BrowserChoice.eu ist eine in Folge eines Gerichtsverfahrens mit der EU eingerichtete Website von Microsoft, welche es den Benutzern erleichtern soll, einen alternativen Browserauszuwählen und so den nach Ansicht der EU durch die Marktmacht von Microsoft Windows zu Gunsten des damit gebündelten Internet Explorer verzerrten Markt wiederherstellen soll.

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Am 17. März 2010 soll durch Windows-Update ein Patch ausgeliefert werden, der den Internet Explorer zunächst deaktiviert und danach sowohl den Download eines Browsers nach Wahl über diesen Dialog wie auch dessen Einrichtung als Standardbrowser vorsieht. Der Internet Explorer wird in diesem Falle nur wieder aktiviert.

Prinzipiell ist diese “Microsoft-zurück-in-die-Schranken-weisen”-Mentalität ja nichts Schlechtes. Was ich doch etwas lächerlich finde ist, dass sich die Browserhersteller über keine vernünftige Anzeigereihenfolge einigen konnten (Alphabetisch wäre naheliegend). So erscheinen jetzt bei jedem Reload von www.browserchoice.eu die “Großen 5″ (IE, Opera, Safari, Firefox und Chrome) in einer anderen Reihenfolge:

Beim ersten Anzeigen

Nach dem ersten Reload

Nach dem zweiten Reload

Und dann gibt es weiter rechts (horizontales Scrollen auf Websiten ist Epic Fail btw) noch 7 weitere Browser:

FlashPeak, Maxthon, GreenBrowser, Avant & K-Meleon

Flock & Sleipnir

Und zu meiner großen Schande muss ich gestehen, dass ich außer den großen 5 nur Flock kenne, dafür fehlen der Liste trotzdem einige andere Browser wie zB Seamonkey.

Wie dem auch sei, ich kann mir nicht vorstellen dass diese Seite den Marktanteil des IE auch nur irgendwie gefährden wird, und das aus 2 einfachen Gründen:

1. Der Standarduser kennt nur den IE, und was er nicht kennt benutzt er auch nicht.
2. User die nicht nur den IE kennen benützen zu 95% bereits eine Alternative.

Trotzdem ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung.  Und noch eine abschließende Anmerkung: Wieso muss die Website eigentlich aussehen als ob sie mit Frontpage erstellt wurde?

What other companies spend on marketing campaign, Apple seems to spend on non-disclosure agreements .

I could give you a list of advantages and disadvantages of the iPad – and I will, but first I’d like to talk about the tablet that I use at work.

It’s a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook T-Series. It has a 12″ screen, and wheighs over a ton or so. The battery life is inversely proportional to the weight, 2 hours tops – with dimmed screen and wireless turned off. And to be fair: the first battery died a few months ago, this battery is an original replacement part from Fujitsu. It runs Windows 7, which I have to say works really smooth compared to XP. And I use it as a normal notebook 99 percent of the time. And that is because using it as a tablet just doesn’t feel right. The only application that can be used at maximum efficiency is Journal, which acts like a normal paper notepad. Surfing the web in tablet mode fails when it comes to entering the desired address, you need the stylus, there is no keyboard you could put your fingers on when in tablet mode. And tapping the stylus on every single letter takes time, especially when you’re surfing to a website which address you’ve never entered before. Let alone Word, Excel or any other office software product.

If we would take my tablet and improve it I’d say we should fix the following things:

• Longer battery life
• Less weight
• Better input methods
• Applications that work in “tablet mode”

And then Apple comes along and releases the iPad. And if we compare my improvement wishes to the iPad’s features we get the following list:

• Long battery life
• Less weight (.73kg with 3G module)
• Use your fingers
• ALL iPhone apps from day one (3rd party iPad-only apps coming soon)

Where there’s light there is always shadow. I could list the disadvantages, deal- and neckbreakers of the iPad as advantages of my tablet, but I won’t. Instead I provide a list of things that are annoying and why they annoy me:

• No multitasking
  I would love to run my Twitter client, my Facebook app and a browser at the same time. This will hopefully get fixed with iPhone OS 4.0.
• No camera
  Sitting on the couch, feet put up, iPad in hand, Skype running, and: no video calls. How about plugging in an USB cam, oh wait, move on.
• No built-in USB
  Do we really need to use adaptors for everything?
• MicroSIM
  Don’t know for the US, but I don’t think that Austrian carriers will sell such SIM cards anytime soon.

