pure roon

“Developers,” a VP at Electronic Arts once told me, explaining why there were so many me-too Windows applications, “will walk through the desert in their socks to get to an installed base.”

True enough. But it doesn’t quite explain the results of a survey issued last week by Evans Data Corp. The headline was that most developers are still not targeting Windows Vista when they write new apps. Only 8% of the 380 developers surveyed were writing for Vista; 49% were still targeting Windows XP.

I welcome any increase in development of non Windows Software, even if it is mainly an increase for a Macs (which I dislike only slightly less than Windowz).

As a Linux user and LAMP developer I have been very happy to see an increase in software dedicated to the linux environment. Up until the last few years Linux desktop users have had to put up with ported versions of windows software that often requires quite an advanced knowledge of wine to get working, but now dedicated LInux software is emergine that not only competes with Windows based software, now quite often outperforms it on both a funcationality and an efficiency front.

I still think Macs are far to slow to be any real competition to windows though…

Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period.

Download Day - as Mozilla dubs it - will begin the minute Firefox 3 is generally available and continue for 24 hours. Ahead of this release, expected in mid-to-late June, Mozilla has set up a website (spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord). This encourages people to organise Download Day parties, to run around collecting sign-up pledges at their university or place of work, and to place Download Day buttons on their websites.

Firefox 3 is based on Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser features a cleaner layout, better bookmark handling and more stability. And it’s faster.

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I’ll be there downloading my copy, my alarm is set…

Already been using the RC2 at work and have RC1 on Ubuntu at home. RC2 seems a little more stable than RC1 (to be expected, since they are meant to have fixed the 10 ‘critical’ bugs in RC1) but both feel a lot smoother and faster to respond. Looks like Microsoft are going to respond with IE8, pretty quickly after IE7 has been released (actually it has been over a year now) but from the betas IE8 is going to be another slow, memory chomping beast, not to mention Microsofts refusal to stick to the same web standards as everyone else, making my job a nightmare!

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Microsoft’s Xbox division and Sony aren’t chatting about incorporating Blu-ray into the Microsoft console, despite a Sony executive stating that the two companies are discussing the HD technology.

Sony US’ President, Stan Glasgow, confirmed last week that talks between the two companies had taken place, though he didn’t say that the negotiations centred on the Xbox 360.

Yesterday, Microsoft’s group product manager for Xbox 360, Aaron Greenberg, went on record to say that the two were not discussing bringing Blu-ray to the Xbox 360.

If Microsoft aren’t planning to put Blu-ray into the 360 then where are they intending to go? Games are getting bigger and bigger and DVDs just don’t cut it any more.

If they aren’t going to Blu-ray, maybe Microsoft are thinking about putting all their games online, but noone would have have a hard drive big enough to store more than a handful of games…

Who knows, I’ll keep looking.

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 Vista, both with and without SP1, performed notably slower than XP with SP3 in the test, taking over 80 seconds to complete the test, compared to the beta SP3-enhanced XP’s 35 seconds.

Vista’s performance with the service pack increased less than 2 percent compared to performance without SP1–much lower than XP’s SP3 improvement of 10 percent. The tests, run on a Dell XPS M1710 test bed with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1GB of RAM, put Microsoft Office 2007 through a set of productivity tasks, including creating a compound document and supporting workbooks and presentation materials.

A spokesperson for Microsoft claimed that the service packs for Vista still needed some work.

It has always been our goal to deliver service packs that meet the full spectrum of customer needs

I upgraded to Vista about a year ago, and I was thoroughly unimpressed with the performance decrease (remember me). However upgrades since seem to have slowly improved performace and stability although I am still not totally convinced!

Yeah I know the source is from a while ago, but I needed a rant…

This just made me really laugh

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Windows-XP has a “feature” (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the “Scroll Lock” key twice.

Find out how, follow the link!