Category Archives: opinion

In my point of view, this is going to be like..

me & Snow Leopard after first 2 weeks

Posted on by
Reply

For the record, I had been using Mac OSX way way back to iBook G3; as I remember, it’s Tiger back then. I didn’t have much love for Mac OSX. That’s why I turned to Vista (believe it or not, I think it’s better than Tiger in many ways), and Windows 7. Nonetheless, destiny always plays us. I have to get a new machine after 3-year+ with X61 Tablet. X200 Tablet is my next target, but in Thailand, unfortunately, there is none available in brick and mortar store. It’s required a special order which takes like a month or so with *extra special price :( * to get which is much more expensive than Macbook Pro. Thus, I decided to get Macbook Pro with matte screen & i7. My decision of purchasing Macbook Pro is about hardware alone since I didn’t think of software as a barrier.

I won’t go through all detail right away since I still need more time to adjust my routine to suit Mac OSX to get a fair comparison. In short, pros and cons I have found are below.

Pros:

  • [software] Apple makes me believe that their trackpad is good; after I have so much love for Thinkpad trackpoint.
  • [software] OSX handle multiple monitors well (just 2 monitors so far) [Linux is way way behind Mac OSX/Windows]
  • [software] Never in love with multiple workspaces, but Spaces does the job very very well.
  • [software] OSX handle most of Google thingys well: iCal, Address Book rocks w/Google account.
  • [software] Mail app is way better than Live Mail in Windows.
  • [software] Spotlight is as good as Windows Search.
  • [software] VMWare Fusion is pretty damn good with a unity feature; it makes you believe that Windows app is native Mac app.
  • [software] Gotta love having bash shell as default. To me, it’s better than DOS.
  • [hardware] Macbook Pro looks very very nice.
  • [hardware] MagSafe should be on every laptops!

Cons:

  • [software] OSX just can’t handle copying files [from cifs to another cifs, multiple copy & paste, multiple times of drag & drop, copying files within many many level of folders] It doesn’t matter if it’s Windows’ thing. If OSX supports it, MAKE IT fully compatible. >> here is a fix.
  • [software] Emptying trash is a pain in the ass; I don’t know what they do, how secure they are doing, but there is no choice for unsecured and fast one. That’s bad enough. shift+option+cmd+del is good enough to empty everything although it might take few hours.
  • [software] iWork is useless to me–I can’t even open MS Word file.
  • [software] Microsoft Office for Mac is below par when it comes to compatibility with Windows version–It’s not OS fault, but most people around me use Windows, that makes this a con. I expect much better app-and-OS-independent here.
  • [software] Missing OneNote! there is none as good also. VMWare Fusion comes being a hero here.
  • [software] no Windows Live Photo replacement–I hate iPhoto which can do only in its own library. Adobe Bridge comes close but it’s not built for viewing tons of photo in many folders at once. Picasa has its own way of keeping all info. I don’t like that. (I stick with spacebar to preview for now.)
  • [software] a change of not showing SMB/CIFS mount on desktop in Snow Leopard is very very awkward. In Tiger, if you mount CIFS path, you will get a link on desktop. This can be achieved with ln -s, but why make this more complicated than it used to be? my bad that I couldn’t find this: firing up Sidebar Preference | General Tab | you will see connected servers show on desktop option! checked!
  • [hardware] 2 USB for top-of-the-line machine?
  • [hardware] Screen isn’t IPS-comparable; this is less than I expected. At least Thinkpad X200 Tablet will come with a better panel.
  • [hardware] no PgUp/PgDw and many buttons on Mac keyboard, but I do love having CMD as an extra.

I know that many are applications’ cons, but if I only include what OS can do, not considering 3rd party app too, it would be non real-world experience. Is there anyone still uses computer w/o any 3rd party software nowadays? I’m sure I will have a lot more to add here; wait and see.

 

Popularity: 9% [?]

