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…

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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!

If like me you use several different computers in your daily life, you may, just like me again, have a lot of bookmarks for both work resources and just personal interests. I have my Windows XP box at work, Vista/Fedora 8 dual boot box at home and a Fedora 8 file server in my basement and maintaining bookmarks between 3 machines was too confusing to do all by myself.

I started looking round for tools that could help me, the first I came across from a friend’s recommendation was del.icio.us. I wasn’t really impressed, their homepage was confused and hard to follow. A few others came up including all the big names (Google, Yahoo etc) but there is one big problem…

I really don’t want to have to go to a website to find all my links to other websites. I have used the bookmarks in my trusty Firefox for years, built up quite a collection and spent hours ordering and sorting them so I really didn’t want to change.

It was well into last year when I discovered Foxmarks, just browsing through the multitude of Firefox addons, so I gave it a whirl and fell in love! I was able to keep my bookmarks exactly how I liked them, but make sure that the same bookmarks appeared on every computer I used. Conveniently if I am ever away from one of my synced computers I can just log onto their site and see all my links there instead.

Foxmarks has changed the way I use bookmarks. I used to just have links to all resources I need (being a web developer I have a lot of references I need to keep going back to) but now I can set up folders for bookmarks of news articles or blog posts that I want to read in the future. If I come accross something interesting at work that I want to blog about, I can just add it to my ‘To Blog’ folder. When I get home I will have a list of links that I wanted to blog about! All sorted!

Michael Arrington has written an excellent comparison of Foxmarks against Mahalo explaining the full features of Foxmarks in more detail.