Windows Phone conclusion

Some time ago, I wrote about my transition from Android to Windows Phone. I don’t regret having gotten a Windows 7 Phone, but I do resent having one. Allow me to explain…

VS 2012: The one I probably won’t own

A long time ago, in a Grimsby far, far away, a young kid saves up enough money to buy a C compiler for his Atari ST. So the transition to Microsoft C was pretty natural for me. I’ve owned personal copies of each version of MSVC since C/C++ 7 in 1992, I still have my boxed VC6.

Based on my experience with the VS 2012 developer preview, beta and release candidate … Microsoft have killed everything in VS that made me choose to fire it up over Code::Blocks or KDE or VIM.

Secret reveal of Microsoft’s iTunes killer

Windows 8 (Dev Preview)

I’m in the middle of moving house, we just finally got into our apartment properly last night. For my test of Internet connectivity, I decided to download the Windows 8 Developer Preview. This morning, while waiting for the carpet guy to come collect his ozone machine (they cleaned the carpets but that didn’t remove the dog-pee stains or the smells of smoke, weed or dog), I gave it a very quick spin.

Xhack: I finally hate Windows Live.

A few weeks ago, someone managed to get access to my Xbox Live gamertag, and charge nearly $130 to my account via Paypal. I might not have noticed except I saw the Paypal emails and knew for damn sure I hadn’t made any paypal payments in the last 7 days.

It took me a little work to find a billing history, but sure enough, my Xbox Live account had mad two big Microsoft-point buys and spent the resulting points on several games… All while I was nowhere near an Xbox.

Thanks to Microsoft’s “live” single-login concept, reporting this issue means my Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone are all kaput…

Admit when you have no clue.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-29VS10PR.mspx

Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).

Well, my delight is certainly inspired :)

Personally, someone deserves kudos for taking the Visual Studio 2010 brief (“make it cool”) and extemporizing a whole paragraph from it.

Microsoft tip of the hat

Following my mention of ‘autoruns’ while revealing (to no-one) that Adobe is evil, I thought I should follow up with an ironic little tip of the hat to, who else, but Microsoft :)

Microsoft’s SysInternals site is just a swiss army knife of goodness…

I’m a PC

Apparently, Microsoft find Apple’s “I’m a PC and I’m a Mac” dehumanising. So, in response, they went and got a lot of people to say “I’m a PC” with Deepak Chopra saying “not a human doing, not a human thinking, but a human being”. Seriously? I really enjoy being a human doing – there are all kinds of human things I love doing – and I really enjoy being a human thinking – nothing like a good challenge. I guess a human being is what we are while we’re waiting for Office to load?

A java update, ooOoo!

Well, now I finally understand why it’s so important that Sun’s Java doesn’t worry about little things like giving you a choice in whether or not they run the Java helper on your system. Obviously all of us use Java all of the time. But, what my computer was missing was, it’s so clear now… Puzzle Pirates.

I don’t know why, but this just pushed a button somewhere. It is time to begin the Annual KFS1’s “Better Then Microsoft” award for companies that manage to out-Microsoft Microsoft at the kind of evil crap we hate MS for. Right now Sun, Adobe and Corel are fore-runners in the category of “Showing Total Lack of Respect for Customers”. EA’s download manager came close to putting them in the running but, while they neglect to give you an install-time option for disabling auto-updates, it wasn’t hard to find it in the app itself.

Any nominations?

IE vs Safari

I’ve started using Safari as my default browser on my Windows boxes. This took me a little by surprise. I thought I was quite happy with IE. Something about Safari feels a little slicker to me, but … is it “the fastest browser” as Apple claim?