Long Zheng came up with this improvement to Vista’s User Account Control:
Great idea!
By the way, if you follow Microsoft, you really should keep an eye on Long’s blog, istartedsomething. His observations are consistently sharp, informative, and entertaining.
John Battelle passes along this report:
Google CEO Eric Schimdt has joined Apple’s board. Given the way the Valley hovers over every possible implication of both companies’ actions, there’s plenty of conspiracies to be theorized here.
It’s the oldest strategy around. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Google and Microsoft are squared off against one another as directly as two companies can be, so it makes sense that Google would align with Mozilla, Apple, Sun, and just about anyone else who is on Microsoft’s enemies list.
OK, Amazon has pre-order prices and a ship date – January 30, 2007 – for Windows Vista. Details over at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report on ZDNet.
But I think this price list, courtesy of a Slashdot commenter, might be more accurate:
I just want to know whether my soul has to be activated first.
Looks like someone at Microsoft Canada screwed up and inadvertently posted retail prices for Windows Vista on a publicly accessible website. The list is no longer available, but I managed to look up the prices of all Vista versions – full and upgrade – before it disappeared.
You’ll probably fall off your chair when you see the prices. (I’m guessing that a full version of Windows Vista Ultimate will cost $349 and an upgrade will run $199.) Just remember, these are undiscounted retail prices. Since 90% of all Windows copies are sold preinstalled on new computers, the actual price tag will be much smaller. In fact, some people will pay less, based on this list. Windows Vista Business Edition is slated to cost less than XP Professional, for example.
Details over at ZDNet: Vista prices revealed!
PS: I notice some folks discussing this over at Neowin and Bink.nu are making a common mistake and simply converting the Canadian prices into U.S. dollars at current exchange rates. The two markets don’t work that way. You’ll get a much more accurate picture of current prices by doing what I’ve done, which is to compare the relative prices of the new Vista versions to current XP versions and then make similar adjustments to the U.S. price list.
[Update 28-Aug 8:30AM PDT: Well, the countdown ended four hours early and the new Windows Marketplace page is now live.]
I’ve been working with the latest build of Windows Vista for the past few days, and in the course of exploring a few features I stumbled across this countdown banner at Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace site:
By my calculations, this site should be open for business at noon, Pacific Daylight Time, on Monday, August 28. It’s a curiously soft launch. No one from Microsoft has pitched this story to me, and the only mention I’ve seen online is this short blurb at LiveSide.
Now, the really curious part is how I reached this site. As part of the setup process, Windows Vista runs a program called Winsat.exe – the Windows System Assessment Tool. This in turn produces a numeric rating for each component of your PC, which in turn gets rolled up into a Windows Experience Index. Here’s how my two-year-old Dell 8300 rates:
See that link at the bottom? The one that reads View software for my base score online? That leads to the Windows Marketplace page, and the URL contains the individual ratings for each of the components in the box shown above, passed as a parameter:
CPU=4.3&MEM=4.8&HDD=5.2&DWM=3.5&D3D=3.4
In theory, this should mean I’ll be offered software that matches my system’s capabilities, including upgrades to more capable (and more expensive) versions of Windows Vista as part of the Windows Anytime Upgrade program.
I’ll take another look at this on Monday and see if anything interesting shows up.
Joe Wilcox doesn’t understand the fuss over the Windows Vista startup sound:
I’m baffled by all the significant chatter over something as seemingly insignificant as the Windows Vista startup sound. For anyone that missed it, Microsoft plans to have Windows Vista emit a distinctive chime when the system is booted up and ready for login or use.
Microsoft’s Steve Ball gave Robert Scoble some reasons for the startup sound, which as of current planning cannot be turned off: 1) “A spiritual side of the branding experience. A short, brief, positive confirmation that your machine is now concious and ready to react”; 2) “The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine.”
First, let’s be clear that we’re talking about the startup sound, the one that plays when your computer turns on, not the logon sound that plays when you enter your credentials to access your account. The problem is that the startup sound is not customizable. It’s hard-coded into a system DLL. OK fine, but a side effect of that is that the sound can’t be turned off. And that’s wrong, wrong, wrong. The user should always have the ability to turn this sound off. Here’s why:
Imagine you’re a reporter and you’ve just entered the briefing room for a major announcement from a politician. You open your notebook, and here comes the Windows startup sound, blasting away. You could get thrown out of the briefing room for that.
