Philoking.comfrom Jason Burns’ perspective…

I recently read this article, posted on Digg.com, and really just want to post my own experience in this exact situation…

Picture this, you just bought built a brand new computer and want to install the brand spankin’ new Windows Vista Ultimate, you plop down $300, and away you go! What does $300 get you? A bare minimum operating system with nothing but MS Paint and Media Player.
So you spend the next 45 minutes installing your bare minimum operating system, it takes 45 minutes because the initial install is 15gb, so by bare minimum I mean feature set, not file size. So after you get installed you try to use the Internet and realize that it didn’t detect any of your hardware (video, audio, network), so you spend the next 2 hours spidering through multiple vendor’s websites who all have their downloads/driver section in different areas.

I hate to tell you, but this is just pure crap. I did just this a few weeks ago. I had a computer that was on it’s last legs, so I went to newegg.com and ordered a new motherboard, video card, ram and hard disk.

The Price

So I can get Vista cheaper cause I work for Microsoft, fine, but I can also find it a lot cheaper than $300, I found it for $222 just looking at newegg. So, first lets break down the cost of software that’s not Linux.

OS X is $129. If you go to Windows Marketplace you can get the Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 Upgrade for $129, but I know, you pesky Linux users are complaining because the Windows machine you DO have probably has a pirated copy of XP on it anyway, it’s ok, you don’t have to admit it, we all know it’s true

So you have to buy retail, I can dig it, so it looks like again, at their full retail, it’s $209 for buy and ship…that’s at Microsoft’s own marketplace (pointing you to Amazon ironically), I am not making it up..look.

So we have shaved $90 off the price lie, and I agree $200 is still no insignificant amount of money, but lets get real, how many people in the REAL world actually build their own computers, odds are that the PC they bought had the price inflated $50-70 and they got it included. I am betting upwards of 95% of Vista users did not build their own PC. But you did, I gotcha, so let’s talk about that.

What’s in the Box

Just MS Paint and Media Player eh? Maybe you should look at that Program Menu just a “little” more closely. Let’s do that shall we? (And since you were mentioning accessories, and not applications, we’ll add those in too.

That sure seems like more than the Linux fanboy listed, and that’s just a cursory glance at my start menu, that’s not including all of the new goodies under the hood. Something tells me that my mom and dad could make do with a Vista machine and not have to buy anything at all besides a good virus program.

45 Minute Install?

What kinda crap hardware are you putting this on man? My install took 20 minutes, another 25 for all the updates. And it was closer to 6GB, not 15GB. Again, out and out lie bro.

No Drivers Detected

So I bought an ASUS motherboard, nVidia Video card and Vista auto detected everything the first time. I spent no time downloading drivers I HAD to install. I did update the video driver to the latest reference driver. But I had a total working system the minute it was done. You sure you weren’t trying to install this on a Circa 1995 486? Just because you can run Linux on garbage doesn’t mean Windows has to run at the dump too.

Sorry to sound so negative, but geeze man, talk about beating a dead horse. I am not a Windows fanboy, sure I work for Microsoft, but I own two Macs, I have used about every flavor of Linux in the mainstream, I know my way around a shell and I spent 3 of the last 4 years developing java code to run on Tomcat and BEA Weblogic on Linux, I am not disillusioned by my new employer. I just get tired of the negative press that just lies out and out to make Vista look bad. When I built the new box I mention here, I officially retired XP, and I have had not ONE single issue with this machine. Beside it I have an HP that I upgraded to Vista 64 bit, changed the video card, it has a TV tuner, I run games on it, again, no issues. I know people have issues, I am not dumb, but usually you can say “what did you install it on?” and have a pretty good idea why.

Read the comments for a good laugh, Linux evangelists really are delusional.

Via Lifehacker

If the digital photo you just uploaded looks washed out on Flickr compared to in your desktop image editor, that’s because Firefox 3’s advanced color profile support isn’t turned on. To enable it, type about:config in Firefox 3’s address bar, then click the "I’ll be careful, I promise!" button. Then, in the Filter field, type gfx.color_management.enabled and set that value to true (its default value is false). Restart Firefox. From there on in, your photo colors will be richer than they were. Why isn’t this value true by default? Well, according to Mozilla, you’ll see a 10-15% performance hit using this setting, but if you’ve got a reasonably fast machine, it’ll be worth the better-looking photos. Hit the link below for an extended explanation of Firefox’s color profile support.

Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors) [dria.org via Joi Ito via Xeni Jardin]

Today I was contacted by the folks at KallOut to tell me about their product that competes with the Hyperwords Firefox Plugin I blogged about earlier.

KallOut is what Hyperwords is, but for more than just Firefox. I am calling this a preview, because as I am sitting upstairs tonight blogging on my Macbook Pro, I can’t actually test this software. I can, however, tell you what it does and where to get it if you think it’s something that might be useful to you.

According to the site:

Find it Faster with KallOut

Selection-based search allows you to get results up to 10-times faster than a traditional browser-based search. Instead of opening a browser every time you need to search, simply select any word or phrase, hover over the menu target and choose the appropriate KallOut menu item. Learn More »

Supercharge your searches with BestGuess™

The BestGuess system matches your selection with the most relevant KallOut choices whenever you select a term. If you are unsure about a topic, there is a good chance that BestGuess will point you in the right direction.

Stay focused with Results in Context

KallOut displays search results adjacent to your selected search term in floating information palettes. Seeing your results in context, instead of opening a new window, avoids the disruption of constantly switching between applications.

Not bad! A quick view of the video and screenshots show what is quite possibly a very useful application. This installs in Windows and gives you this functionality across browsers and office applications. It could be a very handy utility indeed.

The CEO of KallOut emailed me to tell me about it and I will give it an install and possibly update this article with my findings. It’s a compelling product that fills a need of many people who are constantly having to use the web to research all sorts of things. If you have experience with it, let us know what you think.