Tech

If you have not done so, start reading from day one here:DAY ONE

Time to take stock

Put things into perspective. It is now Saturday Morning, the beginning of my third day of using only closed-source, proprietary software. I am actually looking forward to today, I have sorted out the DVDrom related lockup issues with Windows7. I spoke to several people and they know people who used the RC and they swear the people they know have had “Absolutely No Problems.” Heck last night at a braai I even spoke to a fellow Linuxer who got the professional edition and swears the Tech Department by the company he works have had no problems whatsoever.

Today is going to be a good day methinks.

Where to from here?

I started a new business where I will be selling geek related stuff online, I need to design the logo for it, and need to maybe work on the webpage some more. That presents some problems, I cannot use the Gimp to fiddle with my logo’s, and I kinda built the site in Joomla - so I am screwed.

The software I am using on this computer is already worth more than the laptop itself, heck if my pricing guess for Win7 Ultimate is correct and I remember the price for Office Enterprise correctly it is almost double.

Off to Bing to check my guesses…

Pricing

Bing is at least good at finding (Internet Explorer has stopped working… cancel… this tab has been recovered) prices for stuff. As I noted yesterday it seems that it gives preference to websites that sell stuff as opposed to your actual search query.

Vista Ultimate: $319.99
Office Enterprise: $227.99
BitDefender: $49.95

For comparisson my laptop price would be about $600.00

That makes me having to up my expenses to double. Now I know I could get an upgrade to Win7 form Vista Business, but that is still an expense of $199 for Win7 only, and ignores the OEM price of Vista Business that was included. I think the refund would be about $50 for Vista if I chose to go down that rabbit hole and try and convince Microsoft to refund me for Vista.

Problem

I need to work on my new e-store, and design my Logo. MSPaint is utterly useless for this, and due to my decision to go closed source I cannot use Gimp, which would suit the needs of this one-time project perfectly.

I decide I need Photoshop. It costs “as low as” $895.00

Yeah I am not going to do that.

I built my website on Joomla, using Apache, Mysql and PHP on my Linux install. Now I have to go .net, IIS and MSSql!

There is no way in hell.

I have come to the realisation that I would not be able to start my business if I did not have access to FLOSS alternatives, here is a breakdown for you:

FLOSS WAY:

Designing of Logo:
Software: $0
Labour: My time.

Building of Website:
Software: $0
Labour: Mostly my time, with some help with technicalities frome some FLOSS friends and maybe $100 for a professional developer to finish things up like the Credit Card facility.

PROPRIETARY WAY:

Designing of Logo:
Software: $895.00
Labour: My time, if I decide to buy the software and do it myself, otherwise get a company to do it and it will also be about $900.00

Building of Website:
Software: (I have no idea even what software would be needed to build a site in .net but here are my best guesses, I will update this once I have gotten the correct tools from our Web Developers at the office…)

Visual Studio .Net: $125.00 on special from MS

Labour: Since I cannot code in .net to save my life this one would HAVE to go to a professional company. A quick qoute from the office to build an e-store in .net works out at about $3000.00

So there you have it, suddenly my entry point into the market is much higher and I can only start breaking even in about three years, if that.

My Tho(Internet Explorer has stopped working… cancel… this tab has been recovered…)ughts so far

Right. Going closed source cannot be that bad, can it?

Likes

I like the way that IE8 Groups the tabs you open by color. It also opens a new tab immediately to the right of the page where the link originated. Very nice.

UAC is less intrusive than what it was with Vista, it still annoys me though.

The Win7 interface is certainly pretty, and the wallpapers are absolutely gorgeous. I like the option to slideshow the wallpapers.

The nice window management touches really make the workarea look pretty. It doesn’t do much for productivity, but it is pretty.

The new taskbar is an improvement over anything Windows offered before. That said it borrows elements from other Window Managers, you can find elements from most notably the MacOS dock, the KDE taskbar and so on. Very little innovation there.

Dislikes

 The functionality of the software does not warrant the cost I’m afraid. To pay the price of a new netbook for an operating system that does not even allow me to get my e-mail does not make any sense.

The (Internet Explorer has stopped working… cancel… this tab has been recovered) constant problems I am having with internet explorer really bugs me. I can now reliably make it break by opening a new tab and typing in an address.

