Vista is like this

My four year old laptop finally packed in around March, forcing me to invest in a new computer. I had intended to wait for Windows 7 but unfortunately fate decided to intervene. However, I took a little solace from knowing that Windows 7 was just around the corner. I figured I could bear Vista long enough to hold out until 2010, by which time Windows 7′s teething troubles should be worked out, and I should be flush enough to buy a really good system. Well it’s been 3 months and 7 days since I bought this Vista laptop and it’s slowed to a crawl. Even when I have nothing running the OS is sluggish and unresponsive. So I’m going to backup/format/reinstall, and get back to a clean system. I could get XP to last 2 years between reinstalls, and it would stay fast and responsive for me. I keep right control over what programs run at startup, and I’m particularly fussy about what runs on my machine, so I’m having a hard time working out where the slowdown is coming from. I’m guessing it’s just a simple case of Vista is shit. Plain and simple. Microsoft bragged that their operating system took as much effort to create as it did to put man on the moon. Well, at least the people who put a man on the moon have something to show for it. In fact the people who put a man on the moon have pushed humanity into a new paradigm. Humans as a species have now walked on two worlds, we are no longer a race bound to one tiny spec in the cosmos, but we have taken our first baby steps into the vast infinity of our beautiful universe. Microsoft, took all that effort and wasted it on an Operating System that grinds to a halt after 3 months of normal use. Windows Vista, is the greatest triumph, in the history of engineering disasters. It is a marvel of wasted effort. It was named Vista to inspire thoughts of views and landscapes, and the vast possibilities of the technological lanscape but in the reality is very different. Vista starts off like a beautiful cottage with large windows opening up to stunning vistas of pristine scenery – and as you use it the windows are slowly bricked up until at last it has become a thing of concrete.

An apple with a bite out it...

On June 11, 1997, technologist Philippe Kahn shared the first pictures from a camera phone when he sent images from the maternity ward where his daughter Sophie was born. That moment hearalded the of instant visual communication. At the same time, in Japan, Sharp and Koyocera were also working on cell phones with integrated cameras. The Sharp project focused on sharing images, but more interestingly the Kyocera system was designed as a peer-to-peer video phone. Soon after the infrastructure followed, and the rest is history.

The new iPhone has arrived and it finally has video capability! Yes, finally! Hearalded as the next great technological advancement, described by apple as “a revolutionary mobile phone”, it is indeed a ground breaking, but only if Apple have a time machine to hand. If they had released it way back in 98 it would have been ground breaking… if they had released it in 2003 they would still have had a shout. But Apple is 11 years late for the videophone revolution. It’s tech that’s been out for over a decade, but it’s revolutionary! Or if you zip up the back, and are prepared to pay marked up prices for old hat technology.

The only thing revolutionary about Apple is their ability to charge the earth for something that’s old, pre-used, pre-chewed. Enjoy your apple… someone’s already taken a bite out it.

Yahoo! Messenger's insipidly vile title bar colours come in a variety of shades. All expertly picked to dodge and side-swerve stylishness.

The title is the lyrics from a very old pop song, but seemed appropriate. For a few months now I’ve been using Yahoo Messenger. The thing that struck me every time it popped open was just how ugly the gawd damn thing was! Normally I detest Yahoo, (or any portal website for that matter), and anything the company spawns. So I avoided that particular messenger for years anyway, thank god. Now, however, I have a contact who is mainly a Yahoo user that I need to keep in touch with. So for me Yahoo just became a neccessary evil. Naturally the skinz, or skins, or themes or whatever they’re called were driving me daft. Finally I decided enough was enough and went in search of more themes. There I discovered that Yahoo 8 had a Vista version that looked 10 fold better than yahoo 9, but now the Vista version has been discontinued to focus on the one (f-ugly) version for all windows flavors. Now that discovery made me angry. It’s bad enough that something looks ugly, but it’s even worse when it’s willfully ugly when something that looked a million times better than it got killed off in favour of it.

This gorgeous looking interface for Yahoo was available for version 8 then scrapped. They are mad!

If Yahoo had anyone there who was in the slightest bit competent they would have integrated the Vista theme in with Messenger 9 and given Vista users the option of turning it on. It looks a million times better. But no, that would have been too liberating. That would have been too democratic. And we know how big corporations like to stamp on their users so they know their place. Instead they wanted to push their idea of what a good skin should look like, and they sure as hell weren’t going to let simple things like style and class get in the way of a good eye-poke. Indeed my eyes are all blood shot from many months of exposure to this hideous abomonation. I would much rather scrub my eyeballs with a wire brush than look at Yahoo! Messenger. I can think of many pleasant hours worth of fun involving my back, a giant bad guy, a whip, and myself tied to a stake in the ground while a bunch of evil henchment stand watching – that would be far more appealing than sitting in front of Y!9. I did try to find the old Vista version of Yahoo 8 but I didn’t have much luck. Clearly Yahoo made extra sure, no one could find it, because something that stylish just doesn’t belong in the hands of the proletariate scum does it? I bet all the big execs at Y! all use the vista themed version for themselves. If anyone who reads this happens to know where I could find one, I’d love to hear from you.

Behold Yahoo 9 in all it's ugly glory. If you think it looks ugly there, just you wait till it's in amongst aero skinned apps where it sticks out like a horned, red man, in Sunday service.

So we ended up with what could only be described as ‘a bit of a disaster’. A bit of a day-glow-colour-bomb disaster. This is primary colour terrorism. This is train-wreck-technicolour-disaster-blaster-hostage-holding. Style, if ever we see her again will be spotted in a you tube vid with the Y! execs standing behind her demanding  1 million US dollars for her safe return. How sad. It looks like the designer was trying to capture the beauty of a toxic waste spill. Indeed when you look at the gut wrenchingly garish colours that are available, you begin to think something along the lines of; mad, scientist, lab, chemicals, BOOM. Did I mention mad? Lots of mad… It would surely cheer up a 6 year old though, but not very helpful as 6 year olds shouldn’t be allowed near the damn thing anyway. So we are left scratching our heads, and staring at it with tears in our eyes, while the search for a nice theme turns up nothing. Definitely nothing at the messenger official site, and nothing at third party websites. Really I was beginning to think that I would be stuck with it for ever more, when I had an idea. I went to http://www.oldversion.com/Yahoo-Messenger.html and downloaded version 8, uninstalled 9, then installed version 8 and set it not to automatically update. It was my intention to install a better looking theme, because there seemed to be plenty of them available for version 8. It was when was trying a couple of themes out I found that it was possible to use the OS default theme. Which was an even better result than I anticipated because it got Aero to work with it. Thank god for that!

Ta-da! And the final result, no hideous primary colours in sight, just Aero in all its shiny beauty. And yes, I gaussian blurred my contacts for their privacy.