Archives for "Technology"
AVG 9.0 Free Sucks for Gamers
I’ve been using AVG free for amost 5 years now. It really couldn’t be beat for free antivirus software and link scanner. The software is compact, takes up little footprint, and really does a fine job of protecting your PC.
If you’re a PC Gamer however, I strongly advise against the upgrade to version 9.0. In version 9.0 they’ve intentionally inserted scripts that minimize the game your in every 30 minutes and bring you back to the desktop. I say intentionally because not interrupting game play is listed as a feature in the basic price package. When I saw this I figured it affected games when it runs a scan on my PC. NOT THE CASE!
AVG 9.0 Game Mode WTF
Every 30 minutes or so, whatever game your playing, will just minimize without warning leaving you player idol which is infuriating. I understand that they’re trying to nag you into buying the basic version, but the tactic used has actually crossed the line from helpful service to virus like behaviour. I’m certainly not going to spend $34.99 for a program that behaves like a virus. I download your program to prevent annoyances like that from appearing on my PC altogether. AVG crossed over to the darkside with version 9.0 and I’ll never use it again.
I’ll be deleting your software as soon as I can find a suitable replacement. You can also bet your ass that I’ll evangelizing your services to less competent computer users who ask me to help them manage their PC’s. (Most of whom, don’t mind spending the $34.99 by the way.)
If anyone has suggestions for more customer oriented non-virus like ANTI VIRUS programs… please leave me a note in the comments.
Bye AVG, I hate you.
Sincerely,
Tarandon
Twitter’s Propensity for One Liners
I’ve recently begun using twitter on a more consistent basis. I sometimes find it difficult to attract new followers that aren’t spam bots trying to sell me porn. I recently started trying to understand what I need to do to get new followers. I find that most of the people I follow own some company or service that I’m interested in. I don’t have a company or service to attract followers, so I decided evaluate how I make friends in the real world.
Usually I tend to make friends by offering comical insight or odd perspectives on topics of interest. I provide a view of a situation that might warrant some attention. Sometimes this involves rather lengthy debate, but sometimes all it takes is a series of one liners that create interesting juxtaposition. Interestingly enough Twitter caters to these one liners quite nicely. The character limit imposed by twitter prevents the lengthy debate style conversations I might prefer to have. It instead forces me to simply add my two cents worth to a conversation. But cming up with 40 or 50 one liners a day can be quite difficult.
One liners don’t enter my mind very easily. It takes some work, and sometimes some knowledge of the people your presenting them to. You need to understand your audience to pick up on things they’ll find funny or witty. The problem with twitter is that the view of any one persons life only comes via the same short snippets I’m trying to make an impact with. And because the birds I follow are usually organised around undustry not character similarity, it’s hard to find one liners that don’t alienate some while appealing to others. I’ve been taking shots in the dark on a one off basis hoping someone might find me humourous/insightful to moderate success. I’ve also been toying with a the option of just not caring how many followers I have. Resigning myself to this option (at least for now) seems a little bit like quitting. Whatevs!
Cheers,
Tarandon
Bumptop Beta
I got invited to the Bumptop Beta last week and I have to say my initial impressions weren’t the greatest.
When I first heard of this concept by Anand Agarawala, I was really excited at the potential of this new desktop environment. He was even invited to TED to display his thesis project to the greatest minds on the planet. But what I downloaded and what he displayed were two very different interfaces.
In the TED talks the user was able to resize the icons in an analog fashion, they were able to make the icons rigid or free moving, they were able to make shelves out of icons and stack other icons on top of them, but this was not the experience I was able to get from BumpTop Beta.
While the animation of BumpTop icon resizing was smooth, the ability to re size was incremental and lacked the limitless feeling demonstrated at TED. The icons also did not spin as freely as the ones in the demonstration, they more or less conformed to a grid with provided wiggle room to create the illusion of clutter. It was possible to post pictures to the wall of the BumpTop environment but was not able to create the ’shelves’ that were included in the demo. When editing notes or prompted dialogue boxes like an outlook alert, the left edge of my BumpTop overlay became transparent exposing the windows desktop. This is likely because widescreen support has not been fully implemented. The list of grievances is long at this stage in the game but I’m still confident the BumpTop team will be able to pull it off.
I had my misgivings about the interface, but keep in mind this is just a Beta. It really is worth while playing around with if you can get an invite, but in the end its just an overlay for your desktop and really doesn’t help you all that much if your desktop is pristine like mine (no icons to be seen here). Everything created, copied or deleted only affects your desktop right now, but I hope this could eventually become a replacement for explorer in general. Every file folder being its own room and its contents interactive icons.
Cheers,
Tarandon
Google: New Favicon?
I just noticed this today. If it is new, I like. If not, I still like.
Cheers,
Tarandon
Update: Looks like it’s not new, the folks over at Blogoscoped noticed this too!
Palm Finally Introduces a new OS
Today Palm revealed news at CES that it had finally completed its latest operating system; and I have to say I’m excited.
The new operating system is called Palm WebOS. Somewhat predictably this operating system is designed to be really easy for web developers to design applications for. If you happen to know X/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create applications for this new operating system.
What this means for the mobile market, is that right out of the gate there are potentially millions of developers available for this system with all the knowhow required to get an application up an running in as little as 3 days.
What’s even more exiciting is the user experience design for this new operating system. Palm has created a device that’s really open to developers while at the same time being fairly sophisticated in its ability to seamlessly integrate information from several sources simultaneously without duplications. This means that your contact list from outlook, gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc. can all be integrated on the same device without any hiccups or format incompatibility issues. In short, I think they’ve acheived what google was trying to do with Android, except Palm seems to have pulled it off with a whole lot more class than the Big G.
That being said, I still have some concerns over the application interface being web based. To me this seems like an opportunity for people to develop self installing applications of a malicious nature through link hijacking and the like. I really hope Palm has thought far enough into the future to prevent these possibilities from coming to reality.
I think Palm deserves a Kudos from the tech community for sticking it out so long and innovating in a market that seemed to have all the angles covered (or at least have people with patents that claim to cover the area Palm has ventured into). On that note, let the lawsuits begin. I suspect there will be some litigation in the near future.
Congratulations Palm!
Cheers,
Tarandon
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