You Can't Coach That

Thursday, February 21, 2008

I may be months behind the times with this but couldn’t resist having a dig at Microsoft.

Excel 2007, apart from introducing a whole new user interface, likes to mess with our minds. From the Microsoft support website:

When you perform a calculation in Excel 2007, the following behavior occurs:
• The result of the calculation is a number from 65534.99999999995 to 65535. The calculation is performed correctly. However, the result is incorrectly shown as 100000.
• The result of the calculation is a number from 65535.99999999995 to 65536. The calculation is performed correctly. However, the result is incorrectly shown as 100001.

Who cares if the calculation is correct if it doesn’t display correctly?

They have now issued a patch but oh dear!  Interestingly, there is no such problems with the latest Mac version.

I wish my salary was $65,535 and that my employer used Excel 2007 to calculate payroll.

“You can’t coach that”

Thursday, August 02, 2007

I have been using these keyboard shortcuts for a long time and was surprised today when speaking to someone today who had not heard about them. To auto complete the dot com at the end of a url hold control while pressing enter. To auto complete a dot net address hold the shift key and press enter. For Macs replace the “control” key with the “command” key.

Now if there was a shortcut for dot com dot au addresses I’d be even happier.

Do you have a favourite keyboard shortcut? I hate the mouse.

“You can’t coach that”

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

This may be considered ultra geeky but I found this interesting and quite fun to have a look at. Nathan Lineback has put together a gallery of Graphical User Interfaces of various platforms over the years.

Here is a sample from Windows 3.1

Wow, 640x480 with 16 colours!

There is plenty of anti-Microsoft stuff on the site but if you can ignore all that it is fun to poke around and see how things used to be. If found the screen shots from the Amiga OS from 1985 very interesting.

Check out the gallery here

“You can’t coach that”

Monday, June 11, 2007

Anyone who takes a passing interest in computers these days is probably aware of the potential risks of using a computer online.  The issue of security is increasingly being used as ammunition in the never ending battle waged by the devotees of the various operating systems available to the computer user.  The fact that Windows is constantly under attack from viruses, trojans, spyware and other nasties has become the stone in the slingshot for the David and Goliath battle between the likes of Apple and Linux versus Microsoft.

I confess that my attitude towards Microsoft has been less than charitable lately and nothing much has changed in this regard. I also do not profess to being an expert in the field of computer security. The fact remains that I have five computers in my home running Windows and only one running Linux so I take a keen interest in Windows security.

I therefore read with interest a report on ZDnet entitled Windows vs Linux security report card redux. For those not interested in reading the report an image from story is included below. According to this report, admittedly led by Jeff Jones, security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, Vista is the most secure operating system.

Obviously all computer operating systems have security flaws. Are these better or worse in Windows compared to Mac or Linux? I have no idea. I do know that I would rather live in area where the rate of home break-ins is low or non-existent regardless of the number of locks I can put on my doors. What do you think?

“You can’t coach that”

[via: ZDnet]

EDIT:

Subsequent reading adds fuel to this fire. The count for Apple flaws patched so far this year is 111 at the time of writing.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Decisions, decisions. As I said in my last post I am seriously considering buying a new Mac Pro. Several of my online friends were kind enough to drop by and let me know their feelings and all offered sane, rational arguments without any hint of the hysteria one sometimes reads when Windows/Microsoft and Mac/Apple are mentioned in the same paragraph.

One fact learned during my research into the Mac Pro has surprised me. I have always believed that Apple hardware was significantly more expensive than the equivalent Wintel hardware. While this is true most of the time, for me and the decision I am in the process of making the opposite is true. At the budget end of the market there is no contest, Apple just doesn’t make a budget computer. Even in the middle of the market they are still more expensive. There is just not the same competition to bring prices down as there is in the Wintel market segment.

My purchase is at the top end of the market. I am considering the Mac Pro with two dual core Xeon processors, at least 2 GB of RAM, a decent video card with possibly 512 meg of video RAM and some serious hard drives. Of course I am going to have to drop some serious folding stuff to make one of these my own. As a teacher, Apple offer me a 12.5% discount. With this discount taken into account the cost of the Mac Pro is actually slightly cheaper than a similarly spec’ed Dell. I could of course build a machine of similar specifications myself for much less than either a Mac or a Dell. While I may still do this I am leaning away from this idea. I am time poor as well as cash poor so would not like to have to deal with warranty type issues myself when something inevitably goes wrong. Windows Vista will of course run very well on a machine with this much grunt. I am just not sure I want to put another 3 or four years more faith in Microsoft.

Once I realised that my capital outlay was about the same for each platform I turned my mind to software. Could I do everything on the Mac that I can do on a Windows machine? So far the answer is yes. It even turns out that the site license my school is about to acquire for Adobe Creative Suite 3 includes both the Windows and Mac versions and the license allows teachers to install on one personal machine. Teaching Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver and other multimedia applications necessitates me having them at home. I also dabble in 3D modelling and animation and video editing. From what I understand the Mac will excel in all these areas.

