linux
Today, bowing to customer demand, Dell launched a new series of desktops featuring the free, open-source Ubuntu operating system. To my knowledge, this is the first time Dell has ever offered any non-Microsoft operating system on their desktops. Until today, it was quite literally impossible to decline the Windows license
windows vista
Now that Windows Vista has been available for almost a month, the comparative performance benchmarks are in. * Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown (Tom’s Hardware) * Windows Vista Performance Guide (Anandtech) It’s about what I expected; rough parity with the performance of Windows XP. Vista’s a bit
mac
The release of Windows Vista has caused an unfortunate resurgence in that eternal flame of computer religious wars, Mac vs. PC. Everywhere I go, somebody’s explaining in impassioned tones why their pet platform is better than yours. It’s all so tedious. Personally, I had my fill of Mac
user experience
In Typing Trumps Pointing, I extolled the virtues of the full-text search included in Vista’s new Start Menu. As many commenters pointed out, the feature itself is nothing new: I love keyboard searching, but basically you say you are installing Vista, an entire operating system, just so you don’
operating systems
Windows Vista has a radically different approach to memory management. Check out the “Physical Memory, Free” column in my Task Manager: At the time this screenshot was taken, this machine had a few instances of IE7 running, plus one remote desktop. I’m hardly doing anything at all, yet I
operating systems
John Gruber gloats that Windows XP does not fare well in a comparison against OS X: But everything about Boot Camp is calibrated to position Windows-on-Mac as the next Classic-style ghetto – a compatibility layer that you might need but that you wish you didn’t. Even the Boot Camp logo
security
Paul Thurrott’s scathing article Where Vista Fails highlights my biggest concern with Windows Vista: Modern operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X operate under a security model where even administrative users don’t get full access to certain features unless they provide an in-place logon before performing any
software development
For better or worse, I've been a Microsoft fan since Windows 3.1. Microsoft is far from perfect, but the alternatives were always so much worse. Can you imagine a dystopian future where we're all running IBM's OS/2 2004 and Lotus Notes Express?
software development concepts
I've been running some version of Microsoft's cool TweakUI powertoy [http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx ] since the heady days of Windows 95. I recently found out that the author is none other than Raymond Chen [http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/
operating systems
As I recall, the Blue Screen of Death was introduced with Windows NT 3.1 circa 1993: A blue screen of death occurs when the kernel, or a driver running in kernel mode, encounters an error from which it cannot recover. This is usually caused by a [hardware] driver that
user experience
This OS X versus Windows XP [http://www.xvsxp.com/] site contains an exhaustive, extensively illustrated 100-topic comparison of these two operating systems. The author tries to be objective, which is admirable, but the extremely detailed comparison is worth reading mostly because it highlights a lot of subtle design differences.
operating systems
As I struggle to open applications on my PC, I was reminded of a few entries in Scott Hanselman’s blog: Personally I have enough crap in my start menu to fill my 1400x1060 screen... arguably only 30% of the icons represent applications, the rest are just flotsam. (May 11,