Yes this is a rant but it has useful information for those who don’t know. It is a classic case of why you can’t trust Microsoft with anything that they manage or host, even platform services. (think: playsforsure or those recently screwed by mesh)
So, Microsoft want you to spend your hard earned cash to buy big powerful machines that can run Vista or Windows 7 Ultimate so you can have a media pc. They also tout their xbox as the perfect extender … really? Then why the frack is it so damn hard to get content to play on the extenders and when finally netflix is announced they decide you have to be a gold member to use it. They also prevent the netflix media center running on the extender … you know – which makes perfect sense, why the fuck would I want movies on my extender anyway?
So you might think a gold membership isn’t so bad, erm well explain how you’re get it on 3 extenders? You have to buy 3 and so that’s a cool $150 a year just for Micro$oft. They works out now at just over $30 a month JUST to use Netflix on your xbox.
If you already have media center you should be able to use it to stream the freaking content, that is what is was supposed to do. What else are they going to conveniently block? It also raises the question why I can’t use my gold account across all house xboxes.
I sometimes wonder why I even bother using media center, it is poorly supported – there really is no internet content it can pull and the geniuses at Redmond decided to remove, yes remove the existing netflix support in Vista from Windows 7 … clap clap – now rumor has it a better netflix component is coming to Windws 7 but why on earth would you remove the existing one …..
The lesson here is, an xbox is for playing games … period.
I still love all my MAC hardware but when doing a lot of heavy .NET development on my mac book pro I wish I didn’t always have to virtualize the environment.
Firstly, running Windows 7 RC in Vmware’s Fusion is great. It is fast, stable and generally a total turn around from Vista. I do however want the maximum out of my hardware so decided to try Windows without the virtual machine.
To do this I went away from the suggested Bootcamp installation since I had a bunch of spare, high speed SATA drives I threw on of those in and was off. The boot sequence on these machines is great, I just selected the Win 7 installer DVD and installed to the empty drive.
Once up and running I had to get some new drivers from Apple and install the Windows version of Bootcamp which helps with drivers, mouse support etc. Once I had all the drivers installed and rebooted I ran the test to figure out my machine’s rating. It scored a fantastic 5.7!! and before I had a 1.0 under fusion.
I still think Apple has the best hardware money can buy and would definately recommened buying their hardware and once Windows 7 is released, installing and using that. It is so fast, stable and great looking that it will blow you away.
To be fair to Rim I thought the store would be a disaster, hard to use or just clunky but it wasn’t. I had an iphone for awhile and I can say that it basically works the same way. Of course you don’t get any of the “cool” applications since Rim believe they know better and that business users don’t want accelorometers or anything groovy in their phones.
The biggest problem is stability of the phone once you start using applications from the store. It basically sucks – even just running 3-4 applications caused the phone to become extremely slow and within a few days unstable until it reboots or I reboot it.
Apple don’t allow applications to run in the background, for good reason! Rim of course, knowing better – let you do this and it kills the device. I tried using just a single application and closing it down when done but the load speed is too slow. Leaving just this single (weather) app running makes the phone un-usable. Who is to blame … not sure – might be a crappy application but I never had a bad iphone app kill my phone so I blame Rim :)
So right now, I give it a 5 out of 10 – nice to get some useful applications for once but hardly worth the effort since the phone is now dog slow. I was testing this on the Bold (9000) with .247 software package.
That is what you want to hear right? Why else would you be reading a blog posting about switching to Macs. Like me you’re probably a hardcore, long time windows user and developer and you’re sick to death of the crap that comes out of Microsoft these days.
So again, let me keep it simple. Go get a Macbook Pro and see what that world is like. No point playing with one in a store, to really get into it you need to commit so you need to buy one. I really didn’t think I’d like OS X and would just end up installing Vista on their nice hardware but it turns out that OS X is really great – not just super stable but feature rich and far more intuitive than any Windows OS you’ve ever used.
After a day or so I maxing out my new baby I wasn’t just happy but pissed at how crappy all my machines up to this point had been. How crappy Microsoft products really are. Why can’t Microsoft make some of these really simple things work? I mean, Apple have really nailed the “it just works”.
I’m not sure what has gone wrong at Microsoft. Everything coming out of Redmond is just crap – and Vista … let’s not put lipstick on that pig. It is crap, it is built on crap and mark my words – it will probably go down in history as their biggest failure. Sure it has a couple things better than XP … wow, that really isn’t very hard. Want a concrete example of something that should just work properly? How about file copy – identical hardware – 30-45 minutes to copy 20 Gigs yet on my Mac, just 9 minutes. Basically 3x-5x faster. Everything on this machine is just better. I think Microsoft has become too big, trying to do everything and nothing well. They need to go back to basics, a few core – good products.
So you’re probably asking … but I have all these programs that run on Windows … quit ya crying, there is a program either identical and just compiled for the Mac or something, usually better that what you’ve used before. Get this, even MSN Messenger is better, from Microsoft … on a Mac. Go Figure. Everything I do development wise for .NET I use under VMWare Fusion which is fantastic, it actually integrates the guest XP into OS X and with Unity you can’t go wrong.
