Google to big to fail?

I did something today that I found very interesting. Interesting to me I am sure, but I do measure by bemusement against my own experiences and expectations and now against what others might generally accept.

Having recovered from an operation I am well enough now to only need be seen by the fine doctors that saw to me twice a year. So last Friday I set the appointment for 6 months hence. Today I got the letter, proving that the top heavy administration that is crippling our healthcare system is at least doing its job.

Then I set about the task of reminding myself. This is where my fascination set in. I was about to set my appointment in Google Calendar. Six months time. Interesting really isn't it. I had conversation about a week ago about a company that is too big to fail. Funnily, I can't even remember what I argued! Did I argue that Google is too big to fail? Or did I argue that Google was bound to eventually fall from grace like every other big company before it, lets face it - Microsoft is not what is once was. Apple fell and came back - but it fell. IBM once owned the market. Dell had a good byte (lols) of the cherry. But all these companies are clearly still here. What about Commodore, Atari, Amstrad.

Now someone could come back at me with every example I give and argue the toss. Excellent go on.

But think also of Yahoo! who fell (big time) and is back. Blackberry, Nokia. There clearly are examples of what I am talking about. And this is why it is good what I can't remember what I argued. It makes the conversation objective. It helps me remember that a lot of big, and I am really only talking about the BIG companies here, do at least fall. And when they fall the next giant either fumbles or falls strategically into its place.

The interesting example here is IBM who lost their superpower status to Microsoft in the eighties with the operating system wars and Yahoo who lost their superpower status to Google in the search market in the 90's.

All things come and go, all things. Period. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Mountains, time, physics, even Google. So when will Google change, and how suddenly and how much and for how long? Well, I hope they around for the next six months so I can remember my appointment!

:)

125 - Windows 8.1

I was working on a computer today and it had Windows 8.1 on it. Boy oh boy. 8.1. One might think that 8.1 is an improvement on 8.0. I have not used Windows 8, and I hate to think how bad it was. At least 8.1 had the Windows key added? I was pressing the Windows key on the keyboard but it was not bringing up anything. The person who owned the 8.1 machine said that it was really easy to use once you got used to it, but you should not need to get used to it. It is simply not intuitive. I tried to uninstall Norton off the machine but I could not for the life of me find an add/remove option for it. I did find an add remove option for an app that was in the new interface at the front end but not to get rid of the full application that was installed.

Windows 8.1 Terrible user experience. 

My question is, who exactly did Microsoft talk to when they were wondering if this was an intuitive system? No messing around. I found it really really horribly bad to use! With Apple OS sales holding, mobile phone use on the rise to the point where people are not getting even laptops anymore because their phone can do what they need and the likes of Steam OS on the way you gotta ask yourself, what are Microsoft thinking. 

Rather, are they thinking?

55 - Apple, the Rohypnol of the computer industry.

Linux is the beautiful woman you fall for, and you wake up one morning and she is laying beside you in the bed. She does not pretend to be anything she is not. She is generous, fun, and intelligent. She sticks up for you and defends you. Protects you and the both of you together can move mountains. She is free, she came into your life and asked for nothing.

Then there is Microsoft, she is expensive, high maintenance. You can't walk down the street without spending money on this chick somehow, she demands alot but when met in full this girl is amazing. And you know what, assuming that you bag the correct one your set... but some of them can be dumb as hell, and infact make your life hell with their dumbness. However all through your journey with this woman, you know where you stand.

Then there is Apple. The viper. You will pay the most for Apple. Truly she is the most beautiful by far, but like a siren, when you hold her you are totally under her control. Initially she was the woman in the bar that only drank champagne and ate strawberry's. Lately however she has become more deceiving, not because she can't bag enough men, but because she has found her competition boring. Now she no longer drinks champagne in classy nightclubs, now she hangs around in shady pubs, chats to you for a while, slips some rohypnol into your drink... when you wake up the next morning your head hurts, all of your money is gone, your cards have been emptied out... you realize in the worst way possible that you have been screwed. Your heart is broken and your angry at her, and you wish you never heard her name.

32 - Steam Box specs revealed.

If you have read my blog alot or popped in and out over the last while you will know that I am looking forward to the new Steam Box that Valve, the computer games manufacturer, is about to release. Well specs have been released for the model of the Steam Box that is going to be released in 2014. Here the specs are:

Here is a quote from a website describing the specs better than I will "First and foremost, there isn’t a single static spec — even for the Valve-made beta units. The prototype units will ship with an Intel Core i7-4770, an Intel Core i5-4570, or an unidentified Core i3 CPU. As far as GPUs go, there will be a mix of Nvidia Titan, Nvidia GTX780, Nvidia GTX760, and Nvidia GTX660 models — all with 3GB of GDDR5. All units will ship with 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, hybrid 1TB/8GB SSHDs, and a 450w power supply. Impressively, all of this equipment is designed to fit inside a 12-inch x 12.4-inch x 2.9-inch case."

