I’ve made up my mind to never install Vista at home. As soon as my current desktop becomes obsolete I’m buying the phattest MacBook Pro available and going full-time OS X.

With every Microsoft OS for the past 15-years I’ve followed the same pattern:

1) I don’t want to install it.
2) I do it anyway.
3) I hate it.
4) I grow used to it.
5) New version, go to #1.

Time to break the cycle. Vista is such a clusterfuck there’s no way I can let myself become acclimated with mediocrity once again. I am not saying OS X is godsend or anything, it’s just a great alternative to Vista. Windows just not where I want to be anymore.

Microsoft has officially announced the worst-kept secret in the gaming space, the Xbox 360 Elite. The “Elite” is the same unit that’s been on sale since November 2005 with a HDMI port welded on, bigger hard drive thrown in, and a MacBook inspired matte black finish. Retail price: $480.

What really bothers me is the quality of the hardware. The defect rate of the current Xbox hardware is higher than that of any consumer electronics device I can recall. How does Microsoft address the issue? By rolling out a new unit with the same guts at a higher price point.

Microsoft planned to introduce a redesign of the 360’s innards early this year utilizing a 65nm CPU which would reduce the amount of heat produced, theoretically increasing the reliability of the console. A lot of people thought Elite would house the new CPU, now it seems that plan is in limbo.

It’s not just the CPU that’s problematic. The 360 comes with an enormous power brick, nearly 1/3 the size of the console itself, which has been reported to overheat on its own. This has prompted people to devise less than elegant solutions to combat heat-related crashes. Considering that both the Playstation 3 and AppleTV have internal power supplies and no wide-spread reports of heat related crashes makes me wonder if Microsoft’s hardware engineers have a single clue as to how to design consumer electronics.

Here’s a few questions. Would you buy a TV with a lifespan of less than two years? Would you buy a TV that if left on too long overheats and shuts down? Would you buy a TV with internal components louder than the actual content you are viewing?

My first TV cost me $200 and has lasted almost 20 years. Paying nearly $500 for something 1/10th as reliable is not what gets me, as much as the fear that people are just going to ultimately accept that consumer electronics should no be built to last does. With nearly ten million Xbox 360 owners out there, I’d say my fear is justified.

The content protection technologies embedded in Vista are scary enough for me to hold off on installing it for the foreseeable future. WTG Hollywood for treating honest people like crooks and WTG Microsoft for bending over to accommodate them.

“Certainly much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording industry to realize they’re playing a losing game, and that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.” — Bruce Schneier

But it gets better. To attract current iPod users Microsoft is going to let you download for free any songs you’ve already bought from the iTunes Music Store. They’ll actually scan iTunes for purchased tracks and then automatically add those to your account. Microsoft will still have to pay the rights-holders for the songs, but they believe it’ll be worth it to acquire converts to their new player.

Link

With 1-billion+ iTunes tracks out there, MS is willing to burn a lot of money to try and gain market share. Ouch.

Pretty old but still gold.

Microsoft fanboy Paul Thurnott sticks a fork in Vista. When even the shills are jumping ship it’s obvious the Longhorn/Vista project is a disaster.

I’m testing build 5308 at work and honestly it’s a snore-fest. Microsoft worked on Vista for six years and it’s little more than Windows XP pretending to be OS X and doing a piss job of it.

Normally I get pretty vehement when it comes to Microsoft, but honestly Vista is such a disappointment I am completely indifferent. Perhaps this is Microsoft’s grand strategy to shed their negative image — release an OS so pitiful that people actually feel sorry for them?

Watch Intel VP Don McDonald own himself attempting to out-simplify Apple’s Front Row remote.

.NET is a minor player in Windows Vista, despite what Microsoft claimed a couple of years back.

I’ve done Java since 1996 and have fallen in and out of love with it a couple of times. I worked on a big .NET application last year, then went back to Java. My impression is that Java just has way better community support behind it. .NET and its languages have all these whiz-bangy constructs that appeal to language freaks (you know the type who can rattle off every keyword but can’t code and app worth a damn), but overall Java is a solid platform with a mountain of free and OOS tools to give it a huge edge. Even the performance is picking up, especially with Mustang. I still love ya baby.

I sat down yesterday to write a Windows 2003 server app in .NET and found I couldn’t develop it under XP due to certain interfaces only being available under Server 2003. I think the fact that Microsoft can’t even standardize .NET development on their own platforms speaks volumes.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx

My favorites:

Leet words of concern or indicating possible illegal activity:

•”warez” or “w4r3z”: Illegally copied software available for download.

•”h4x”: Read as “hacks,” or what a malicious computer hacker does.

•”pr0n”: An anagram of “porn,” possibly indicating the use of pornography.

•”sploitz” (short for exploits): Vulnerabilities in computer software used by hackers.

•”pwn”: A typo-deliberate version of own, a slang term often used to express superiority over others that can be used maliciously, depending on the situation. This could also be spelled “0\/\/n3d” or “pwn3d,” among other variations. Online video game bullies or “griefers” often use this term.

I wanted to use my external Firewire drive on all my systems. I found that formatting the whole thing for FAT32 was not the answer. The best solution I came across was to make two partitions, one FAT32 and the other HFS+. Windows can read FAT32, OSX and Linux can read both. Super.

The best way to do it is under OS X (10.4.2 in my case) using diskutil. My drive is 160GB, so I did a 100GB FAT32 partition and a ~60GB HFS+ partition. It’s as easy as:

diskutil partitionDisk disk2 2 MBRFormat MS-DOS FAT_VOL 100G HFS+ MAC_VOL 60G

Diskutil will figure out the change on the 60GB partition if you go over the free amount (it came to something like 55G).

You need the MBRFormat parameter if you want Windows to be able to read the FAT32 partition. If in doubt check the man page.

Using either disk under Linux 2.6.x is as easy as:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/exthd1/
mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda2 /mnt/exthd2/

You need the vfat and hfsplus modules compiled for this to work of course. Check my Linux 1394 guide for getting the disk to work under Linux.