Blag

Well, Windows 7 launched today, hopefully ending the embarrassing legacy of Windows Vista.

It’s going to be covered to death by the media, so I really can’t be bothered saying anything much – not like I’ll come up with any shockingly new ideas that several million other journalists and bloggers haven’t already thought of.

Apple didn’t quite manage to steal the limelight of the show, as some people predicted – Snow Leopard was launched quite a while ago, and there’s nothing radical in the new lineup of Mac hardware. Microsoft’s launch this time is meant to be low key, with more effort put into advertising over the coming months.

*awaits end of HSC, before buying a copy of Windows 7, 8GB of RAM and a new GPU*

What can I say? Microsoft managed to turn around their Vista reputation and create a product that everyone was interested in, then they blundered and hired the most clueless ad agency in the world.

*cringes*

*ears bleed and eyes shrivel up like prunes*

Really? OK, so Windows 7 Launch Parties is a kinda lame idea, but there’s enough geeky people around to pull it off, and there will be enough media coverage when Windows 7 is officially launched on October 22nd.

Quotes from Twitter include:

“What would compel someone to have a Windows 7 Launch/House Party?…seriously!”

“Got my life size cut out of a nude Bill Gates ready. Oh, I thought you said Windows 7 Raunch Party. Sorry.”

And joy of joys, there is also a dedicated Windows 7 Launch/House party website, so you can upload snaps of you and your friends nerding out over an install of Windows 7. Hosts also get a signature copy of Windows 7, and a party kit including branded napkins, streamers, posters and balloons.

If it makes you feel better, here is an alternate version of the Launch Party video…

$20 says that the 4 actors in the video have no fucking clue what they’re selling.

Damnit.

Gotta re-evaluate the browsers again – Firefox 3.5 , Google Chrome 3 Beta, and Opera 10 Beta were all updated in the past few days.

Dunno if there are any ground breaking changes though – Firefox’s update only fixed a few security and stability issues, Opera’s was “numerous bug fixes” and a GUI update, but Chrome… well, given the number of bugs currently in it, any update is welcome.

a.k.a 32-Bit Web Browser Review

And now for a short detour in the multi-part series, onto the most extensive post I have written to date.

A few months back, I was searching for Firefox on Major Geeks (file download mirror that’s unmetered on my ISP) and came across a… let’s say, unique browser – 32-Bit Web Browser, developed by a small company called Electrasoft.

Click here to visit Electrasoft’s home page, and here for the product information page.

Seeing as I was auditioning browsers anyway, I downloaded 32-Bit Web Browser and installed it in a virtual machine to try out. The results made me cry

I didn’t even bother benchmarking it; instead, I shall endeavour to give the application a virtual anal tearing, point out it’s numerous (understatement of the year there) flaws, and why its author is a charlatan who is scamming money off unsuspecting parent and senior types who don’t know any better. Let’s just say I would rather use Lynx or Dillo, than go anywhere near 32-Bit Web Browser with a 15 foot barge pole, so to speak.

This will be a long and intensive post, so click to read more.

(There’s more text at the end, it’s not all images!)

Read the rest of this entry »

There are only a few browsers even worthy of consideration at the moment – due to lack of support, infrequent updates, security holes, performance issues etc, I’ve decided to ignore all other browsers except for the main five. Legacy browsers (e.g. Firefox 2.0, IE7, Safari 3, Netscape were excluded), and the latest versions and betas available at time of testing were used.The versions I tested were:

• Google Chrome 2.0.172.33
• Google Chrome Beta 3.0.193.0
• Opera 9.64
• Opera 10 Beta Build 1631
• Safari 4.0.2
• Firefox 3.0.11
• Firefox 3.5
• Internet Explorer 8

Aside:  FYI, I’ve long since lost all traces of browser loyalty – they’ve already wasted enough of my time and sanity for me to even bother blowing the X browser horn.

I don’t really believe in browser benchmarks – the only real way to test browsers out is to use them for a few days and monitor their performance and system resource usage.  The SunSpider and V8 “industry standard” benchmarks are utter crap – every tech blog, journal and media portal seem to toss their figures around willy nilly, yet fail to realise that both benchmarks are BIASED and UNFAIR when used to compare competing browsers. They were designed to test performance of different builds, updates, improvements and so on, not the performance of a completely different competitors product. SunSpider was developed by WebKit (the basis of Safari) as an internal benchmark, as was V8 for Google Chrome. The only “un-biased” benchmark currently available is ACID 3, but even that doesn’t really simulate real world usage.

