1FPS|by David Chartier

I’m starting a new series at 1FPS preliminarily titled “Vistupidity.” I’m writing about Windows stuff a little more often for Ars Technica, which means I usually fire up Vista in either Boot Camp or Parallels/VMware to test something and grab screenshots. Now the Ars pieces are, of course, about whatever product I’m reviewing, so I can’t start harping on Vista or Microsoft’s dreadful decisions in the piece itself.

But that’s where “Vistupidity” here at 1FPS will come in. When I run into these virtual insults to computer user intelligence and perhaps humanity itself, I’ve been making notes and saving screenshots for a rainy day, and I think this is it. Sometimes these posts may be long explorations of the usability problems I find in Vista, and others—like this opening piece—may simply be a short mention of a silly problem that perhaps doesn’t need much discussion at all. I make no guarantee on how often I’ll have a Vistupidity piece, though. It’s not like I make a point to hop into Vista without an assignment. But thanks to the cross-platform wonders of Evernote, I have all the screenshot-snapping and note-taking tools I need to easily keep track of these experiences, so we’ll see how things go.

That said, here’s a Vistupidity icebreaker for #1: Internet Explorer 8 beta. No, it isn’t just for Vista, but that doesn’t make the screenshot above any less silly. This was shot during the IE8 installation process, which I started immediately after finishing the download from Microsoft’s site. Hardwired into the installation process, however, is an “Installing updates” step—for a brand new application.

Are Microsoft’s developers working on IE8 so often, and official updates appearing nearly every minute, to warrant a full-blown “installing updates” step during the IE8 installation process? Should the version I just downloaded be, well, the latest version?

The update step took around 1:30-2 minutes all by itself, but I never saw what the updates were. It just sat there with the continually rotating progress bar that, in reality, doesn’t reveal a single thing about the actual progress of the installation.

Google finally released an official Google Calendar Sync add-on for Outlook on Windows. I don’t use Windows so I haven’t given this a shot yet, and I’m not familiar with any Windows alternatives out there. Still, it’s nice to see the company finally releasing official tools that bridge the wide gap between the convenience of web apps and the integrated power of the desktop.

I firmly believe that people who love Flash apps don’t know a thing about the power and integration of the OS they’re using. Even Windows users have better tools available to them than Flash offers, but Mac OS X? Don’t even get me started.

Yes, I totally get the benefit to developers because they can develop in one platform but create an app for all three major OSes. That’s great, and I thoroughly appreciate chances to do less work.

But looking at Flash and its new extensions like AIR and Flex from a user’s perspective (though admittedly a power user), the compromise just isn’t worth it.

Mac OS X offers rich, system-wide tools that developers can build into their apps (and most do) for checking spelling and (now in Leopard) grammar, saving highlighted text to notes, and moving information to and from other applications. For example: when reading news in NetNewsWire, I can strike a keyboard shortcut to send the URL of the headline I’m reading to Twitterrific for sharing with my friends on Twitter. I can drag URLs or text from any other application into Yojimbo, a program for organizing and archiving files, PDFs, serial numbers, and more. When replying to someone in a forum using Safari, I can select my last name and tell Safari to learn its spelling, which will tell every other program to learn it too.

Stuff like this is absolutely invaluable to getting work done with a computer (that’s right: they aren’t just for porn anymore!). But these any many other features get thrown out the window with Flash because it lives in its own world; it doesn’t hook into any of these awesome things Mac OS X does. I don’t know if this is because Adobe’s Flash team all uses Windows (though I wouldn’t doubt it) and therefore doesn’t get to enjoy great tools like this or what. I only know that the advantages of Flash (and I do recognize that there are some) pale in comparison to the tools that have been right under our noses for a lot longer than Flash has.

I just finished installing a bunch of new Vista drivers from Apple’s latest Boot Camp release, but I was never asked for a password. Drivers for core stuff like the video card, my keyboard, IR and more. Sure, I was presented with a dialog asking if I wanted to proceed - a dialog I could trump with automated mouse positioning software from 1998 - but never an actual password.

Could someone please explain again how Vista is more secure than a cardboard box? Either I missed one of Gates’ shiny sound bites from that media blitz back in January, or… this is a crock of shit.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Microsoft announces Windows Vista Maritime Edition

A whole line of cruise ships that run entirely on a high-availability version of the Windows OS. Who says Windows can’t handle mission critical tasks? Fantastic!

 And car manufacturers want to begin building Windows into various aspects of new models? Let’s see how well “I’m sorry officer, you see - Windows thought that last stop sign was a virus, so it launched Windows Auto Defender, but the registry hasn’t been updated in a while since Microsoft AutoActivation rejected my 64-character Microsoft Auto License code, so my car sped twice as fast to get home before Microsoft AutoShutDown would kick in and lock my wheels in place” excuses will work.

Windows-based ATM machine hacked, gets Painted - Engadget

(image via Engadget)

Two major points strike me right off the bat:

1) The jackass who even considered the idea of an OS that can’t handle keeping your mouse and your printer straight might be in any way qualified to secure money needs to not only be fired, but get run out of town. I would consider ‘out of the country’ as a bonus.

2) Any bank I do business with that makes this horrendous decision loses my business faster than one of these machines could crash.

The silly “I hate your OS” crap aside, this is retarded no matter how you look at it. Windows might be great cuz the majority of the industry runs on it, or it’s simply all you know. Windows might be great cuz you can build your own machine from the ground up. Windows might be great because [insert whatever you want here]. The problem is:

Windows is not great for being reliable, secure or trustworthy. Period. The more ATM product managers and others in similar decision-making positions who get this through their damn heads, the better off the world will be.

[tags]Windows, ATM, security, wrong[/tags]

Mac vs. Windows - It’s All About The “Maximize” Button | restiffbard.com

Yea, that’s the *only* difference between two of the planet’s most wide-spread GUI operating systems. Never mind the army of engineers working for these two companies, or the decades of work that’s gone into both the underpinnings of the OSes and the markets and uses for which they’re designed: the whole “your computer is t3h s4×0r” argument comes down to a damn button and a UI behavior.

Jesus, this is why magazines and newspapers have editors, and why even our blogs employ some form of self and team policing.

Rick (a friend of mine)

[Ubuntu's] initial install is very trim, but has just about everything a typical user would need

11:11

David (me)

but that doesn’t mean it trumps Windows or Mac OS X in terms of feautres, compatibility, expandability or sheer ability. Don’t get me wrong: I think Ubuntu’s great, I hope it goes far

11:11

Rick

I say it trumps windows, just out of principle

11:12

David

pen and paper trumps windows these days

[tags]Linux, Windows, humor[/tags]

Gas pump Windows crash

Originally uploaded by dcharti.

The pump crashed and filled my van with sand! And deleted my keys! And deflated my tires!

[tags]Windows, humor[/tags]

Microsoft: Windows shortcut ‘trick’ is a feature | ZDNet Australia

I always wondered when the day would come when we could no longer tell whether something in Windows is a security hole or a feature.

[tags]Microsoft, Windows, security, software[/tags]