The day flip phone surprises me

Posted on by
Reply

Samsung V200In a day that smartphone rules the world of a living, iPhone, Android and such are just outperforming all featured phone. I have been using so-called smart phone since Treo’s day. Before that, I never was a fan of all in one kind of things: PDA and phone specifically. Then I was super happy Tungsten T2 + Sony E T-630. I could access internet by connecting via Bluetooth. Now, I’m with Nexus One. Is that good? yeah. Am I impressed w/N1? absolutely. However, recently I have been forced to have 2 cells. One with unlimited data plan—on N1 surely–and the other with cheapy voice plan; the combination works. Things get more interesting from that.

Nowadays, I find myself using N1 as just PDA back in the day. It’s much more powerful than T2, of course. I love it. The biggest surprise Samsung V200is a sammy flip phone. Nothing is special at all by today’s standard—back then it’s the very FIRST POLYPHONIC ringtone capable phone LOL. Lucky me that it is still rock. What do I find? I find that it’s very very easy to pick up the phone and surely nothing bothers if I tap on the virtual button or NOT. If I want to answer the call, just open the phone. If I want to hang up, just flip it back. If I want to make a phone call, just type the name. T9 sucks I must admit, but swiping through 300+ contacts is worse. Oddly enough, I never find Treo is less effective in phone ability to any featured phone. I, nevertheless, have yet to find any easy-to-use/real productive in phone for touch phone at all.

In short, are we running toward a wrong direction? possibly. I can see that Samsung flip phone just gives me more productive as far as phone call is concerned. Although it doesn’t give me any extra service like N1 can provide, touch phones by all means ain’t a good phone either. I wish I see a good new cellphone again one day. It won’t be so soon until touch trend is over; but on that day, I’ll be eagerly waiting.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Live: sign in with a single-use code

Posted on by

single-use codeMicrosoft might not be trend setter anymore these days, but they are working hard to be back. That’s for sure. Live Mail or hotmail is one of popular email in the world, regardless of how good it is. Once in a while I get in my account to check if there is any of my mail, besides loads of junk. Then I noticed something new, single-use code ??

 

It’s just like one-time password; use it and throw away. That’s for anyone who are concerned about leaking password on public network/computer. Yes, it’s pretty good idea, but is it practical? So I tried.

image

Above is what I got. My Google Voice number might be the cause of the issue, but if that’s the case, Microsoft should give up this option also.

Moreover, I hope to see Microsoft back in the game, but so far, Live Mail? ie? Zune HD?, Windows Phone 7? Windows Embedded Compact 7? I still don’t see a bright future for those yet. Firstly, they should have easier & more consistency name LOL.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Apple iPad – too big or just the right size

Posted on by

Apple iPad First of all, how the hell Apple manages to get *4:3 IPS panel* at this time while no others even care to get one. Kudos to Apple for that.

I don’t know what Apple plan for iPad; some says to beat netbook to death; some says to beat tablet pc; some says to create new category; whatever that is, I know Apple will find the way to establish their products well, regardless how big market share would be. When I first saw iPad, my react is like, “hmm they really did that!? I love to buy one,” but  when I got to specification and realized that it is 9” screen; it gave me a big pause, here. 9” is way to big to consider as on-the-go device and one-hand operation, I don’t know really how I’m going to use it if I have one.

Well, it’s iPhone OS. I’m not sure if that is a good choice for such a big device like this. If it were 7”, that would be awesome with iPhone OS. I guess I gotta tryout on this. The only reason why Apple use iPhone OS I see is the thinness since it runs on ARM CPU; I can’t imagine Apple uses such a low end stuff like Atom either. Imagine that Steve Jobs claimed that Apple works with Intel specifically to have such a powerful CPU package named Atom. Nah, it just never works out well.

ipad keyboard God almighty huge on-screen keyboard! That looks good. I think it will beat any on-screen keyboard indeed and yet, it might beat Apple own real physical keyboard as well since I have no clue why the heck they have that uncomfortable, thin and no tactile feedback for bigass iMac.

On the couch, it will be one of the hell device out there—no arguement here. I would love to see how IdeaPad U1 goes too since it’s basically the same thing as iPad, just differrent OS, which Apple already proved their supremacy, while Lenovo is just newbie. However, I can’t see iPad being used anywhere else. We’ll see if my imagination is too short here.