So, I gathered 301 different websites – each laced with images, Javascript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, pop-ups and AJAX and loaded them in each browser to check for memory leaks, abnormal CPU usage and disk I/O. I then tried using each browser with 30 tabs open for a day or two each, to see how they performed over time. As a test of each browsers tagging, history and bookmark searching capabilities, I also imported my 8MB bookmarks.html (where possible).

Each browser was setup to a “usable” state – i.e. pop-up and adblocking enabled if available, dangerous javascript options disabled. All other options were left at default, as settings shouldn’t need tweaking out of the box for a browser to be usable.

Test system specs were:

• Overclocked  Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4ghz @ 2.95Ghz
• 4GB 4-4-4-12 DDR2
• 3x 250GB WD2500KS SATA Hard Disks in a RAID0 Array (used as system disk)
• Nvidia GeForce 7600GT
• Windows XP Professional SP3 32-Bit with latest patches as of 13/7/09 applied
• Norton Internet Security 2008 16.5

So by no means a slouch. Keep in mind the average PC will NOT be anywhere near as powerful.

More to come in following posts…

I am a whore for the internets. If I had the money, I’d have interwebs pipes as extensive as Paris’s sewer system connected to my house so I could stream HD videos and torrent all day, at 40Gbps via multiple redundant upstream backbone networks. Unfortunately, bandwidth costs about ~$250 per Mbit unmetered delivered via fibre, so that’s an $12,000,000 internet bill per month. Then add on installation costs of laying fibre from the nearest access point to my doorstep, priced at ~$200 per metre in suburban areas (of which 98% of that costs is for the trenchworks and council approvals), a Cisco ONS 15454 SONET backplane to terminate the Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexed fibres, with a price heading into the 6 figure range and my plan doesn’t look quite so rosy anymore…

Regardless, the web browser is still the weapon of choice when it comes to surfing the web. Interestingly enough, picking the right web browser has been a long and gruelling process for me (no really!). I have rather peculiar web browsing habits, some of which entail -

• Bookmarking and tagging any website that is remotely interesting, or possibly useful in the future – my bookmarks.html is so large that some browsers can not import it, and scrolling to the bottom of the list takes ~ 5-6 minutes.
• Looks interesting? *click* *open in new tab* – after only about 20-30 minutes, I’ll typically have 25-30 tabs open. After a day of browsing, it’s usually around the 120-140 mark. Just wait until I start opening new windows as well…
• Constantly opening and closing browsers, so the ability to “save all” tabs and “open all tabs” is VERY important
• And as a consequence of the above reason – a high performance core that can search through 8MB of bookmarks and tags, 180 days of history and handle a 800MB cache

I mentioned long and gruelling – up until now, not a single browser available was suitable, each having their own crippling flaws and perclivites. But now, with the latest wave of browser updates/releases/betas, that’s all beginning to change. Hooray, no more:

• Blue Screens of Death (BSOD) – yup, a *certain* browser forced me to reboot my PC constantly
• Massive memory leaks that would make windows page its own kernel to disk in an effort to free up RAM
• Disk thrashing as browsers try to re-open 120 tabs from the cache
• Constant tri-daily browser crashes
• Awful laggy performance worthy of sandpapering your face

Well, I compiled a list of 301 tabs of pages packed with images, Javascript, Java applets, Flash, Shockwave, Silverlight, pop-ups and AJAX and unleashed them on all the browsers I could get my hands on. The results may surprise you…

More to come in the following posts.

(By the way, I do realise my web browser usage is NOT in anyway representative of most users, but the debilitating flaws in some browsers would still affect the average granny, logging into her ISP e-mail once a week to check for messages from the kids).

Hmmm… that’s mildly annoying. A back end upgrade had unexpected side effects, breaking the custom modified theme I was using for the man website (Blog excluded) due to the way it parses get_categories(), so now it looks mingered.

Well more mingered than it was previously anyway. A patch will be out in a few days, so I hear.

Eh, what do you know – some how, this site gets enough visits per month to use over 1.25GB+ bandwidth per month.Yay for search engines!

Oh me, oh my.

A break in the blag update drought.

Actually bothered to create a new post just for this.

Microsoft has been granted IP patent # 7536726 (filed in 2005) for technology used in the crippling of operating systems.