Everything else can be seen as an advantage, at least in my opinion:

• No full blown OS
  Because it doesn’t suck. And the apps DO work.
• No Flash
  Because flash ads do suck. And HTML, JavaScript and Web-Standards are your friend. Youtube (and soon every clone) will switch to HTML5, and Flash will die, slowly, but it will die.
• Unlocked 3G
  If you guys had only done that with the iPhone before, that 15.6 billion bucks revenue would have at least doubled. Say hello to world domination Nevertheless it’s a step in the right direction.
• No stylus
  Because you do not need one. Ever.
• Gorgeous Apple apps
  love the new calendar and photo app.
• Leather case and keyboard dock
  Do rock.
• eBook reader
  The iPad will kill the Kindle. Or at least hurt it very badly.

We all know that Steve Jobs hates netbooks. So do I. They suck big time. I know, I had two. Too small, too slow, but cheap. And that’s pretty much that there is to it. Will the iPad kill the Netbook market? Maybe. What definitely will happen is that Apple will bite off a huge piece of the netbook market pie.

But will I buy one? Chances are good. I’d go for the 64GB model with 3G for 850 bucks, and sell my MacBook Air on eBay. Sandra recently discoverd eBooks and fell in love with the Kindle, but after yesterday’s keynote and her comments on the iPad, I’m very certain that she’ll buy the iPad, not a Kindle.

And after Apple announced the price for the iPad starting at $499 stock price increased by 1% (to $207). So shareholders like it. And so do most people.

(via fscklog.com)

MacBook Air 1,1 | 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo | 2GB RAM | 80GB HDD

Install took about 30 Minutes, everything works like a charm. Shutdown takes about 2 (two) seconds which is extremely fast, startup time is about 50 secs, which is a bit faster than under Leopard.

MacBook Pro 5,1 | 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo | 4GB RAM | 500GB HDD

Install took about 30 minutes as well, and to be honest I had some problems after first time booting into Snow Leopard:

• coreaudiod consumed all free RAM at once making it impossible to work. Simple solution: open up Activity Monitor, kill the process, open up a Terminal, and type

  sudo rm /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/coreaudiod.plist

  after that reboot. More information can be found at the Apple support forums.

Mac mini 1,1 | 1.83GHz Core Duo | 2GB RAM | 60 GB HDD & MacBook 5,1 | 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo | 2GB RAM | 160GB HDD

Installation took about 50 minutes on the Mac mini – it’s not the fastest machine Apple has ever built – and about 30 minutes on the MacBook, but it’s a neat media server.

Everything works like a charm too.

Incompatible Software and Workarounds

An almost complete list can be found at snowleopard.wikidot.com. Here is a list of apps that work with Snow Leopard (at least with m Macs):

My Compatibility Chart for Mac OS X Snow Leopard

rm -rf ~/Library/Application Support/Nambu/

Exchange Sync

Works absolutely flawless in Mail, iCal and Address Book, and is the one feature that made me buy 10.6 in the first place – Multiple address books and calendars be gone! You can now sync your Google Calendar with iCal too.

Dock Exposé

Nice to have. Enough said.

QuickTime X

Okay, but I often need to concatenate movie files and save it as one file which works with QuickTime 7 but not with X. Luckily Snow Leopard offers you to install QuickTime 7 as well, which can be found in /Applications/Utilites.

Screen Sharing

Is now executing keyboard shortcuts on the remote machine instead of the connecting one.

Anything else?

No, not really as far as I’m concerned.

Should I buy it?

Yeah why not

(via gizmodo.com)

Click here to view the embedded video.

(via gizmodo.com)

“Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography,” an Apple spokesman told CNN Thursday afternoon. “The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed, and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store.”

(via wired.com)

6 products that failed.

25 years – a timeline with pictures.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Exchange for the rest of us

they made a big mistake.

I signed up for a 60 day trial account (79 bucks per year is a lot of money and I don’t want to buy a pig in a poke) which got extended to 90 days due to Apple’s “we’re sorry for MobileMe being such a pain in the ass” apologies.

MobileMe’s speed is beneath contempt. When selecting all mails in my inbox and hitting the delete button it usually takes 5 seconds until the recent 25 mails moved to the trash. Same problem with the calendar. And with the iDisk. And I thought after the .mac debacle in Europe (availability below 75%, speed below 56k) Apple learned their lesson. For a 50kbyte Pages document it took me about 15 seconds to upload it to my iDisk (and my internet connection is far away from being slow) – when uploading from my Mac, when uploading directly via webinterface the speed is a bit better but still. Apple gets paid 100.000.000 bucks a year and seem to operate their servers with a modem.

It is not possible to send invitations from MobileMe to an iPhone or iPod touch – so why do they call it the Exchange for the rest of us. It is more like the Exchange that the rest of us never wanted.

Anyhow, I give Apple time until the end of my trial account to fix those problems, bugs and to add all those missing features (like push from my Mac to MobileMe, sophisticated appointment management, notes and tasks, sharing with iDisk etc). If all that fails my advice would be to stick with Google, Yahoo or Zimbra.

