Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

Worst. Review. Ever.

CNET is serving up perhaps the stupidest PC software review ever written, a comparison of IE7 and Firefox 2.

It encompasses just about every eye-rolling, groan-inducing, focus-on-the-trivial, big-picture-missing flaw I’ve ever seen in the PC review format. The comments from the three “judges” reflect a depth of analysis that is measured in submicron thicknesses. And I give the whole piece extra lameness points for the cringe-worthy prizefight metaphor, which was tired when I first read it in a comparison of IE5 and Netscape back in 19-frickin-99.

Follow the link if you must, but only if you first swear a solemn oath not to blame me when you get to the end and say, “My God, that was a colossal waste of time.”

(Full disclosure: I write for ZDNet, which is a subsidiary of CNET. But thankfully, I had nothing to do with this mess.)

… On the plus side, at least it’s short.

A leaner, meaner feed list

Adrian just cut down the list of RSS feeds he reads by about 5%. Of course, he was starting at a crazy high total of 950 feeds. Yow!

Anyway, his example inspired me to cut down my puny list of 225 feeds by a similar amount. In this case that means 10 feeds to unsubscribe from. It turned out to be pretty easy, actually. The first ones I dropped include a bunch that just crank out too many posts, and not enough catch my eye to make it worth sifting through all those posts. Too much noise, not enough signal.

The good news is that each of those sites was cranking out an average of 20 or more posts per day. In at least half of the feeds I deleted, the folder in FeedDemon was filled to capacity, with 200 unread posts.

Now, if I wanted to cut my list from 225 down to 10, I might have kept some of those sites. But my personal preference is to read only places where the quality level is very high. If there’s something on one of those bigger sites that’s relevant to me, I’m confident that a John Walkenbach or a Dwight Silverman or a Scott Hanselman or Raymond Chen or Dori Smith will comment on it. The people on that list are amazingly good at finding stuff I’m interested in, and I’m happy they’re around as filters.

Meanwhile, I feel liberated, having just deleted more than 2000 posts I was never going to read.

One of these days I’ll publish my feed list if anyone’s interested.

… I just noticed that the J-Walk Blog is still in beta:

So visit at your own risk.

Memories of 95

Via Steve Clayton, Brandon passes along a link to the original Windows 95 launch ad:  

I actually remember watching this commerical on TV, or something similar. I was 13 years old and had just entered the 6th Grade. I remember all the news broadcasts about people waiting outside computer stores to buy their copy of Windows 95.

In 6th grade? I was one month away from turning 40 years old and oddly, I don’t remember ever seeing this commercial. I think I spent the next month or two recovering from the long, long, long build-up to Windows 95. Judy and I spent a week in the San Juan Islands and another week in Hawaii and didn’t watch much TV.

The most poignant thing about this video to me is at about the :54 mark: the brief distant view of the Manhattan skyline, with the unmistakable silhouette of the Twin Towers.

Media Center versus the world

Over at ZDNet, I’ve just posted Part 1 in a three-part series comparing the leading digital media solutions for the living room. If you’re curious what you get with different DVRs, PC-based software like Beyond TV and Sage TV, and Windows Media Center, check out the feature table and the accompanying post.

Best Windows app ever!

PC Advisor reports:

[K]eep your eyes peeled for some big software announcements to coincide with Windows Vista’s release. Microsoft said several developers are working on products to make the most of Vista’s advances, and we were told that Microsoft bigwig Jim Allchin, co-president of its platforms and services division, described one as “the best Windows application ever”.

Hmmm, what could it be?

… My Windows Vista Inside Out co-author, Carl Siechert, suggests that the mystery app “removes SPP/WGA/WPA in all its forms, removes all copies of the EULA, and replaces them with GPL. But here’s where it gets even better: it connects to Diebold voting machines nationwide…” Yikes!

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Journalism 101: How to link

Does anyone know of a good tutorial on how to create hyperlinks?

If so, please send it along to Paul Thurrott. He obviously hasn’t mastered that skill yet.

In this week’s blog post, Paul picks up a story from Neowin about the delay of SP3 but doesn’t link to the original Neowin report. (I did.) He quotes dueling statements from McAfee and Microsoft on their escalating brouhaha but doesn’t link to either one. He quotes the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog on their response to a reported bug in IE7 but doesn’t link to it. (I did.) Same with stories about Sony and HP and Apple and Google. See a pattern here? It’s like he’s saying, “Want more details? Google it, buddy! I’m too busy to make those links!”

Oh yeah, and he mentions me, too, by name. I’m really not interested in getting into a food fight with Mr. T, but this really is an important thing. Why does a responsible journalist provide links to articles he writes about? And why should that be one of the criteria you use when evaluating who you get information from? Because that’s the only way you can go check the source for yourself and learn more. (Here’s an example of why it matters.) That’s also the only way you can verify that the person writing the story is not making stuff up. But Paul doesn’t do that. And in the story where he calls me out by name, he just plain gets the facts wrong:

There was a lot of silliness online about Windows Vista licensing this past week, with one of my more vitriolic colleagues, Ed Bott, taking me to task for publishing an article that relayed Microsoft’s official position on the Vista EULA (End User License Agreement). After explaining that this was the wrong thing to do, and claiming he had all the facts, Bott then later published an email Q & A he had with Microsoft himself a few days later, because he was “still trying to understand the confusing new licensing terms.”

But, oops! No links! So Paul’s many fans will just have to shake their heads and tsk-tsk about this Bott guy without ever reading what I wrote. Ironically, in the article that sent Paul around the bend, I wrote: 

I’ve dug deeply into this issue and I’m convinced that he’s being spun by his sources at Microsoft. Unlike Paul, I’ll give you links to all the facts, so you can read the supporting documents and decide for yourself.

Go ahead, follow the links to Paul’s post and mine and see for yourself if you can find the part where I claimed to have all the facts. I did have about a dozen more facts than Paul, all of which contradicted his sloppy research, which consisted of phoning a Microsoft product manager and printing a quote. That’s not journalism, that’s stenography.

I don’t bother subscribing to Paul’s 436 weekly articles (I may have missed a few – the man is definitely a faster typist than me) precisely because he often gets stuff wrong and he never cites his sources. So even if I find something interesting, Paul’s articles don’t do anything to help me learn more about it. But his name pops up in Technorati and he gets linked to by other people occasionally, so I see stuff like this.

It’s a great way to run your own personal echo chamber, I suppose, but it’s not journalism. And Paul? You’ll be pleased to know I didn’t use a single expletive.

Over to you, Paul. And I’ll get you that tutorial on hyperlinking as soon as I can dig it up.

XP SP3 in 2008?

Neowin reports that the Windows Service Pack Road Map has been quietly updated. Service Pack 3 for Windows XP Home and Professional is now planned for release in the first half of 2008, nearly four years after the Service Pack 2.

Crap. That’s an awful lot of roll-ups and individual patches for Windows XP users to have to deal with.

Mary Jo Foley says out loud what you’re probably thinking:

There’s no doubt that some (many?) Microsoft customers will see the latest slip as a less-than-subtle attempt by Microsoft to force them to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows that are coming down the pike. Why stick with an operating system that hasn’t gotten a full-fledged set of bug fixes and updates for two-plus years? Why not just make the move to Vista and Longhorn Server?

I think this is a sign that Microsoft’s development resources are stretched awfully thin.