Windows 7 Taskbar = Superbar, for the win!

All I have to say is that I can have 26 running programs and their icons will fill the Taskbar perfectly. I could remove a couple of icons from the Notification area to gain another icon, but I have no need since I usually can’t even fill half of the “Superbar” with running program icons. And this is all with the normal large icons.

The following screenshot tells everything you need to know:

For this silly little demonstration I really had to dig around the start menu to find things to run… hence some of the odd icons. My favorite was the private character editor (the 10th icon from the right) which I had no idea existed!

While some are saying that the start menu is obsolete now (on blogs that make them money*, mind you) the fact is that 80% of icons shown for this test weren’t pinned to the Taskbar, and a few aren’t even applications at all.

And it’s been the same group that have been complaining about the “Superbar” anyway, saying that Microsoft has dumbed-down the OS and should have run the design and UI decisions by them first, as though their elitist blogger status has deemed them worthy of choosing an interface that’ll be used by millions and millions of users. (And I’m sure if they were given the opportunity, they wouldn’t hesitate to capitalize on the situation by blogging extensively about it – and bragging all the way.)

Perhaps Microsoft should drop the start menu and give us an application launcher. But then again, that’s exactly what the start menu already does, so there really isn’t much to complain about after all.

* But to be fair: if I could get paid to blog I might be doing the exact same thing… except I wouldn’t be hiding the counter-point or my true opinion somewhere at the bottom of a lengthy post.

Oh, wait…

Sudoku Fail (And a Solitaire Fail for Good Measure)

Needless to say, the rules of Sudoku state that a number may only appear once in each row/column which, as the red 1’s above the “SOLVED!” box indicate, the rules have been broken by the free Sudoku game for the Zune. I guess this is about as bad as the Solitaire fail I got several years ago on my old Pocket PC:

 

And if you don’t know the rules of Solitaire (shame on you): that 9 of diamonds shouldn’t be placed on the 8 of diamonds… which I somehow managed to do.

UPDATE: I guess if one Sudoku fail isn’t good enough for today, here’s a double-fail fail:

Sudden Class Action Switcheroo Frenzy or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bricked Zune

Wow, I have to say I’m glad today is the start of a new year, because after the events of yesterday I wasn’t sure if I could handle another odd day of a particularly odd year.

The crazed over-hyping of a (particularly fascinating) bug in the Zune 30 was honestly a great way to simply sum up 2008. What started off as “are you experiencing what I’m experiencing” on random blogs and forums turned into a bloody full-scale battle, with the tipping point of insanity being the cries of a class-action lawsuit, which I liken to the hardware version of Godwin’s law: when a device has a noticeable flaw, it’s only a matter of time before someone declares that a class-action lawsuit is in order. * 

If you were enjoying New Year’s eve with family and friends or busy going about your normal life, you probably didn’t catch the news (unless you have a Zune 30 and it bricked on you). Basically put: many of Microsoft’s Zune 30 devices (and contrary to the “news” reports it was only the 30GB version) had a sudden flair of death in which they had a system-reboot and displayed a progress bar that stuck at 100%. It turned out to be an issue with the internal calendar, and I suspect the specific code was written poorly and didn’t know how to handle a day-count of 366. I didn’t personally see it on my newly received Zune 30 (thanks Mom!) because I had read about the problem prior to firing up my Zune and chose to just wait it out. Although all of yesterday I sat here at my desk with my Zune perched in the corner of my eye begging me to fondle with it, but I was avast in ignored such pleas.

So everybody suddenly panics, many began to open their Zunes up to try and immediately fix the problem (with a hardware solution), which perplexed me since only a software issue could be this precise on a global scale. But their quick actions mostly resulted in the bug repeating itself once the Zune was rebooted. And since older firmware wasn’t affected, it was more proof of the software being at fault.

We now have a perfect example of the pros and cons of updatable firmware. Even with a one-day, once every 4 years flaw, the Zune still beats the mainstream alternative.

And all this happens 2 weeks after a critical 0-day flaw in IE was discovered, which had even IE8 in the crosshairs of the entire industry with random people recommending that we all switch browsers*, even though Microsoft released a patch days after the bulletin was updated to include IE8.

It’s strange, as no one has even bothered pointing out the major flaws that still exist in XP, but I guess doing that might require them to recommend upgrading to Vista, which as we all know must still be as slow and “useless” as it was on it’s release date. (Personally I’m recommending that you hold off until Windows 7—which, no doubt, will be released this summer—unless you really need a more secure system, in which case go ahead with Vista since it is far more secure and you won’t run into driver issues like you might have a year ago. Since Windows 7 builds on Vista—with the snappiness of XP—you won’t need to worry about upgrading from Vista later on.) 

So with that, here’s to a new year that I hope will be filled with pleasant announcements from Microsoft (especially on January 15th, for the Mini-MSFT type) and smarter actions taken by bloggers.

 

FIN

 

 

* Regardless, a class-action suit is only applicable in a situation where it’s obvious that the company in question knowingly allowed assumed problem to remain without taking any action or alerting their customers. It seems quite obvious that Microsoft didn’t plan for this and they weren’t purposely bricking devices in order to “cash in” on people ditching their bricked and buying the newer Zunes.

* I would link to another blog post of mine, except I never got around to actually posting it… Perhaps later on I’ll update this to include that future post.