own folder and their desktop is somewhere within this folder, the same sort of thing has been in windows for a while. What is different is the new focus on the user folder being the main folder for the user, with the documents folder for documents, not downloads, which now have their own folder on default. The entire ‘My’ thing is gone from Vista, instead of My Documents, or My Music there is just Documents and Music folders located in the user’s folder.
Other perks of Vista include automatic support of all plays of sure devices, without having to install drivers or anything. I plugged my Zen Micro in and was ready to transfer music, it just worked. The search for drivers on the internet feature on XP that usually doesn’t find what you need now works with Vista. Originally the driver for the onboard sound wasn’t found, within seconds of going though the install driver wizard my sound chip was recognized and working, without me going to a single website to download drivers, which I had to do for XP. The new searching is nice too. There is no run program anymore, search takes the run program’s functions now.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
If you haven’t seen the recent claims from the fraudulent law firms of Daniel Wallace and Maureen O’Gara it is advised that you check out Slashdot and read the article.
A note: The following is considered a rant of sorts, and may include indecent language and sexual/racial/other slurs that may offend members of my audience but because of my firm believe in no censorship I will keep the slurs and vulgarity in this post.
Well they claim that the GPL license is unfairly setting a price on GPL’ed software and that this hurts big business. They say that the FSF should remove the GPL and LGPL from its acceptable open source licenses. They claim that the price that the GPL sets is just ‘unfair’ for competition and is undercutting big businesses.
GPL is nothing more than a price fixing scheme designed to drive software vendors out of business
said Maureen O’Gara. What is this stupid bitch babbling about? So we are supposed to believe that the GPL is evil, eh? Well I think we should believe that this stupid bitch is evil. She for one should have her legal license revoked and then sued by the FSF, whom she is attempting to sue for the GPL, for slander. I would like to see the book thrown at this lousy excuse of a human.
The GPL is a license, an open source license that requires any works derived from the works that are released under the GPL to be released under the GPL. The GPL requires the developer and distributor of the program that is released under it to also provide the source code for free to anyone and everyone who may want it. This license is seen as communistic and evil by Bill Gates and others in Microsoft, but in fact their EULA is even more evil then the GPL, the EULA was designed to remove the user’s rights, the GPL was designed to give the rights to the people.
The EULA is closer to something of a dictatorship, such as Saddam Hussein, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, or Hitler since all these governments were by the select few, and for the select few. The GPL gives the power to the people, demos in Greek, and when the people have the power then you have a democracy, not a communism, since in communism the people aren’t allowed to participate in the government. It is technically illegal for one to take a CD of Windows XP Pro and a valid CD key that one owns and create a Windows LiveCD (or DVD) similar to a Knopix, or Gentoo LiveCD. Why? because the EULA forbids it by punishment of the law. The EULA is the real evil since it restricts the user’s rights. The GPL only says that you can’t claim the program, or any of it’s code as your own if you didn’t write it, and therefore if you include any of the program’s code into a application of your own, you new code must fall under the GPL because of the use of the GPLed code. You don’t like the rules? Then write your own program from scratch and then release it under any license that you choose. The GPL was never intended for profit of the code released under it.
What is wrong with the GPL? Really why does big business have problems with it? I mean, how can a bunch of amateurs really compete with a large corporate conglomerate such as Microsoft or IBM? Or do companies such as SCO want to use GPLed code but not release the product under the GPL out of greed? No one can compete with free eh? Then why did Novell buy Suse Linux? Novell is now using and supporting all open source software, and most of its old proprietary software has gone away. I believe that they use the GPL as their open source license. If a company is making money from a product that is also available on the internet for free then why is this lawsuit even close to being valid? I have just disproved their case.
The lawyers also dare to accuse groklaw of some things that are not true at all.
Groklaw’s article
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Yesterday was my birthday and failing to open my gift from my parents turned into something of mixed results. When I woke up this morning I skipped searching for the Easter basket and went straight for my birthday gift. Low and behold I actually got what I really wanted, a Creative Labs Zen Micro. This came to somewhat of a surprise but either way this device is great.