Yes the Steam Box might look like this... or nothing like this?

What sticks out to me is the 1 Terrabyte solid state hard drive! I have a new computer and I have to say the difference between a solid state drive and a regular disc drive is amazing in terms of speed. I am seriously looking forward to it. Valve are making up a machine that runs a hackable scaleable machine that seems to kick the ass of Xbox One and Playstation 4 in terms of specs.

The only thing that we do not know about yet is the price. If you valued these parts today for a machine it could come to €1500+, not the €400 - €500ish that we would like!?!

24 - Steam and the living room

So in case you do not know all about Steam and the Living Room here it is. Basically Valve, the company that made the Half Life series, Portal and Left 4 Dead series has a piece of software named Steam. Steam is the distribution software that is used by gamers to download all the games and gaming tools that they need.

Now Valve want more people to have access to their games so they are releasing an operating system named SteamOS. It is basically a variation of Linux that is tailored towards Valve games. On Friday, yesterday, Valve released the controller that would be used to play the future games from Steam and current games persumably. It is amazing looking. Look at the image below...

SteamOS, Steam, Valve, Contoller

No sticks, tons of buttons, a little screen. The pad is called a haptic controller. Read up a little more here on the BBC website - link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24304272

21 - Second Steam announcement.

The second of three announcements were made by Valve today. It is regarding "Steam Machines". These are the boxes that SteamOS will run in your living room as they envision. They are first going to release their own Steam Machine and then other manufacturers can make their own Steam Machines. A steam machine is basically a computer that will have to meet some basic specs as determined by Valve and run SteamOS. So basically as soon as SteamOS comes out I will be scrubbing some machine I have here at home and turning my PC into a Linux Valve gaming machine.

Interestingly I read an article today where a head in nVidia said that the reason that they do not have their chipset in the xboxOne or the PS4 is because they did not want the bother. They are focusing on new technology and innovation and they said that never again will consoles be better than PCs in the way that in the 90's that consoles were better than PCs.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.829212-Nvidia-Console-Graphics-Will-Never-Again-Outpace-PCs

I noticed that myself when I got what essentially an office computer, but a good one so it had plenty of RAM, a good quick Intel Quad Core processor and I added a smashing graphics card. What did I end up with? A gaming rig that is simply faster and better at the moment than either the PS4 or the Xbox One. And they haven't even been released yet!

So yes, it is something that I realised a while ago. Do not buy a console, buy a PC, it is as simple as that. Cheaper in the long run, games are prettier even in the short run, with a much more hugely massive games library to choose from.

And the best thing to me about a PC over a Console, and it is the one thing that I will not ever forgive their decaying corpses for... a keyboard. If I am at my games console all day I eventually need to type something, I need to get up and go to my computer, turn on my computer, while I am there and I have finished typing my email that only took 2 minutes on the keyboard, I might as well play some Steam games, after all I did just get a humble bundle for 5 dollars, and for that 5 dollars I have received something like 7 games. Yeah, it will be a while before I get back to the sub par graphics of the console on the TV... I am going to play my literally hundreds of hours of virtually free entertainment here on my PC...

Whats that?

At least you can sit back and relax on the couch! Boyeee! Haven't you heard anything I have said about how good Steam is? Steam has the Big Picture which enables better gaming on a big screen TV. Of course they have had it now for a while so it is nothing new... I guess Microsoft would have been screaming off the roof tops if they came up with some innovative new concept... lets listen....

Yeah nothing, not a peep. Just the sound of a dying concept, the sound of confused marketing people back tracking every sentence they just spoke for the last few months until at last they have said nothing, the sound of confused developers whom are not allowed by Microsoft to develop but with bloated tools that the sleeping giant burped out years ago... and then the sound of silence.

Test Your Browser... HTML5test.com

Hi there.. it has been a while since i was on and I missed it alot. Enough of that! Onto browser testing...

Go to html5test.com and you will be presented with a page telling you how well your browser can handle HTML version 5. Why would you want your browser to handle html 5? Well version 5 supports alot of things that make your web experience better... alot better when it is implemented.

So on my computer I have Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome... I have not updated all of the browsers yet and I have run the test to see how they do before and after latest versions of the browser. Now remember the following... these marks are out of 500... ahem Microsoft....

I don't know what version exactly this is.. What is Version compared to Update Version? Stupid Microsoft!

• Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 - 138 plus 10 bonus points!
• Mozilla Firefox v16.0.2 - This got 372 plus 10 bonus points.
• Google Chrome Version 25.0.1364.152 m 463 plus 10 bonus points 

Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 - 138 plus 10 bonus points!

Damn thats kinda crap! Microsoft really bad...

Mozilla Firefox v16.0.2 - This got 372 plus 10 bonus points.

Firefox did ok....

Google Chrome Version 25.0.1364.152 m 463 plus 10 bonus points 

Google Chrome did very well...

