The Last Word (Beta)

I don't really remember. I think they're a custom ...

2007-12-13T13:39:00.000+05:30

I don't really remember. I think they're a custom emoticon pack I found somewhere.

I'm not developing this anymore, but I'm sure someone with time could add more emotions :) I'd be happy to let them, and link them here...

What kind of emoticons are these? MSN? They're so ...

2007-12-13T12:18:00.000+05:30

What kind of emoticons are these? MSN? They're so cute, I'd love to use more than the standard "smile" and "wink" ones!

@Aditya: I do not use the Vista machine for any so...

2007-12-13T01:40:00.000+05:30

@Aditya: I do not use the Vista machine for any sort of gaming at all. :) I use laptop pretty much for my development and browsing and usual multimedia stuff. It does have Oracle running on it. So, I know that takes a bit of memory. But thats the thing - a lower end machine than this laptop with 2000 and running more services is more stable and performs better.

Well, maybe its just my experience but from what I hear, everyone does have this one complaint about Vista - resource hungry - so it seems like its more widespread than just my experience.

And I'm REALLY surprised you being happy with Vista Ultimate on a 512MB RAM!! :) The recommended is 1GB and I know it takes more than that for things to run properly. On laptops, I believe it matters even more. Lot of things differ from desktops - MoBo, Bus Speed, Disk Speed etc etc.

Ah well! Its all good as long as one gets what they need from their OS. Cheers!

@Tiamotiodio: Yes, the no-border CSS works for Int...

2007-12-12T20:32:00.000+05:30

@Tiamotiodio: Yes, the no-border CSS works for Internet Explorer as well.

Hi! Doesn't Ramani "no-border tips" works for Inte...

2007-12-12T20:17:00.000+05:30

Hi! Doesn't Ramani "no-border tips" works for Internet explorer?
Does it?

Sorry for my bad english :p

@Rishi: I'll second Avatar on this. It's very unfo...

2007-12-11T15:47:00.000+05:30

@Rishi: I'll second Avatar on this. It's very unfortunate your experience has been bad (it's not earth-shattering bad, mind you ... but I guess it's productivity-hampering bad). Vista is bad on many aspects, but it completely depends on what you want from your machine at this point of time. If you want to game, you should already know not to upgrade to Vista on a low end machine. Core 2 Duo and 2GB are only part of the info ... what video card do you use? What's your usage pattern ..? There are so many different parts to understanding the new OS.

Yes, I'll give you that Vista is impossible to use properly out of the box. It sucks! It takes a good amount of work to get it working the way you want it to work, and the way it is supposed to work on 'your' machine, but once you get all that going, it's a darned nice system. Better than XP, for sure.

You don't need to disable Aero for performance. You should, however, disable UAC if you think you can keep your computer secure enough. You need to know which parts of your hardware to upgrade (memory boosts only help so much) if you want to see improvements.

Integrated search was the part that disappointed me. It's uses of processor clocks too much. It works perfectly on my Macbook Pro, but my Lenovo crumbles. But that should improve in SP1 (the changelog is up, have a look).

And just so you know, I don't use Basic. I'm on Ultimate (both my computers), with Dreamscene on most of the time, Opera running cron jobs (for my Facebook applications), and Firefox, Trillian, uTorrent and Outlook almost always running. I'm not complaining ...

@Rishi:your experience is unfortunate and it refle...

2007-12-11T14:20:00.000+05:30

@Rishi:

your experience is unfortunate and it reflects a situation that 1% of the userbase in ANY OS lives.

so i regret you have to be one of the persons living under that situation.

but there is really good chance of SP1 solving your problems, so who knows.

And I'm surprised you're liking your experience ev...

2007-12-11T06:22:00.000+05:30

And I'm surprised you're liking your experience even with a 512MB RAM. Well, you're using Home Basic in that case so don't know if its much of a resource hog.

The only thing I really like in vista is OS-integrated search. Windows just got that right over XP in my opinion. Rest all, well at least, "looks" cosmetic.

I ask anyone - if you have to tweak vista too much i.e. disable aero etc, then why would you use it over XP? Better underlying implementation? Well, for me i've had 3 core dumps in 4 months on my Vaio. Not quite stable, are we?

windows vista is the worst windows os i've seen. i...

2007-12-11T06:16:00.000+05:30

windows vista is the worst windows os i've seen. i never liked xp and still don't use it. i've got my god ol' 2000/fedora or ubuntu dual boot on most machines i use but a recently purchased laptop came with vista and boy what a piece of crap it is!!