In short, this is just one of million opinions on iPad. We’ll see how it’s going to change when iPad releases.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Bing – re-badge Live Search

Posted on by
Reply

introducingb__g This is definitely not the breaking news. Microsoft just decided to change the word, Live, to “Bing” I don’t know if Bing is so much better word or anything. Will Live suite which is great change its name to Bing suite as well? They claimed that Bing uses new algorithm or whatever to achieve better performance; we probably don’t care either. What we care is whether “our keyword” can generate the result we want or not.

image

After trying for a while, I don’t see anything much interesting or persuasive enough to convince me that it’s much more than a re-brand & putting useless features like category, search history. I honestly don’t know if you feel the same way, to me, search is built to destroy any classified, categorized data since if you do arrange stuffs neatly, you don’t need search, but if you do need “search, “ then you have no need of organizing them [that includes others’ stuffs which is categorized in the different ways of your brain]

In short, if Bing couldn’t change attitude about putting more and more bots for much larger coverage, like Google, and try to get most out of those huge database, they are not going to be even close to the first choice. Don’t think Google is the only competitor here. Yahoo, which gives the results much different than Google, might be much better alternative to Google rather than old archive search like Bing.

ps. I really feel sorry for Microsoft that they have soo much potential in every ways, but they couldn’t come up with the ace solution to the market. They might need to re-organize or something to aim their goals much more efficient. For instance, if they happen to amalgamate all E-mail clients’ teams such as Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Outlook 2007, into only 1 e-mail client—might be 2 sub-divisions: web-based & desktop-based. I believe they can have GMail-equivalent easily. But, they are dividing into small groups to achieve in everything as far as the products go. Consequently they just divide themselves… and think of it as a good plan. Hurr what a waste..

Popularity: 3% [?]

PayPal is too smart or too cheap?

Posted on by
Reply

No offense. I have nothing bad about PayPal to talk about. They have such a great service, but “Contact us” is freaking me out.

paypal - chat bot

I just saw Paypal had chat available—great was what I first thought. When I got into it, it was surprisingly fast. Every responses are too fast to be human. Darn, after 2 conversations, I find out that it’s just a bot, but it’s pretty good, too good to be true. I just thought of Terminator kind of thing. Probably it’s closer than you think. Oh no matter how deep I got into technology, but this idea really freaked me out.

If I were PayPal, I would pull this off. In case you didn’t have enough people, then don’t have it. I just prefer to talk or chat with real person or wait for replied e-mail from real human or it’s just me.

=) I just don’t like it really; you may try talking to *it* here
ps. I gotta watch too much science fiction lately :-(

Popularity: 2% [?]

Circuit City was gone; who’s next?

Posted on by

It’s just sad that another nationwide brick & mortar store is closed. Although anyone can see this coming, I don’t think they expected to be this fast. News was spreading this morning; they are going to close at the end of today. The rest, from now on, Circuit City will be controlled by the liquidation store—sale? good deal? probably. But the thing is their sale will be final, no warranty of any kind. I don’t know whether it still is a good deal this way. It’s worth to spend time seeing all those left over though. It’s only 10% of tag price; not even close to some Circuit City online deal.

The last shot of CircuitCity.com

Nonetheless, the more important things are how long Best Buy will be the only giant nationwide electronic store. New face coming up or all B&M stores fading away, who know? But now less competitor, less competition. That’s bad for us anyway.

Sooner or later, there surely will be another big store closing. But the question is who? -_-  Now it’s time to move to *local* store, *smaller* business. Thus it will have more stability and reliability.

Yeah!, America. It probably is the right time to realize that you couldn’t control anything although you can print bills as many as you want. Is that relevant, huh? :-P

Popularity: 3% [?]

Netbooks all around—what catch me most?