As you may or may not know I have an aging Creative Labs Nomad II (32MB built in, 128MB Smart Media card). This was a great device, after the three months of hell in the beginning with problems with the device deciding to not work after two months of use. I loved the headphones that it came with and it fit the hand very well, and best of all it used AA batteries that could be replaced when they ran out of energy. From my very pleasant experience with the Nomad II and other Creative products, the T5400 speakers and the sound blaster series, I expected allot from the Zen Micro when I first read about it.
After letting it charge with the wall charger for about four hours it was fully charged, well I had to leave after I plugged it in and I returned about four hours later so I returned to it being fully charged. I would stress for anyone that gets this product to be extremely careful when installing the battery, or changing batteries, Creative placed a warranty sticker in the bottom edge of the slot at an angle (not fully in contact with the plastic edge the entire time), not a very smart move, which is extremely fragile and it will end up tearing, many people have had this problem, and it did it to me. I knew about this problem and tried to be careful but somehow it still did it, the battery is keyed and slightly shorter then it’s slot, allowing aftermarket batteries to potentially have higher mAh ratings, the supplied battery is a 3.7 volt Li-ion Polymer 680mAh battery with a supposed 12 hour battery life, we’ll see about that this summer.
The Micro comes with three tracks on the hard drive, one being the ever so familiar Creative Labs channel test jingle, “Welcome the Experience” and two others that are there to demonstrate the high fidelity audio output capabilities of the device. The first thing to do once the Micro is fully charged is to install all of the syncing software; I recommend just installing the drivers if one has Windows Media Player 10 already installed. The software requests that you restart your computer, which I did, then I recommend if you intend to upgrade to Plays For Sure compatibility to do so at this time, otherwise it is still a wise choice to get the latest firmware from http://www.nomadworld.com since the next thing to do is to transfer your music.
Since reinstalling XP in January I have only used the Media Player 10 utilities to transfer my music to my Nomad II, so naturally I opted to use the same methods for the drag and drop transfer mechanism integrated into explorer via WMP10. It works great except for disk stats, so it is easy to loose track of free space, this was more of a problem with a Nomad II, but for some this may still be a problem. I did all my transferring using a USB 1.1 connection, since my computer is five years old, it ended up taking little over half an hour to transfer about 1.1GB of music to the Micro, I have in total about 3GB of music.
Now it’s ready for testing. While playing with my Zen Micro I noticed a few *new* neat things, well new when coming from a Nomad II. I love how the player is able to play music while one is in the menu, looking/changing settings, viewing play lists. When entering the menu on the Nomad II the music stops playing, which was very annoying. Other nice improvements is the navigation, the scroll pad is very nice when compared to going in iPod circles and when using the next/previous track buttons on the Nomad II. The sound is just great, the included earbuds are adequate for day to day listening, but the quality just doesn’t compare to the back bone head phones which were included with the Nomad II, but a pair of Altec Lansing headphones will do for long trips. The included belt clip and stand is nice, and the stand looks very good, with a nice rubber edge padding to securely grip the Micro. The feature that I love most so far has to be the full functionality of the USB port, which allows the device to be charged via any USB host, a feature that was missing in the Nomad II, allows this to be a real road warrior tool. The random/shuffle feature is much better in the Micro then in the Nomad II; the latter had problems with playing the same song twice in a row if the player was shutdown in the middle of the song, this problem doesn’t occur in the Micro.
Transferring was much easier and faster on the USB1.1 interface when compared with an iPod mini, which I have worked with for a relative. It took literally half an hour to get the iPod to sync correctly with iTunes and transfer, plus several restarts and a firmware update to the iPod. The iPod Mini doesn’t stand a chance when compared to the Zen Micro.
Some claim poor battery life, but that is due to the fact that the player when using the original firmware doesn’t like charging with the AC/DC adapter, and that if you don’t shut it down the Micro goes into a standby/sleep mode, just like Windows can, which shuts off the internal hard drive but it doesn’t. Others have experienced lockups, which I’ve yet to find, though I’m not using play lists at all, just the random function, so I don’t know what could be causing these lock ups, though shutdown seems to take a while, I guess some must be impatient and assume it locked up on shut down. I am using the latest firmware, 1.02.05, and I’ve played with store models at local CompUSAs for months with out lockups, which the sales people said that they have yet to have it lock up, and a few of them own the same Micro also. The brother of a friend of mine has a Zen Micro, that he’s had since Christmas so if there are any time related problems I’ll know about them before I’ll experience them.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