UAC was such an annoying thing. Besides annoyance, it did something which wasted a day of my work time. i work a lot with hardware and during one of my hardware development, it was blocking one of my program and without even asking me. now it leaves you with no way to figure if its incompatibility of your drivers or something else. Even though UAC is a feature not-so bad, i'm forced to disable it.

I can go on about the quirks in there. And if someone says, people said same things about XP.. well, Vista took YEARSSSS to be released so you'd expect it to be better. And it is better on some aspects - better than XP that is. Still not as lightweight as 2000. Its a bloody resource hog. It EATS my core2 duo, 2gb machine up. And yes, this is after tweaking and disabling unnecessary stuff.

I wish windows never announced EOL for 2000. I wish most of my games worked on Linux.. I wish nVidia provided native drivers for linux for 8 series. Cos sadly, I'm forced to install XP on my gaming machine.

//Not more than 2% of the applications have any ‘u...

2007-12-11T00:20:00.000+05:30

//Not more than 2% of the applications have any ‘use’ value.//

I came to this conclusion long back. Problem is not with application developers but the demographics of its users. Facebook is 2/3rd women as per this post.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/21/facebook-is-almost-23-women-and-other-stats/

Don't take me wrong but most women are not geeks (atleast not technology enthusiasts). Moreover I think there's a large number of high schoolers (they may not even know about RSS feeds).

Facebook valuation is only on paper now. Sometimes I am surprised how these analysts come up with such a valuation knowing very well that there's a large population of kids in Facebook. Now that their advertising effort Beacon is changed to opt-in model, Mark has to prove in some other way that Facebook can actually make lot of money from its users.

yes, i have actually browse trough the 10k apps, a...

2007-12-10T02:05:00.000+05:30

yes, i have actually browse trough the 10k apps, and will be generous saying that only 10% have some merit in doing something right or fun, whatever.

that is 1000 apps, and from there we an break them down to:

only around 100 app are what i could consider great, that is 1% of all the apps. and that neither of those 100 app have broke 10,000 users. that is a sad sad sad reality.

i also hate that facebook is not only a wallen garden in the worst way but that it has layers of boundaries within that wallen garden.

but it was just announced that open social is going to be delayed for spring, that truly shows that opensocial will not do anything to facebook, it will only do good for google as one of their huge PR stunts they pulled this year along the 700 spectrum and android.. not a single significant development on any of that will be seen until mid 2008 and that is quite a long time in internet time.

ah, but at least they are improving blogger :P

The applications on my profile, I feel, make f8 lo...

2007-12-10T00:47:00.000+05:30

The applications on my profile, I feel, make f8 look better ;) :

1) Explode (I have only one friend on that network, but the concept still intrigues me)
2) Twitter (which also posts itself into my FB status)
2) Notes (which imports my blog)
3) del.icio.us
4) Flickr

I like! Almost all of my FB 'activity' is actually offsite, my profile just imports.

My cousin even has a 'wall' to replace (not alongside, he deleted the normal wall) the standar wall. The difference? It posts on his opher.ca website and posts on his website go there. Talk about moves towards decentralization! (yes, I wrote hin wall app)

While I agree that a makeover is much needed, I li...

2007-12-07T05:51:00.000+05:30

While I agree that a makeover is much needed, I like Google Search for it's minimalistic look.

I absolutely hate Yahoo Search because the page looks like an ill-assorted collage.

All those who love simplistic and fast designs tha...

2007-12-07T01:40:00.000+05:30

All those who love simplistic and fast designs that give you only what you want and nothing wore, raise your hand!

Google should hire you. You're so good at changing...

2007-12-06T22:45:00.000+05:30

Google should hire you. You're so good at changing looks often :)

Will catch you sometime in chat.

my GAWD ! i wanted a new look for last word !and t...

2007-12-06T15:28:00.000+05:30

my GAWD ! i wanted a new look for last word !

and this was just pure awesome !! the home page is very nice ^^

and as for google, hm..

the artistic part of me wanted to see a new google too :D

but the geeky part of me says that the current one with only 1 image and 1 input is more than enough :D

and don't really care about the other elements :P

@Singpolyma:i meant it from a end user perspective...

2007-12-04T19:05:00.000+05:30

@Singpolyma:

i meant it from a end user perspective, windows can also be in anything for that matter.

i have played suse,linspire and ubuntu in five flavors, gOS, sugarOS, Eee Xandros recently so it is not like i don`t have seen them lately.

i wanted to check certain apps, beryl and mono/moonlight related stuff.

also because people brought them to me looking to replace their OS with you know what. so i got to saw lots of distros this year so i know what you are saying but i also know what i saw and what i heard from the people that brought them.

"linux is all about tweaking it to get used and ad...