Posted on by

Only tiny bit over a year since the first “netbook,” Asus Eee PC 701, was released to the market. I don’t think anyone expected netbook to be this large market, but it is growing constantly and rapidly. However, it’s probably coming real close to saturated point so far. It just could not be anything more than this since there is almost no possibly significant improvement available. Low price? yes eventually Eee 701 and 900A reach $199 in brick and mortar store. If it’s lower than this, I bet Asus would better bundle with their hi-end motherboards which almost twice as that. Performance? I think Atom can only take you this far since intel won’t take any risk to destroy Pentium D indeed. Cheap stuff gives less margin; no business wants to destroy its own profit indeed. Size? 7” 9” 10” 12” what else do you want? smaller than this will be MID or PDA or even phone, larger than this is Notebook. There is just no more room to fit in. CDROM? we still need that? once a year usage won’t justify extra price and weight for this market.

What we have so far should be about the same as we will have in next 6 months or a year I guess and I’m really happy seeing all netbooks available in B&M store. In my opinion, if I have planned to buy another netbook besides Eee 702 I’m using, I will buy …

  1. HP 2133 Mini-Note – It fades out of the market for a while; although keyboard is big, it looks so cheap anyway. Passed! We’ll see if HP Mini 2140 will be better or not.
  2. MSI Wind 10” – this could be named as king of netbook because it’s just about right in everything. Sadly it’s too big for my taste.
  3. Acer Aspire 1 – this is another good netbook with a nice keyboard. No weird right-shift anymore, but it failed me in term of appearance.
  4. Eee Eee Eee – I don’t know what model they have anymore 900 900A 900HA 901A 902Z 1000HA 1000A whatever I don’t care them anymore, just because too many models and I don’t believe in quality of SSD from Asus from my own experience. For $300+ I expected to know what I will get, not luck.
  5. Dell mini 9 – it might be a good one, but by the fact that it is the only one I have yet to see in person and there is no dedicated F1-F12 keys. I would not get it anyway. Such a shame that most B&M stores carry Dell laptop, but it’s hard to find Dell mini 9.
  6. Lenovo S10 – look good; quite good features; small keyboard for 10”; somehow I just don’t feel S10 better than anyone else on the market, how weird is that?
  7. Samsung NC10 – the first contender for Wind 10” throne. Fantastic >6-hr battery life on 6-cell; nice design; matte finish chassis. Ohh I like it very much. It seems to be real solid machine in my opinion.
  8. HP Mini 1000 – damn! I couldn’t believe that HP can improve 2133 this much. Same design but look much much more solid than the predecessor. Its lid looks like normal HP, but once open it. What a nice job from HP! Everything is about the same with others IMO but it looks much better with matte finish. Just about 3-hr battery life—no larger battery available due to design—not so bad, but it wins me completely.

Although I’m not a person who buy things by its look, when comparing HP Mini 1000 to the rest, it just shines. If you don’t see it in person yet and are looking for netbook, I highly recommend to see and play HP Mini 1000 by yourself. Alternatively, Samsung NC10 could be on the top of the chart in term of functionality. Again if I were you, I definitely pick HP Mini 1000. Hey! sometimes look can just win functionality without any logical reason.

HP Mini 1000HP Mini 1000HP Mini 1000

** I can’t believe I like HP product this much since I hate glossy design so badly. HP Mini 1000 is just an exception.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Hurting developer’s heart? STUPID MOVE from P*lm

Posted on by

image

All P*lm developers should be aware, P*lm will follow you guys and ask you “politely and forcibly by the power of the law” to drop off “p” word you are using as your trademark or whatsoever.

This is what Dmitry, one of the most talented P*lm OS developers, had faced. As a result, he had to move his web site from http://palmpowerups.com [06/07/2005] to http://PlmPowerups.com to avoid such a confusion (perhaps because P*lm couldn’t do any better than him?) and change the SDHC driver to “PlmSDHC” since it has no relation or approval from P*lm [of course, since they DON'T EVEN CARE all predecessors' product]

here is the first post of palmpowerups.com:-

Palm Powerups opens

Palm Powerups opens today. This website will offer to you the software needed to make your palm more powerful, usable, interesting, and exciting. The currently available products include UDMH, warpSpeed, skinUI, Picsel Accelerator, and SysNfo. Of course you can expect many more great programs from Palm Powerups in the future, and your ideas are always welcome in the forums

Posted by dmitrygr on Tuesday, June 07 @ 16:50:43 MST (15 reads)
(Read More… | Score: 5)

I haven’t seen anything telling he worked at P*lm, just one developer that wanted to make Palm device more powerful! [which is a good thing for them, right? I'm not so sure if P*lm thought the same way]

P*lmRevolt [1/4/2006] and P*lmInsiderPro [03/20/2006] also got a notice and changed the names to pRevolt and ZInsider respectively. I don’t know what P*lm think really since all these programs and names has been up *PUBLICLY* for many years ; why now?