Or this scenario: You and your spouse are staying in a hotel and you have to get up early to do some work. You slip out of bed quietly, to avoid waking her up, turn on the computer and the sound comes blasting out. A bad way to start the day.
Or you’re a student and you sneak into class five minutes late. Do you really want your computer to announce your late arrival? For that matter, is the world a better place when that damn sound plays 20 times as 20 students turn on their computers at the start of class?
If Microsoft wants to create a mystical branding experience with Windows, fine. If a hardware maker wants to slap stickers all over a new computer, that’s fine too. Just give me the right to remove or change that sound, in the same way that I can remove those stickers.
I’m researching an upcoming story and need to see the original end user license agreements for MS-DOS (preferably versions 5 and 6) and Windows 3.1.
I have copies of the floppy disks, and the agreements are not on those disks nor are they invoked as part of the setup process. My dim memory of those days is that the licenses were of the “if you break the shrinkwrap on this box you accept our terms” variety.
Anyone got those moldy oldies hanging around?
From today’s Wall Street Journal (subscribers only):
Apple Computer is issuing its own big recall of laptop computer batteries, on the heels of a recall by rival Dell that cast a harsh light on the perils of a widely used battery technology. The Consumer Product Safety Commission said Apple plans to recall 1.1 million batteries in the U.S., plus 700,000 batteries sold in other countries. The batteries, like those in the Dell recall, were made by a a unit [of] Sony.
Who’s next?
Update: I see by my server logs that someone at Dell.com is regularly checking the Technorati feed for the keywords “Apple batteries.” Schadenfreude, anyone?
And Dwight Silverman picks up on the “who’s next?” question with word that “Apple, Sony, Dell, HP and Lenovo are planning a battery-manufacturing summit. All of them use Sony-manufactured batteries in their notebooks.”
A story at InfoWorld’s website last Friday revealed the startling news that Dell and Sony may have covered up the problem with exploding laptop batteries. According to reporter Paul F. Roberts, the two companies “knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago.” [* link at end of post]
It’s a well-written story that can’t possibly do any good for either company’s checkered reputation.
But that’s the last time I’ll knowingly visit Infoworld.com. Here’s just a taste of what I got when I visited this page:
The overall impression was extraordinarily hostile and disruptive. And not in a good way. It made me want to run screaming from the site. I don’t read InfoWorld regularly, and after this experience, I can’t imagine why anyone would. (Ironically, when I revisited the page a minute ago to verify that the link worked, it locked up my browser window.)
I’m reluctant to link to the original story, as well, because the last thing I want is for you to follow a link I provide and have a similarly terrible experience.
Yes, I know I could use ad-blocking software. The good news is that most sites aren’t this aggressive, and many sites that I visit have advertising I want to see. But if other sites begin following InfoWorld’s lead, I’ll have no choice.
[*] OK, here’s the link. But you’ve been warned.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a flurry of posts about someone’s campaign to kill off the Caps Lock key. Dwight Silverman notes, sadly, that the movement is the online equivalent of peasants with pitchforks storming the castle:
Unfortunately, the link goes off to a Google Groups discussion, rather than a reasoned, written argument. The point here, as best I can ascertain it, is to remove the caps-lock key from keyboards to prevent anyone from typing e-mail in all capital letters, ever.
While we wait for the hardware industry to kill off this mostly useless useful but occasionally annoying (see the comments for more of this debate) appendage, here’s a more practical suggestion: disable the key so that hitting it by accident has no effect. This post at the Annoyances.org forum lists the keyboard scan codes for Windows and explains how to manually edit the Registry to neuter the Caps Lock key. John Haller was kind enough to create a collection of .REG files (for Windows and Unix) that disable the Caps Lock key or change its function so it acts like a Ctrl key.
Related: If you use Microsoft Word, you probably have a similar grievance with the Insert key. If you hit it by accident, you switch in Overtype mode and whatever you type wipes out what’s already on the page. The cure is here: How to disable Word’s annoying Overtype key.
Ed Bott 