So then I attempted to update the 3 tested browsers again to see what would happen... lets see if the scores improved or got worse!

Before

• Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 - 138 plus 10 bonus points!
• Mozilla Firefox v16.0.2 - This got 372 plus 10 bonus points.
• Google Chrome Version 25.0.1364.152 m 463 plus 10 bonus points
• Google Chrome on my Samsung Galaxy S3 Android version 4.1.2  - 417 plus 11 bonus points.

After

• Microsoft Internet Explorer v9 - Do not know how to update browser easily.. fail again MS
• Mozilla Firefox v19.0.2 - This got 393 plus 10 bonus points. - Up 21 points!
• Google Chrome Version 25.0.1364.160 m 463 plus 10 bonus points - Same score...
• Google Chrome on my Samsung Galaxy S3 Android version 4.1.2 - Didn't test yet...

Conclusion...
Keep your browsers up to date.. this test shows how updating can be very useful .. not only from the obvious security point of view but also from the experience you will get from your daily browsing... 

2012 - Day 74 - Lovely Ubuntu + Anonymous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) 

**********************************

I didn't tell you or did I? I few days ago I got a laptop that had Microsoft Windows on it and I overwrote the operating system with a Unix - well Linux rather - operating system. In my case the new Linux operating system is Ubuntu. The version of Ubuntu that I have is 11.10. The version is relevant because Ubuntu has come into its own with it own look and an interface called Unity that is kinda like the scroll bar that you find on the bottom of Mac OS screens where you can pick programs from really quickly. But there are a million reasons to go with Ubuntu over Windows. First off they way that computers are going, with phone and tablets the actually dependancy that people had on Microsoft Windows is not as strong. I am not saying that Microsoft is obsolete! I am not saying that. What I am saying is that once there were many operating systems, then for a while there was really just  Microsoft with Apple and Unix getting honorable mentions. Now if you want something to run your device you can go with:

Windows
Android
Lumia
Apple OS
Ubuntu (of various versions of Linux)
Blackberry
Sony

The reason I mention all of these is because there are reasons in the past where if all you wanted was to surf the internet, check mail, play some computer games, look at YouTube, Facebook etc the regular end user would have simply needed Windows or Apple. That has definately changed now. The future is definately bright because if the past has taught us one thing it is that where there is competition there is innovation. And with competition and innovation there is always one big winner. You - the end user.

So why am I on Ubuntu? Becasue I can. I downloaded it free and apart from games (there are some there but games are simply not Linux's strong point) it has everything. For games I use my beautiful xbox360. For everything else I can use my beautiful Ubuntu.

2012 - Day 69 - Saturday

Funny old Saturday. I was at Cliffs Gym... then at mom and dads power hosing the house and path. My evening was topped giving a Microsoft Access Databases to my little friend... A good day.

Vista: How do i hate thee, let me count the ways...

If anyone knows me at all, they know how much I love Bill Gates and Microsoft. And I have been around computers long enough to know how Microsoft, for example, make it easy for the common man or woman to use their computer... no more setting up sound cards, no more choosing your graphics card, devices have become plug and play and people who normally couldn't even turn on a PC before this are now surfing the net and buying crap of ebay.

So what happened with Vista? Seriously what the hell happened? I have vista on my main PC at home and it really is crap... now i hate usually when people say "vista is crap" because they might have heard some retard reporter in the Sun say so, but in this case they would be correct. Here is a small list of things that Vista makes worse....

• Connecting to the internet
• Run games slower... run the same game on the same machine with the same hardware but have vista on one and XP on the other and vista is around 10 or 20 frames per second slower...
• i tried to hook up a sony camcorder to vista, didn't work, but it worked no problem on xp, and just for the record, i had ran the vista patch...
• map maker for Call Of Duty 4 will not work on Vista...
• basically when you do ANYTHING at all technical AT ALL on vista, it asks you if you are sure that you want to carry on.... and they, Microsoft, call that better security. you can just click yes that you are sure you do want to carry on and the program keeps on loading in... HOW IS THAT SECURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• my god, i nearly forgot.... THE SEARCH.... the search... my god the search....... how the hell can i find what i am looking for? it is impossible to find anything using the search window. why did they break it...
• Also, the start button.... personally i find it alot worse that the previous one on XP

Now before one of you say "but the game or the programs and drivers have to be written for vista specifically", which would be a good point, i have to say, crap, if a program runs on XP it should run on Vista at least. that is the least i expect from software of one of the worlds biggest software company with their flagship product. anything else is lazy crap programming.

The whole thing here is, why? why did they have a totally excellent working operating system, ie - XP, and f*&k the whole thing up? You know of course what is going to happen, maybe not this year, but probably the next, google will release an operating system, or the next google on the horizion will.

Why? Microsoft you are throwing it all away...

Who here knows what an IBM 360 Mainframe is?

When i ask my little girl what Microsoft is when she is older, will she know?