2007-12-03T20:14:00.000+05:30

"linux is all about tweaking it to get used and adjusted to it."

See, that's the old myth that keeps some thinking linux is complicated. Linux is all about beicn ANYTHING -- cell phones, routers, servers, desktops.

Some distros are made with power users in mind -- these ones can be tweaked to infinity. Some (like Ubuntu) are designed with end users in mind -- no need for tweaking.

Some distros are designed for embedded apps (read: phones) that do not even ALLOW tweaking.

@Singpolyma:did you said that linux don`t needs tw...

2007-12-03T17:07:00.000+05:30

@Singpolyma:

did you said that linux don`t needs tweaking?...whoa.. that is something new, linux is all about tweaking it to get used and adjusted to it.

like pretty much any OS if you are a power user, if you are not it also works fine in all the operative system, a rookie user don`t know any different..

now, on the Blogger subject, of course. that is interesting dealio...

"Believe me, over a month of using it, tweaking it...

2007-12-03T01:49:00.000+05:30

"Believe me, over a month of using it, tweaking it to my needs, I've got it to work perfectly on my Lenovo R60 as well. Like I said, can't open too many applications (512 MB RAM), but for that much, this works pretty awesomly."

I thought the idea was to get it so that end users can use it ;) Linux works great out of the box, with no 'tweaking to my needs'

"we should be talking about how the prospects of the new features to arrive at Blogger, Opensocial and OpenID support/integrations will make Blogger worth another shot in 2008. :P"

Definitely exciting stuff, I posted about the OpenID integration as soon as I saw it -- so exciting.

No no no.. That is in IE7. I don't exactly remembe...

2007-12-02T22:07:00.000+05:30

No no no.. That is in IE7. I don't exactly remember anything common with the crashes, except that some web pages were rendering in the browser. :P They seemed to be random during browsing. And even the task manager wouldn't come up.

Anyway, I too intend to wait until they make it more stable and more secure (was that a hyperbole?) with SP1. I want it to be better, because you cannot live without windows at one point or the other, just because of the easy availability of other software for that platform.

Till then, I have Ubuntu+Beryl if I need some aesthetics. :P

Hah, well it depends on the configuration.Vista Ul...

2007-12-02T16:40:00.000+05:30

Hah, well it depends on the configuration.

Vista Ultimate on a high end tablet PC gives you the full experience and it trumps leopard all the way..

but, whatever.. :P

@Avatar: There is no 'good' left in this world, is...

2007-12-02T16:35:00.000+05:30

@Avatar: There is no 'good' left in this world, is there? :P I wrote this post because I didn't want people to trash a decently good operating system :)

I like Vista, and I hope SP1 fixes memory issues (cache-ing and garbage collection wise).

Although I do prefer Leopard over Vista, compared to XP, it 'is' a decent step forward.

yes, 2010 should be more than enough for when we s...

2007-12-02T16:16:00.000+05:30

yes, 2010 should be more than enough for when we start seeing this going truly mainstream and working well.

On Sabeer, yeah, he want to make lightning strike a second time.

lets see what happens.

in one year time, over 100 Vista installs have pas...

2007-12-02T16:02:00.000+05:30

in one year time, over 100 Vista installs have passed my hands so i think i got a good understanding and proven use of Vista in a vast array of different laptop/desktop configurations/brands.

XP is not vista,vista is based over WS2003, all the base code of the OS is better by default.

So that talk about how vista is nothing but cosmetic changes is hilarious.

Now, taking away from that huge difference when comparing them is the fact that unlike XP, where there where only two OS configurations, Vista carries around with 5 level configurations, so even if your machine is vista basic, it pays the price on the fact that all the features of the OS (ultimate), are compressed/locked/encrypted into the OS.

that takes a huge toll on the installation compared to XP

I have installed Vista Basic on pc`s as low as one 1gh/512mbs and surprise surprise, they run fine, but they do need a good configuration to run them optimal and exactly as if they were XP pro.

and just to compare Vista Issues, they weren't as bad as Leopard issues, they now got 3 screens of death, the stuck in time bug, the hdd death bug, among others i am very sure that most of the problems are caused by the not proven illuminous graphic engine and the time machine feature they rushed out so leopard could ship in 2007.

in just one month SP1 for vista public beta release will be out and all the exaggerated noise and ill perceptions will fade away during the year until they are nothing and at the same time people will start migrating from XP at faster pace than this year.

exactly as it happened with XP!!!!

and aditya, this post coming from you makes me thing you were fishing for comments and visitors.. it of course worked. :P

we should be talking about how the prospects of the new features to arrive at Blogger, Opensocial and OpenID support/integrations will make Blogger worth another shot in 2008. :P