“making selected portions and functionality of the operating system unavailable to the user or by limiting the user’s ability to add software applications or device drivers to the computer’ until an ‘agreed upon sum of money’ is paid to ‘unlock or otherwise make available the restricted functionality”

Oh, when will the fun ever stop.

Meanwhile, Sophos has developed an Anti-Virus program for members of the Klingon Empire!

I’m not even going to bother trying to comprehend what type of shrooms they were smoking when their designers created this, but it’s damn good marketing regardless – it’s made headlines all over the interwebs.

*See the bloatware name and shame list for alternatives and description of the problems encountered

Woo! Time for another (brief) rant at my favourite company in the world – Apple Inc.

Why are Apple developers so incapable of making a lightweight, fast and clean version of iTunes ans Quicktime?

They take forever to load, two years to install or upgrade and leave behind more debris upon uninstall that a shrapnel grenade. For f***s sake, installing a bloody antivirus program has less of an effect on your computer than iTunes/Quicktime, no joking. And why does Quicktime always crash? I bounced this idea off a couple of mates who do media/arts at uni, and the general consensus there about Quicktime on any non Mac OS computer is the same – utter crapola. Unstable, laggy, restrictive.

Ironic, their “I’m and Mac, and I’m a PC” ads.

Perhaps Microsoft should insert time delay trojans into MS Office for mac? Or maybe vulnerability exploiters when it detects a Mac user visiting their website?

To Apple’s credit, they got rid of Quick Time Task a while back.

For now, the only reason to keep iTunes is if you own an iPhone/iPod. I’d use Windows Media Player, if it’s library management weren’t so awful…

*Updated iTunes just then. Why of why does it have to restart my freakin PC? I haven’t done that in 14 days and 3 hours now… Even installing Norton, yes Norton Internet Security doesn’t require a restart. Get with the times, Apple!

Bleh, no point creating 4 separate posts for 4 small issues so here they are amalgamated into one:

1) As is the inevitable fate of all blogs, Russian spammers have found Blag Akismet has been installed to filter out SPAM comments… (Those Russians really need to try harder – “nice blog ————- (url to mp3 website) – by default, most blogs should block their comments anyway, without the need to install anti-spam plugins but no harm done beefing up security)

2) Coles, the supermarket chain owned by Wesfarmers which supports terrorism has stopped selling “Pacific” branded 50-pack made in China ultra unhealthy packed with MSG spring rolls

3) Looks like the 301 redirect worked! Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo, Netcraft and Alexa have started crawling this new URL

4) Wiki’s are so freaking annoying to set up and maintain!!! Especially mediawiki (what Wikipedia uses), being one of the most un-user friendly pieces of software ever created by man.

I looked in the Firefox Help > About menu and guess what I saw?

Firefox raped by Thaksin Shinawat!

As it turns out, the maintainer of the Noia Extreme theme is a Thai. Noia, being one of the Top 10 themes on Mozilla’s extension’s website obviously drew quite a lot of negative attention over it. Yet it still hasn’t been fixed, and users are posting “fixed” or “reverted” versions for those who don’t ish to have their favourite browser adorned by some Botox injecting middle aged Thai man.

I, as with most people consider this adware/political propaganda. Yes, as the author of the Firefox theme he can do whatever he wishes, but a more appropriate manner of expressing his views might have been a link on the theme’s download page, or a tab that opens with related information the first time the theme is used. I don’t see the point of that image actually – clicking on it doesn’t provide any information, or open a new page/tab.

Hopefully the Noia Firefox logo will be restored soon… or I might install the IE7 theme for Firefox in protest

And Microsoft opens the first patch Tuesday of 2009 with a critical SMB bug, which is predicted to leave a similar trail of destruction as the Sasser and Blaster worm. I’m surprised such a blatantly obvious (in hindsite) bug was undiscovered for over 10 years. In any case, anyone with even the most basic firewall is safe, but that leaves corporate networks screwed, as typically, they don’t have firewalls on individual workstations.

More: http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/272988/microsoft_patches_super_nasty_windows_bugs?fp=4&fpid=762453&eid=110

Edit: 8 million computers infected so far by the ‘Sleeper Virus”, according to CNN US anyway…  Alss there is a variant known as Downadup or Conficker [F-Secure]. It has the potential to create massive botnets, spewing out fake domains andmass infecting vulnerable web domains. So far, most infections tracked by researchers are coming from corporate networks, but due to NAT, each IP could represent 2 computers, or 2000. The worm dictionary attacks users computers, locking them out of Active Directory.