vista – Stilgherrian

16 July 2011

Google knows what people don’t like

Google knows everything. Google knows what people like. They also know what they don’t like.

Here’s what Google suggested just now when I started typing in the search “people do not like…”. Me. Change. You. Obama. Vista. Cats. To think. War.

It’s interesting to compare this with what turned up in previous attempts to have Google explain human nature. Personally, I find it quite disturbing.

20 October 2009

Links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 15 October 2009 through 19 October 2009, gathered with bile and soaked in vinegar:

50 Years of Space Exploration | Flickr: A brilliant infographic summarising interplanetary exploration. In an excellent demonstration of Chaos, the landing on asteroid 443 Eros is accidentally tagged as “443 Eris”. All hail Discordia!
They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They: Susannah Breslin’s fascinating and somewhat challenging feature article on the recession-hit US porn industry.
ISP in file-sharing wi-fi theft | BBC News: UK ISP TalkTalk staged a wireless stunt, illustrating why it thinks Lord Mandelson’s plans to disconnect illegal file sharers is “naive”. It’s easy to blame others just by hacking WiFi connections.
Prince Philip tussles with technology | ABC News: This story is a few days old, however I found it curious that a perfectly good story about the design of technology was tagged as “offbeat” and the teaser written to make Prince Phillip look like a silly old man.
NPR News Staff Social Media Policy: Another example of a good corporate social media policy. There’s plenty of these policies around now, so there’s no excuse for any big organisation not to have caught up.
Federal Court of Australia Judgements: Some judgements have been recorded on video. “The Court is keen to continue to improve public access with the use of live streaming video/audio. Further live and archived broadcasts of judgement summaries are posted on this page as they become available.”
Televised Patel trial an Australian first | ABC News: The trial of Dr Jayent Patel for manslaughter to be held in a Brisbane court will be shown in Bundaberg, where the deaths happened, via closed-circuit TV. Given this “local interest”, one wonders why it couldn’t also be available anywhere there were interested parties.
Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work: Maier was a Chicago street photographer from the 1950s to 1970s who died earlier this year. Some 40,000 negatives have been found, and they’e now being blogged.
100 years of Big Content fearing technology — in its own words | Ars Technica: Copyright-holders have objected to pretty much every advance in media technology, it seems.
Mac Sales Spike When A New Version Of Windows Comes Out | Business Insider: A curious interpretation of the figures, but they reckon that when Microsoft releases a new version of Windows it drives people to buy Macs instead.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Coming War on Bloggers | Valleywag: While I normally don’t read Valleyway, I caught someone mentioning this article and was caught by one useful new term: conceptual gerrymandering. If the US FTC wants to give tax breaks to “news organisations” they’ll have to define what they are. Could it be old journalists versus bloggers battle writ large?

25 June 200925 June 2009

Thank you, corporate supporters

Photo of sponsor-donated equipment: see article for details

This is the hardware I’m taking to Africa for Project TOTO for ActionAid Australia, courtesy of our supporters. While I’ve said before that social media is about the people not the tools, this kind of support is great. So, what’s in the picture?

In the back row there’s a pair of laptops to leave in Tanzania, thanks to Lenovo Australia: a refurbished ThinkPad R61 (left) and a brand new ThinkPad X200 (right). I’ll review the X200 at the end of our mission. Both are running Windows Vista Business.

In the front row, from left to right:

My own Nokia N96, to which we can compare the size of everything else. (It’s about the same size as an iPhone, Mark.)
A Thuraya SO-2150 satellite phone from Optus, thanks to Internode who are paying the bills. Yes, that tiny little thing is a satellite phone!
A Motorola MotoRazr V3xx multimedia phone, and
An LG KF700Q multimedia phone, both thanks to Telstra, and both of which stay in Tanzania.
A Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook running Windows XP, again thanks to Lenovo Australia, which is what I’ll be using instead of my usual MacBook Pro while I’m on the road. I’ll write about that experience as I go. However I’m very nervous about not having my usual computer with all its software loaded, and I still have to transfer my workflows to that system tonight.