My next purchase is going to be a 8 Core G5 with 24″ Cinema display … I’m comitted to Apple hardware and software now for at least 5 years. We’ll see how the playing field looks after that. I do know this much. Every student I know or talk to or see or hear from these days has a Mac, more and more home users have Macs and when people like me start switching, you’ve got a land slide coming. I’ll convince a ton of people to switch :) Including you …
Just a quick note about an interesting discovery made for great battery saving on your iPhone, if you’ve been lucky enough to get one :)
Over the last week my battery life was extremely poor but I’d also had quite a few slow downs and lock ups. What is interesting is even if the phone locks up, it seems to recover after a few seconds without a reboot. Well a couple days ago my phone started getting really hot and the battery was dying in about 2 hours with no use …. so I rebooted the phone.
You can do this by holding in the lock button + menu button for awhile either until it just reboots or you pick an option from the system menu that appears.
After rebooting my battery is now lasting almost a full 2 days – I think some background processes get locked up and even though the phone appears to be working “ok” it is sucking down the juice. Worked for me, might work for you :)
The results are in! and well not really much I can say except that Wifi on the iPhone is what kills your battery.
The 3G on/off didn’t make too much difference, I found that although Edge may use less power – it takes so much longer to fetch data that you’re coming out even if not worse. This assumes you even have a 3G signal.
With Wifi turned off I could probably get 2 days out the phone before recharging.
Another tip for saving power – when I call it a night I turn on Airplane mode (disables all comms). I want to sleep not be bugged at night :)
Ok so this is day 3 after getting my new iPhone and this is what I’ve found. To summarize, no real deal killers yet but a couple of close calls. Apple have some explaining to do but anyway, here are the details. Oh I’m watching Season 1 of Heroes so if my post goes off track you can blame that :) If you haven’t watched it then just go get it now – I mean right now. Read this later.
Being that I needed the enterprise features of the iPhone that is where I started. I clicked the mail icon and was presented with a simple list of possible mail services, looks good so far. I picked Microsoft Exchange and entered my email, domain username and password. Done. Yes. That simple. It worked first time and in oh I don’t less time than it took to get back to the main screen my contacts were already synced.
All my email (going back I’m not sure how far yet …) appeared and was super simple to navigate. You have access to all your folders so if you’re used to the extremely limited AND OUTDATED (yes RIM you!) folder structure of the black berry this is a nice relief. A couple odd things now. You can’t mark an email un-read. You can’t add a new account from this screen. You must go into settings to add another account. Edit: I found the un-read option hiding under header details …
I did, if you’re wondering (I know you are) add my gmail account. Worked great and seems to support full sync. If I delete on my gmail via the browser it updates on the phone (via pull not push). Yes! and this was without mobileme which is cool but I don’t need it just yet.
Navigation between mail boxes is a little painful. You need to go back into accounts and pick which one you want to view. They could do with an icon on the main page for each mailbox …. maybe in time.
Overall mail is great, so easy to read, scroll and zoom.
The camera and browser is a couple words work exactly as expected. The camera is good especially on the big screen. The browser is fast on 3G or even faster on Wifi (duh) and supports wide screen.
Now a real pain. Still no MMS – yes its 2008 and v2.0 of the iPhone and yet Apple still believe we don’t need MMS. I can only assume they’re screwing us over somehow or have ads on the site that lets you get the sent pics because unless they explain why this advanced phone can’t do it then it must be money motivated. So boo.
You can’t as yet dial numbers from calendar entries which I hope will be fixed, it is extremely common to do this and I think I read on their site it was possible so maybe that is just a bug.
Overall for phone speed its acceptable. Sometimes it gets sluggish but I just leave it for a second and it gets back to normal “slick”. I’ve noticed emails disappearing and then reappearing later so definitely a few bugs. I’ll let you know how reporting them works out. So far I’d say worth it. I was a big black berry fan but I’m sick of waiting for html email! and I’m even more sick of BES.
I guess it was to be expected that stores just wouldn’t get enough stock with a word-wide launch. I went pretty early but if I’d gone at launch time I think I would have made it … boohoo, anyway – I tried a couple of big AT&T stores and was just out of luck each time. Tomorrow is another day and those stores, believe it or not, are already getting more stock in … so …
Maybe I’ll be lucky, of course this time I’m going a lot earlier and with a chair :)
If you follow along with those Engadget guys you can read some good reviews so far – might be worth a couple weeks wait anyway for the madness to calm down but really, who wants to wait.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/07/11/iphone-3g-review/
I recently moved into a new house, I tried like crazy to make sure months in advance that all the services companies would arrive on the moving day so I could continue my services. Of course I was let down by non other than my satellite company.
So I started looking around for a alternative while I waited for the next install date to role around. I noticed that iTunes could supply almost everything I watch on TV and using the Apple TV device I could just about replace my satellite or if you have cable that system.
So my question is how can these companies survive. For cable the out is easy, they already have a great delivery mechanism for delivering IP based content directly the home and from the work I’ve done at Cox, they busy doing just that. (On Demand?) What about satellite companies like Dish and DirecTV? I have not seen any real effort in the on demand arena and to be honest they better hurry up. They should at least be providing content via my internet connection AND satellite.
If anyone works for one of the above companies maybe you have some inside info on plans?
