Archive for the Rants category
Here is a great article! It would make you much smarter! CLICK NOW!
Really, its a good read! and it will not damage your windows as much!
http://5z8.info/openme.exe_w3r1n_autoinstall
Or how about those great links - would you click any of those? They are highly recommended!
http://5z8.info/getPersonalData-start_p6m3w__init_download
http://5z8.info/worm.exe_z6o2f_-php-deactivate_phishing_filter-48-
http://5z8.info/startphish_t6e6d_boobs
(Maybe - the last one actually looks promising).
If those links look suspicious to you, why are you clicking links that look like this?
http://tinyurl.com/2k5kuf
Do you know where they lead you to?
As you could see if you followed the very first link above, the Wikipedia entry for URL shorteners has plenty of pros, but enough cons to counter them. My number one is that the obscurity of the URLs makes them dangerous as it removes a layer of sanity checking that you go through when you are about to click links. Also, they are widely used by spammers and phishers as they easily negate one of the basic features of spam filtering - scanning URLs against blacklisted sites and terms, so they are quickly becoming the phishers holy grail. Not to mention the fact that those links are at the mercy of an intermediate service provider, which might be temporarily down or simply out of business, and then you are stuck with a bunch of dead links that you can not even reverse-engineer on Google.
The explosion of URL shorteners brought to you by the likes of Twitter ( http://5z8.info/backyard-fireworks-disasters_y1t6m_this_persons_account_has_been_hacked ) was driven by technical constraints (like the legacy limitation of 140 characters due to SMS message size), but instead of limiting the usage to the edge case of SMS (or actually doing something to fix, or better, retire the SMS system) we embraced this as a godsend. The shortened URLs are all around.
This brilliant service, ShadyURL, illustrates those points in the best way possible (I don’t think they intended to, though).
Stop creating shortened URLs, period. Its bad for us. And when you get a shortened URL in your Twitter or email, be very careful when you follow it. Lastly, if you want to spread this awareness further, use ShadyURL to send links around.
And by the way - the above links are some of the mildest and least offensive ones I could generate - I am suspecting that most of the URLs won’t pass your basic spam filter.
A few months ago I “upgraded” Office on my Windows laptop at work to Office 2007. I know, I was using the older version for too long - but it was working fine, till it stopped.
A few months after the switch, I still can not figure out the disastrous Office 2007 user-interface changes. This is a huge step backwards in productivity for me. I keep staring at the huge buttons - 100 pixels tall of wasted space across the entire top section, in all office applications, the strange ribbon (what was wrong with the single line customizable toolbar?), and the unintuitive office button at the top that hides all the useful stuff - it all seems like a move designed to give a sense of “need” to the Office suite, without a real benefit to the user. It clearly seems like Microsoft was trying to desperately make it look much different, in the false pretense that “different” == “improved”. Not so.
This week I actually stopped using word on Windows and moved to WordPad just because of the slow speed and bloated and useless user interface. I know its way too simplistic, but you know what? For editing RTF files, with some headers and fonts, you don’t need more then that.
Surprisingly for me, the Office 2008 suite on the Mac is actually one of the most polished, fast and beautiful applications I have ever seen from Microsoft. Not only it is on par with every other Mac application in terms of sleek-factor, fast-loading and intuitive to use, the user interface stayed true to the original menu paradigm throughout the lasts years, and did not change for the worse as in the Windows version. My guess this is due to the strict UI guidelines developers respect in the Mac application world.
On top of that, its elegant and beautiful. There are many small touches that are hard to notice without a careful one to one comparison - like the nice shading in the active cell in Excel, the beautiful fonts in all applications, or the more useful page layout in Excel. The Mac version of Excel is becoming one of my favorite applications on the Mac.
My suggestion for all the Office power users - try Office on a Mac. You will not believe this is a Microsoft product.
That’s it, it has been said at last.
Here is a statement by Microsoft’s partner group manager, Simon Aldous:
“One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics”
Isn’t it awesome and refreshing?
The following statement is out in the wild now, and there is no going back - in spite of Microsoft’s cruel response (To Mr. Aldous, that is).
Dear Mircosoft: Its OK to take the best and most useful ideals from your competitors, and build upon them. Its OK to praise a competitor on some aspects of their product, while still claiming that your product is better in other ways. But no, Mircosoft, it is NOT OK to lie, and it is NOT OK to throw one of your loyal managers at the dogs.
Also - I am sorry to be the one that tell you this, but we, the simple users, are not dumb. At the end of the day, every one of us decides if they want to use your products on their merits and our convenience. So please continue to improve Windows, make it nicer and easier to use. You can even try to innovate, as you are doing with the Surface. Just don’t lie to me.