“The letters P-A-L-M reflect a prized brand with significant customer awareness and earned loyalty,” said Ed Colligan, palmOne president and chief executive officer. “Innovation, power, ease of use, and elegance all are attributes of the brand, and we intend to invest to turn what is a strong name today into a household word synonymous with leadership in mobile computing.”

What they are proud of when getting it back from palmsource [$30M -- 3.5 years installments from 5/24/2005]  — I just realized they haven’t paid off it yet! [few more months left =)]

Just putting a note ” *** is not affiliated with or endorsed by P*lm Inc in anyway” isn’t enough? They support you & they do everything to help you get better product but you just want to destroy that, what a shame! although you have all right to do so. How come you haven’t chose more mature way, e.g. releasing policy will effect the software released after this day or something or mentioned this at the first place. Oops I just realize that they probably use Garnet for a long long time without releasing newer OS, so they have to think of such a dated software as well.

It’s just plain STUPID. I think the doom day is closer than you think.

Go back to work, P*LM.

update [2 weeks later]: Palm seemed to react to this issue as they should do firstly which is letting PalmPowerups.com continues its name. However, all product names which has this-4-letter-word still need  to abandon their name. I think they ain’t busy working Nova enough.

Popularity: 2% [?]

developers were gone, don’t you feel anything, Palm, Inc?

Posted on by

imagePalm OS was one of platforms that has very large community behind its success. No matter how many limited it has; there is a will, there’ll always be a way to work around. Yep, that was true. Sadly, now it’s definitely not.

First, Dmitry talented Palm OS developer decided to release his famous work–skinUI–as a freeware and not to code Palm OS program for good. In addition, he won’t continue supporting Palm OS Nova as well.

Next, PDAMill high quality game coder also quitted developing for Palm OS platform. If you do remember Snails, you know how good they were. PDAMill did follow the same path by releasing all Palm OS softwares for free.

Yet Ellams Software long time Palm OS developer went in a wild too.

What I’m pretty sure of is there will be a lot of developers go away from Palm OS platform. This is such a terribly huge sign of the death of Palm, both Palm OS itself and Palm, Inc. Doesn’t Palm Inc feel anything so far? I don’t know if it’s because the limit of OS itself or darned bad Palm Company. IMHO, the latter factor is more significant to me since Palm OS is working just fine to me as a PDA, may be not a decent web browser though. This seem to be a result of choosing worse choices in every steps in last few years–releasing under-powered Treo 700p while it could do such a great performance with Centro 2 years later with the same core platform (but too late of course), canceling Foleo which had such a potential of success if you look at Asus Eee PC as an example, and the worst decision ever–deciding to discontinue its own strength–PDA line. I think Palm might think that Treo could do everything Palm PDA can do, so there is no reason to keep that. But what can I say is Treo is a big plus of Palm PDA, not a substitution. It’s like the reason why we still have a laptop while tablet PC could do much more. Palm itself just chose to fight in a league it’s not used to with many powerful rivals and opt out of where they are good at.

What’s next? Palm OS Nova based on Linux? Then what? Apple already proved that the best-selling device doesn’t have to be the best really, just have its own strength and that’s it. It’s like the great Palm Pilot or the last Palm TX or Treo that have such a great PIM,image but instead of promoting & improving it, they decide to leave it behind and promote the weaknesses–multimedia or whatsoever.

Dude, that’s no imagination at all.

Good bye, Palm, Inc. I do hope I would be able to find you in stores in next few years. But honestly I don’t think you will be there. That’s truly sad.

Popularity: 5% [?]