Almost daily my computer seems to be slowing down. Windows 7 clean install was refreshingly quick. However after the updates, Office 2007 and Bitdefender I now have slowdown problems. IE takes longer to load. Opening a new tab takes five whole seconds, sometimes more. In the beginning that was instant.

As soon as a blog entry gets as long as it is by this sentence I start running into issues with typing. It is definitely performance related and causes me headaches as I have to type letters two to three times to get something written.

Annoyances

IE8 and Google Mail do not work together. Whenever I am in my Gmail inbox and click on a messages IE freezes and I cant do anything for sometimes up to 10 seconds until the mail is displayed. Going back to inbox causes the same behaviour. This holds true if I have only Gmail, or Gmail + tabs open.

Also it does not look like IE8 Resizes pictures. I’ll have to confirm this but I just opened an image that my wife sent me via Gmail in IE8 and I had to scroll from side to side to see the whole picture.

Weird.

UAC

User Account Control is an absolutely useless piece of the Win7 interface that serves two purposes in the real world.

• It annoys people to the point of becoming glassy eyed which leads directly to:
• It causes people to become desensitised to the messages to the point of absentmindedly clicking yes to any message that pops up.

I think that when UAC was introduced in the form that it was with Vista that by one masterstroke Microsoft caused one of the largest user-side security holes in the history of computing. Since that day, people have been clicking YEA to any message that pops up since UAC used to pop up almost every five minutes.

Granted it is less intrusive with Win7, but it is still useless as a security tool.

Think about it. It pops up, locking everything on your desktop until you click Yea or Nay, but once you select Yes for instance, it disappears and your task continues. It causes the user no pause for thought other than *&(*dat, I wanna go ahead with whatever I was busy with.

Contrast that with Ubuntu as a for instance. There seem to be two levels of >ahem< UAC, one is simply a dialogue box that asks you to confirm what you want to do, very similar to Windows UAC. It does not lock up the screen and is usually confined to when you are downloading something from Firefox like an Add-on. In Firefox it also greyes-out the YES button for three seconds - forcing you to think about the click.

For major tasks, like instlling a new application, the screen does get greyed out with a dialog box, but this time you need to type in your password. This way of doing things has the following direct results:

• It is less of an annoyance to the user, hence minimising the fisheyed practice of YESSING everything in site.
• It gives the user pause to think about their decisions in the case of Firefox and Thunderbird.
• If the user goes fisheyed and does not read warnings, the multi leveled approach keeps the blind yesclick response limited to an area where major damage will be minimised.
• Asking for your password when doing things like installing software makes the user think about what they want to do, one because entering your password starts a thought process along the lines of “if it needs my password to continue it must be serious” and two you are aware that you actually had to allow the computer to do what you just told it to do. Yes you now realise that the power and responsibility of what you just did lies with you.

How many of you using Windows Vista now have ever thought that you give the permission for UAC for whatever it is the computer wants to do? Have you thought about why you need to click yes or no?

Windows Mail

At some point today I installed some updates (again) and suddenly Windows mail was offered to me as a download.

I might be wrong but I thought the user would have to download Windows mail from the MS download site. In any case I now have Windows Mail, MSN messenger and some other goodies to try out, including a wordpad like program (called Windows Live Writer that seems to be solely for writing blog posts), Movie Maker and some other Live utilities.

Wordpad

Wordpad has seriously improved. You now have the option of saving documents in .odt format! Wowee this is good news! Also it seems to be a good enough tool to let the casual user get away with not using word for most tasks. This is a real positive for me.

Incidentaly I have just checked the visitor statistics and have the first WIn7 users reading it, at least two. Your thoughts will be welcome guys!

Internet Explorer Failures

Internet Explorer is really intruding on my browsing experience. I decided to browse some Demotivational posters that I found on a thread and IE would crash a new tab, sometimes three or four times in a row. I decided to go and look at event viewer and found that two events are created for every crash.

For today I found one-hundred-and-four such events. Which means that IE had TAB related crashes fifty-two times today. During these crashes IE locks up completely, and I have to click cancel in order to get back to browsing. Sometimes IE recoveres that TAB and sometimes not.

Fifty Two NEW TAB related crashes today, that is not counting the others.

Wow, what a day…

Read more about Day 4 here: DAY FOUR

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 7:37 am and is filed under GoingClosedSource, Software, Tech, Windows.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.