So, some questions…

We’ll be able to pair the two phones to the two ThinkPads for ActionAid International Tanzania. Our blogs are running on WordPress. So they can quickly catalog their photos and videos and upload them, what tools would you recommend for the job? Remember, this is running Vista, and while I personally would consider switching to Ubuntu Linux, there isn’t time and Vista is what they already support in their office.

And as for me, running Windows XP and wanting to throw something together quickly tonight, what would you recommend?

10 June 200910 June 2009

Thank you, Lenovo

Photograph of Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbook

Thank you, Lenovo, for sponsoring ActionAid Australia and Project TOTO. A few days ago I received evaluation units of the IdeaPad S10e netbook (pictured) and the ThinkPad X200 ultra-portable.

Apparently there’s more to come. Cool.

I’ve been too busy to do anything with them beyond a basic set-up, so a more detailed review will come later. However it did feel a bit weird flipping between a Windows XP Home netbook with a trackpad, a Windows Vista Business notebook with a trackpoint but no trackpad, and my usual MacBook Pro with OS X and a multi-touch trackpad and a mouse.

Interestingly, even though the X200 is more powerful and physically larger, it feels lighter than the S10e. Mind you, it’s four times the price. 😉

02 October 2008

Links for 28 September 208 through 01 October 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found for 28 September 2008 through 01 October 2008, posted automatically and covered in badger fat.

How to be Creative | gapingvoid: Hugh MacLeod’s classic article on how to be creative, starting off with Tip #1: “Ignore everybody.”
Pigeon-powered Internet takes flight | CNET News: A news report on the 2001 experiment to implement Internet protocol RFC1149, which allows Internet data to be sent by carrier pigeon. It’s not fast, it’s not particularly reliable.
Welcome to my world, the “online community” that prefers to keep out of site | theage.com.au: A strangely misinformed article about online communities, which commits what I think is the great sin of assuming a social relationship becomes less valid when mediated online.
Height | xkcd: xkcd is “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”, but this episode is a wonderful diagram of the universe drawn to a logarithmic scale, from the height of a giraffe to 46 billion light years out. It’s also available as a poster print (hint hint).
How to change the product key for Office XP, for Office 2003, and for the 2007 Office system: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Microsoft Office. This article explains how to reset it and change it back.
Change the Windows Vista Key | About.com: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Windows. This article explains how to reset it and change it back in Vista.
How to change the Volume Licensing product key on a computer that is running Windows XP SP1 and later versions of Windows XP: I’ve had to roll out a lot of computers this weekend. Rather than spend 4.5 hours on each one, I set up one and then cloned them (at least where the hardware was identical). That meant they all had the same product key for Windows. This article explains how to reset it and change it back in Windows XP.

18 June 200818 June 2008

Quote of the Day, 18 June 2008

Photograph of a feral goldfish

Such a fuss over new version of the Firefox web browser today and Apple opening a new shop in Sydney tomorrow! The feral goldfish are all a’flutter, feeling left out if they don’t have the latest news this very second. Thank the gods for Richard Chirgwin.

In a discussion about how digital rights management will affect sales of Vista, he writes:

The actual adoption of Windows-based broadcast TV recording among mainstream users is pitifully small. It’s easier in every way for Joe Sixpack to buy a black box hard disk recorder.

Hence, although in many ways I think Vista is a dead duck anyway, DNR flagging won’t change its future one way or the other…

I can’t get the excitement about media centres, myself. Quite simply, why would I rearrange the house or run cables just to hook the TV to the computer, when I can put the recorder where the TV is?

PC-based Media Centres, whether Apple or Microsoft or Linux, have a specific target market: people for whom getting this sort of crap to work creates a sense of achievement which serves as a surrogate for the ability to do things that are actually useful…

Hear hear!

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