The blade was finally brought to a halt

I'm found elsewhere now. I started a new project with two of my friends at brbcoffee.tumblr.com. The logic goes something like "More authors, more topics, a more interesting product."

So yeah, see you there :)

Song of the blog: Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye

Sincerely yours

Bjørn

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Looks like a blade that is swung down

While I do love me some good political debating, discussing politics on a blog feels a bit too much like beating off. I do enjoy beating off, on the odd occasion, but not in public, so I am not going to do it, any more. This leaves me in a peculiar situation though; I want to swap one part of my blog for something completely different, but I don't really know what. Anyone have anything they want me to write about? Anything that doesn't force me to deal with Michael Jackson?

Seing as my political views can be summarized by this image, there's a limit to how long I can ramble about it.

Aside from that, I will be deleting some of the oldest posts here, as they don't even fit the current specs for this blog, and probably won't fit the next ones either. I'll also try to get a proper banner once I've figured out what is actually going to be on here in the future. For your viewing pleasure I'll also remove most of the google ads, because everyone seriously freakin' hates ads, and I know it.

I have a few extra ideas too, some you won't notice if I go through with them, and some will fundamentally change the place forever. Whatever happens, exciting times are afoot! Now, about that second topic thing...

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Chrome OS? Sweet!

So Google has finally decided to get serious about computer operating systems. This can be nothing but great news. Of course, we can't expect it to compete with the good old contenders as soon as it's launched, it will most likely be used in the dark by linux enthusiasts. I expect it to be a flawed gem, but around the third release it should at least be good enough to run on netbooks. Around that point, if Google starts a heavy ad campaign, who knows? It's working for Microsoft's Bing, and Google is already well known, and used by many. It'll never be a Windows killer, not even Steve Jobs will be able to do that, and that's because Microsoft is just too deply embedded in the common man's perception of computers. Until the computer world is revolutionized, Microsoft will likely be around to torment us all, their blue screens barring their nasty teeth at every corner of every street.

Error: Missing system file: Chrome.dll

In other news, the Chrome browser is almost done for the Mac! Maybe I'll be able to browse the web without crawling back to firefox now... There are some nasty bugs in the 64bit version of Safari 4 on Snow Leopard. It can't make comments on facebook, but that's happening on their server, can't blame Apple for that, as proven by it's fluctuation status. More importantly, the browser dies every time I try to use the blogger editor! As I dislike Firefox, I might just not write a lot of blogs until the issues is fixed.



Song of the Blog: Don't Think Twice, It's Alright


Sincerely
Bjørn

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Bing

Have you tried Bing yet? You know, that new Microsoft search engine, powered (and advertised for) by Microsoft?

Why Microsoft thinks we need another old school web search engine is beyond me. With Web 3.0 about to bloom, and real-time search making it's entrance, showing up sporadically as we speak, how could they possibly think that there is a market? WIth all the big bloggers raving about the real-time web every other day, why would anyone endeavor to fill a niche that Google beat to death a decade ago?

Ironically, finding this image on Bing.com was not as easy as you'd think, I had to refine the search and scroll pretty far to find it.

That being said, Microsoft is doing a pretty decent job. As a standard text search it doesn't do anything new, it's basically just Google with a new logo. It's supposed to have all these nifty features, but they just don't show up. I'm thinking maybe they only work in Internet Explorer, which is just a childish decision if that turns out to be the case, but neither google nor Bing provides any kind of fast confirmation. Supposedly, Bing will categorize your search results, pull up online stores when you're searching for a product, look up reliable medical info, etc. Sadly, as far as I can tell, this is not the case. Simply put, none of the features touted are actually available (at least not to mac users).

However, I still love Bing. "But why, Burnie? Don't you use a mac?" Yup, I sure do, and since I do, I have a very good wallpaper thing going, where it changes my wallpaper every 5 seconds. This means I need a large amount of wallpapers to keep things from getting repetitive, and Bing gives me just that! A steady supply of walls! Now, 4scrape already does a splendid job of that, but their search function is rubbish, where Microsoft's is gold. Bing has one very amazing feature, which I use all the time: It lets you categorizes your image searches by size (small, medium, large, wallpaper), style, colour, and layout! Oh, and there's a people function, but it's largely useless as it doesn't work properly.

This comes up if you search for Bing UK. I don't know that doesn't even

I'll keep this short. I love the... Wow. As I was typing that sentence, I headed over to Bing to get another picture, the one that you see right over this text, and suddenly some new stuff is working. I don't know what they did, they're probably monitoring me, although that's not my area of expertise, but the main point is, now the web search function is actually marginally less useless than it was at the beginning of this post! I went to the UK site, wondering if there was some racism going on, and now even the .com site thinks I'm from the UK, so I guess there was, but whatever, stuff works. The categorizing still doesn't do much, mostly it just pulls up the "news" category no matter what I search for, but at least now it shows some promise!

Does it stand a chance against Google? No. Does it do anything new? No. Is it good? Yes, it's good, but it doesn't matter. Google is not going anywhere, and Microsoft is basically just spending a lot of money advertising for a new old product on a static market. It's a bad business move, unless Microsoft decides to introduce real-time search to Bing some time very soon, and even then they're not first, since Collecta launched today! So go check that out at Collecta.com! It's a bit on the slow side, but at least they're innovating! Maybe it's just me, but I like a little bit of pause button with my search engine.

Song of the Blog: Everything's Magic

Sincerely yours

Bjørn

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Just an update

I very recently wrote a blog on how I felt about Snow Leopard, and my first impression with the OS. This is just an update to that post, so if you have not read it already, you may either ignore this post, or put it on hold while you read this.

One thing that I talked about was the apparent lack of Quicktime X, one of the innovations of the new OS that Apple touted the most at the World WIde Developers Conference. While it has suddenly appeared, and is indeed very nicely designed, it has some serious issues, surprise surprise. It seems Apple hasn't done such a good job with the 64bit environment as I first gave them praise for, at least not yet, this might (and should) be fixed by the official release. Now the Quicktime player in and of itself is fully 64bit, there are no issues there, but it seems Apple has chosen to split up the processes, letting Quicktime handle the GUI and design, while a separate process, the QTKit Server, handles some of the more hardcore processing. When it turns out that the QTKit Server shows up as a "normal" 32bit process in the activity monitor, the alarm bells start wailing.

Come on Apple! You can do better than this! Or maybe there's something I don't understand, it's not like I've done any research on this new thing, it might be that a 32bit process is necessary to play movie files that were made on a 32-bit processor, and therefore the QTKit needs to be 32bit for these movie files? I don't think that sounds very reasonable, but it's possible, and I will test the hypothesis some time in the future, I shall simply make a movie myself and see how Quicktime handles that, but for now I stand disappointed.

Edit: I googled a bit, and found an article suggesting that the QTKit is in an even worse shape than I thought... Read more about it here.


Song of the Blog: The Static Age


Sincerely yours
Bjørn Sphere: Related Content