Apple, I know you don’t consider advices of some Austrian kid, but wouldn’t you make a whole lot more money if you’d sell the iPhone to anyone? Forget those exclusive contracts, they’re so 1990 and give us what we want. iPhone, 16GB, for 200 bucks a piece without the hassle. Maniac said something utterly true about the iPhone:

By the way, iPhones will be sold with exclusive contracts only, it’s dead to me now.

Besides: the apps rock!

a) look more closely to find that remote, or

b) take another Apple remote, aim it at your MacBook, Apple TV or whatever and press Menu + Rewind, until you see the icon with the broken chain, this will unpair the lost remote.

To pair that other remote press Menu + Forward, until you see the icon with the intact chain. This information saved me a lot of time and trouble with Sandra, who wasn’t able to watch “The Closer” with the Apple TV

So here is my conclusion:

Vista is Windows like we wanted it to be 5 years ago. The user interface got redesigned in an eye cancer avoiding way and it feels right. But you need a whole lot of new hardware to get things up and running.

All started a few days ago when I first showed my MacBook at work. A colleague of mine who is a Microsoft fanboy – in a positive way – asked me if I’m planning to install Windows. First I said, that XP is not exactly what I’m looking for in an OS, and that I would like to install Vista for testing, making hands-on experience as our company will migrate to Vista in the near future) and to play CS:Source and BF2 again. Yesterday he offered me a Vista DVD and asked me

Does the MacBook have a FireWire port?

Yes it does.

Then you’ll need to install Vista Ultimate.

WTF? I would love to know what the boys at Redmond were thinking when they decided not to support a FireWire port with the other versions. WTF.

So later that day I fired up the Boot Camp Assistant, created a 32GB partition, inserted the Vista DVD and clicked the install button. A few hours minutes later, after formatting the new partition with NTFS, waiting for all files to be copied, several reboots, filling out some information (e.g. computer name, username, password, user avatar) Vista was up and running. The first thing I managed to do was to setup the wireless internet connection, and to install the Steam client. I tried to install all Vista updates and CS:Source but the clock told me that it’s already way after bedtime, I’ll finish that today.

The positive things in Vista so far:

It looks nice

I may sound like a douche bag, but when you’re working with computers and sit in front of them all day you need to look at something sexy, a Jessica Alba wallpaper, even in Full HD won’t do the job.

Aero

3D flipping, transparency, floating windows, all that soothes even the savage beast.

Security

A root password is the right thing to have.

Performance

Booting is much faster than it could possibly ever be with XP.

The negative things in Vista so far:

It looks not that good

Why do windows change their border color when maximized?

Aero

How can it be possible that you can flip windows around with a 64MB shared memory graphics card on Mac OS X, but in Vista you’ll need at least 256MB?

Security

It is annoying, to get asked for permissions four (!) times when installing the Flash plugin for IE7.0.

Performance

Why does it take so long just to shutdown? Normally an OS would tell all running processes to go fuck themselves,and then power off. Vista seems to prefer negotiation. Reminds me of XP when pressing the power button, and some application refuses to close itself, then it would me inform about not being able to shutdown. You’re the OS not me, you can kill processes and I need to catch my train.

I’ll post more information the following days.

Open a terminal

diskutil list

You should see something like this
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *232.9 Gi disk1
1: Apple_HFS Media 231.4 Gi disk1s4
2: Apple_Recovery 400.0 Mi disk1s1
3: Apple_HFS OSBoot 900.0 Mi disk1s2
4: EFI 200.0 Mi disk1s3

The partition important to us is Apple_Recovery, which, in my case, is located at disk1s1

You may have to change disk1s1 to something else, depending on your system!

cd /Volumes
mkdir recovery

sudo mount -t hfs /dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/recovery
cd recovery

sudo cp -p OS.dmg /Users/<yourusernamehere>/OS.dmg.backup
We copy the original recovery image to our user folder, just in case something goes wrong.

Download the Take 2 Recovery Image at

http://mesu.apple.com/data/OS/061-3561.20080212.ScoH6/2Z694-5274-109.dmg

sudo cp -p /Users/<yourusernamehere>/Downloads/2Z694-5274-109.dmg /Volumes/recovery/OS.dmg

Eject the drive with
diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk1
Put the Apple TV back together, do a factory restore and everything should work fine!

Use this How-To at your own risk! I can not held be responsible if something goes wrong!

Some forum users reported that it has to be a Leopard only issue, resulting when you upgrade your harddrive and use Leopard to clone the original drive to a new one, but I can’t affirm that, I used Leopard and I updated to software version 2.0 hassle-free.

At last

VIENNA, AT 9:43 DELIVERED

Thanks, UPS