Microsoft’s map graphics, which are known to be highly accurate, highlights that while the Kinect for Windows hardware is currently available in mainland Australia, it is neither available in Tasmania or coming soon.
via Microsoft: Tasmania secedes from Australia – istartedsomething.
Seems like Microsoft has updated the original article with an updated (read: more accurate) map. Grabbed this from a MetroTwit developer’s blog.
In a perfect world, all our phone updates would be released when the phone manufacturer said so, not at the whims of hardware manufacturers and certainly not at the discretion of telecommunications companies. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with the (somewhat minor) Windows Phone 7 update, with delays globally as carriers and hardware manufacturers stumble over numerous “testing and verification” stages. And even when Microsoft finally approve the update, it “might take several weeks” before users even see the update? Well, there’s a joke if I’ve ever heard one.
via Sleek Interface Designs from DeviantART.
Okay, I’ll admit it – being a Mac user, I usually prefer to having things that work, even if that means sacrificing a little bit of customisability here and there. Every so often though, I like to go all out with UI customisations and tweak every setting/interface I can.
I didn’t even realise it until just now, when I saw the two pics at the beginning of this post. For some reason, they reminded me of the dark old days when I used to used Windows ME machine with a little program called Musicmatch Jukebox, which was almost infinitely skinnable and could be made to look pretty similar to the screenshots above.
If I’m honest, it’s one of the things I miss about “the Apple experience” – the ability to customise UIs to however you want. Then again, I’m kinda glad – Apple gear (usually, haha) lets you get stuff done, without worrying about all of that kind of stuff. It’s probably one of the reasons it’s more user-friendly as well, but we wont’ go into that.
Yet, even after being a “true Mac user” for the past three years or so (PPC is so dead to me), I’m not ashamed to say I’ve relapsed once or twice. I jailbroke my iPhone 3G and installed a different font (which, interestingly, made it slightly less readable, but so much more enjoyable on the eyes), I’ve experimented with Enigma for Windows, and more recently, I’ve also considered changing the standard Mac UI scrollbars to something a little more, er, modern.
Bottom line? It’s not that I don’t like having control over how I think things should look – far and away, themes are great. However, it’s the time required to make everything “just right” that kinda puts me off – one of the main reasons I didn’t stick with Enigma was that as powerful as it was, I wasn’t really prepared to go diving into lots of customisation files for all the tweaks I needed to make, which is also one of the reasons why I haven’t tried GeekTool yet, either.
As I’ve said before – Linux is only free if your time is worthless, and that still holds true for (most) of these customisations, as well. Be content with what you have – experience has always told me there will always be a better version out there, but oh wait – did you just waste an hour trying to get it to work?
😉
Let’s just cut to the chase here: Windows 7 is built on top of Windows Vista. It doesn’t roll back the major changes that Vista made; it doesn’t reduce system requirements (for example, it still needs Direct3D graphics and 1 GB RAM to be worthwhile), it doesn’t undo security decisions like UAC, and, except for specific scenarios like booting, it doesn’t really perform significantly better. If you have software or hardware that’s incompatible with Vista, it’ll almost certainly be incompatible with Windows 7 too. The things Redmond did in Vista were not mistakes to be rectified; they were necessary upgrades to the platform.
[…]
That said, Windows 7 does bring some low-level improvements of its own. The graphics driver model has been updated, resulting in markedly lower memory consumption when lots of windows are open. ZDNet performed some benchmarks which purport to show Windows 7 being faster than XP SP3 and Vista SP1 (they also show Vista being faster than XP in a number of tests, but of course, no one cares about that…), but the differences in most cases are pretty slight (10% or less) and so are unlikely to be felt in practice. However, the main thing is that even if it’s not noticeably faster than Vista, Windows 7 also isn’t any slower. The new features all come at zero performance cost, and that can only be a good thing.
via Deep inside the Windows 7 Public Beta: an in-depth tour.
This approaches an antique-level of age, but it’s still something to think about if you haven’t made the switch. Do you really want to be stuck with using an operating system that’s almost TEN years old? I bet you’ve even upgraded your hardware within that time – why not the software, then?
This post is tagged “awesome” for a reason, you know 😉
The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process after you set a solid color as the desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2
You know what, in this day and age, this is ridiculous. How was this even necessary in the first place? Why was it necessary? Who let this code ship?
…at least there’s a hotfix. /sigh
…well, that didn’t go as planned.
What happened yesterday was completely different to what I actually thought (or had planned) to happen. My original, original plan was to move as much freshbytes stuff over to here as possible, but then I decided to use my time more wisely and play Dragon Age: Origins instead. 😀
If only that had been what actually transpired.
You see, I have this file system scheme with my Windows machine where as much as possible is moved off the OS drive. As I format my machines regularly, it just makes sense to dedicate a hard drive to Windows, and have two 1TB drives for storage – one for installed programs (okay, just Steam) and another for all my media, legally acquired or otherwise.
The way that it worked before I decided to play with it was that my User folder was on my OS drive, but the Documents, Videos and Pictures folders underneath that were moved to the Program drive. Truth be told, there’s nothing wrong with this setup.
However, I must make a special mention to those developers who think a special hidden folder in my User folder is an excellent place to store save games and other important info. Usually games store their save information, profiles etc, in either their own program folder, or under the Documents folder, or even under the My Games folder in the Documents folder. Such is the case with games like Dragon Age, BioShock, TrackMania, Rainbow 6 Vegas (1 and 2), and so on. There are certain games, however, that decide the hidden folder AppData is an excellent place to store this information instead, and without naming names, we’ll just say that a certain indie physics puzzler inolving Goo and a recent driving arcade game involving Paradise are the main culprits here.
