A waste of bits and bandwidth

The interwebs were alight a couple of weeks ago with news of the ‘Windows Godmode’ shortcut.

Essentially, a GUID based shortcut which grouped various settings together in one area. One source of complaint for me has always been the ‘reorganization’ of many settings in Vista and 7.

I likened it to busy work where a developer moved settings into separate menus, where they used to be together in a single menu. Annoying and seemingly without reason but I’m sure some guy got to keep his job.

Someone at Microsoft thought the reaction of people was funny and released a bunch more GUIDs for everyone to play with. With that being said, I tried them all to see what they do. There have been reports of troubles, so you have been warned.

The format for trying this out is “name.{GUID}”. For example, the first one could be a folder named “Default Location.{00C6D95F-329C-409a-81D7-C46C66EA7F33}” Don’t include the quotes when copying.

Here’s the list of strings which have been circulating around. Some are more interesting than others…

A warning sign that you might be in for a bad user experience. Opening the Windows Vista box

It appears that my del.icio.us posts might come to a screeching halt now that Microsoft has made a bid to buy Yahoo!

I thought it was bad when Yahoo! bought Flickr and then del.icio.us but to their credit, Yahoo! let my two favorite sites carry on, mostly as they were. I can only imagine what a nutcase like Balmer would do once he gets his sweaty hands on them.

Time will tell but history tells us that they will cock this up much as they have done past acquisitions. Microsoft is not a customer oriented company, they’re an enterprise company. They have a terrible record when it comes to customer service, customer privacy, and customer choice.

It’s not that I’m worried that the world is coming to an end, I just don’t like the idea.

Clearing out the old drafts…

October is turning out to be an excellent month for new operating systems. Ubuntu 7.10 is being released on Thursday. I’ve been using Ubuntu at work for a while now and I can’t wait to update. Price is free.

Apple has finally announced the release date for Leopard 10.5 is October 26th. I decided to do the pre-order thing and that means I’ll have my copy on the 26th. Well, hopefully. Purolator are not exactly good at delivering things which is odd given that is what they do.

Bonus points to Apple for charging Canadians the same price as they do ‘Mericans. Now if only they would do the same thing with their hardware… I also took advantage of my educational discount to get it for $115.

So Ubuntu is free and Leopard is $129. What does Microshaft charge? $499 And it sucks… If you decide to go with the 5 year old XP Professional, you’re still looking at $440

To be fair, my Media Center runs Vista and Media Center works just great. I’m sure my happiness has a lot to do with the fact that I never actually use Vista. Anyway I needed to bank an October post plus I’m all excited about the new OS’s coming out. I hate to miss a chance to slam Microshaft

So that is all. See y’all in November…