What I really want is all three operating systems - Windows, Ubuntu and Mac (WinBunMac). Windows has served me well over the years, although I am becoming disenchanted with it of late and haven’t got excited about Vista. I enjoy using Ubuntu and it’s free. It has limitations in the software I cannot run on it though. I haven’t tried Mac OSX yet but I am willing to give it a try. The fact that it is optimised to run on only one hardware platform appeals to me.

And the Mac Pro just looks cool

The following people were kind enough to give me their honest opinion:

Mick
Goldcoaster
Comedy Plus
RT
Arnie
Jim

For the record, it was five to one against the Mac.

“You can’t coach that”

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

I love a good conspiracy theory. It is not that I necessarily believe them I just find them interesting to think about. The interwebs is of course an excellent source of said theories. I recently heard a good one concerning Windows (the source slips my mind otherwise I would quote it here).

The story goes that Microsoft are intentionally slowing down Windows XP through the patches delivered through live update. The conspiracy theorists would have us believe that this is being done to encourage the switch to Vista.

There are two issues in this particular morsel of anti-Microsoft propaganda. Firstly, are patches and updates slowing XP down, and secondly would Microsoft be doing this intentionally.

In response to this second issue, my thinking is that the potential downside to Microsoft of such action would be so serious that it just couldn’t be true. It does make for a good story though and stranger things have happened.

As for the idea that XP is being slowed down by patches and updates, I offer my own anecdotal “evidence”. I have recently reformatted two of my Windows machines, my everyday PC and my music jukebox PC. They both have received a fresh install of Windows XP. While one is a laptop and the other a desktop they have similar configurations. They are both Pentium 4 machines while the laptop processor is faster, they both have 512 meg of RAM and they both have 7200 rpm hard drives. One key difference in the two setups is the fact that the laptop has been updated for all Microsoft patches and updates while the desktop has not. The desktop is a bare install of Windows XP with service pack 2 installed. This machine does not connect to the internet so I see no need to patch it.

Theoretically, these machines should show similar performance. And drum roll please - they don’t. The laptop computer with XP fully updated and patched is noticeably slower in performing basic tasks. For example it takes longer to open a “my computer” window and the right click context menu takes longer to appear. Now you might be thinking that I am making claims without proof or evidence to back them up, and you would be right. I don’t plan on going as far as timing various operations for comparison purposes, I have better things to do.

This is just another small nail in the coffin that will bury my loyalty to Windows. As for moving to Vista I am left cold by the thought of the system specifications that are needed just to run the operating system. I am 90% decided on a move to an Apple Mac Pro. Go ahead, talk me out of it.

“You can’t coach that”

Friday, May 18, 2007

I have just finished watching an episode of The Lab With Leo on The Lifestyle Channel and learned something very interesting. Michael Dell uses Ubuntu Linux on his home laptop. Admittedly he does use Vista on his high end (gaming?) machine but I find it intriguing that the Chairman of one of Microsoft’s biggest customers thinks that Linux is the way to go for his laptop.

More food for thought here in my mental gymnastics over my future computer direction.

“You can’t coach that”

Saturday, May 05, 2007

My Dear Inspiron 8200

I know that we have been fighting a lot lately but I am determined that things will change. Yes I swear and threaten to send you to computer heaven when you are slow to execute my frantic and often ill considered commands. We have been through much together over the years. There was that time you got a virus and I was up all night looking after you, nursing you back to health. Not to mention that nasty worm infestation that we don’t talk about when company comes to visit. If anything these trials and tribulations have strengthened the bond between us.

Now that you have a nice new install of your favourite operating system your manners have improved considerably as has my temper. I promise not to burden you with too much worthless junk masquerading as useful software if you promise not to freeze for no apparent reason more than once per day. I will diligently defrag your hard drive and clean your registry on a regular basis.

I honestly didn’t mean it when I said you were for the scrap heap. I can see our time together continuing for the foreseeable future. In the unlikely event that a new computer does come to visit I promise to turn you into a lovely Ubuntu machine.

Yours lovingly

Coach

“You can’t coach that”

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Sometime in the not too distant future I hope to successfully lobby the Minister for Finance to make the appropriate funds available for the acquisition of a new PC. That new PC is more than likely going to Windows Vista running the show. I have therefore started to consider what flavour of Vista to select.

All the computer magazines I have been reading lately have included stories on Vista and the April issue of PC Authority included a nice brief table on some of the key differences.

I was quite annoyed to see that Remote Desktop is not included in the Home version. Do the Microsoft decision makers think that home users would have no use for this tool? I for one make regular use of it to control my Media PC on another room. I am admittedly using XP Pro.

Oh well, I guess I will be spending a little more on the business edition of Vista as well.