Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost

Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost.
It’s very simple, before making a big deal about something, try to understand the consequences. Mob mentality is a dangerous thing, try to rile them up for the wrong reason, you’ll get burned yourself. You tried to publicly shame two people for a private conversation, now not only you yourself are shamed and fired, but also you’ve brought shame to the word “feminism”.

The Case for Windows 8 on Desktop

Since its launch on October 26, 2012 Windows 8 has been taking taking some criticism from from pretty much all direction for its inclusion of the tablet centric interface, formerly known as “Metro”, into its full fledged version. Unfortunately it’s a completely new take on a consumer OS interface and the confusion was not unforeseen. Heavy users are dissing it for not being integral to their workflow, no-savvy users are mostly uncomfortable with the change. People are seemingly preferring Windows 7 over 8 for the more known/familiar interface paradigm.

So I have put together some sample examples on how simply Windows 8 can provide better functionality than Window 7 even on a desktop, without a any touchscreen. To the best of my knowledge this cannot be done on the previous version of Windows.

Snapping an app to a side for quick info view/tasks, while doing other works is simply awesome. Some might argue that Windows 7 provides snap to sides, but no software ever change orientation based on that and that almost never provides a optimal user experience. I have tested.

Office 365 University promotion: 1st Hand

As reported earlier today, Microsoft has launched a promotional campaign on Office 365 University, and it can be redeemed here. Although the original offer is pretty darn sweet, I see no reason to not take Microsoft on this super generous offer.

In atypical Microsoft way, they have made even this a little confusing. So I did it in a way I thought would avoid possible mishaps. The offer page does not give any way for you to provide your main Microsoft account, or I could not find any. So I visited the page while logged into my Microsoft account. After I entered my college email address and shared it on Facebook, I was given a message that an email was sent. Not clear which account, but in a moment I saw that the email was sent to my college email address, not entirely unexpected. This would not have been a problem otherwise, but my college email account is also powered by Microsoft, which is basically a full Microsoft account(7GB SkyDrive). So had I clicked the link my college email likely would have registered for the Office 365 University and 20GB of extra storage. So instead of 45GB in my main account, I would have been stuck with 25GB and 27GB in two separate accounts, hardly an ideal situation. So I decided to forward the email to my main account and see what can be done. When I clicked the link inside from my main account (afraid that the link could have been email specific), I was immediately registered for Office 365 University, and SkyDrive storage was bumped to 45GB.

Last gripe is that I had to reinstall Office to complete the process. I expected that my preview version of Office would have been automatically updated accordingly, but instead I was directed to the Office web-install page, which was showing 2 of 2 install remaining. When I proceeded to install, the installer said that there is a preview version installed which have to be removed in order to continue with the installation. I of course complied and the rest of the process was smooth as a baby’s back.

What if Microsoft had done Windows 8 differently?

Reblogged from Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision:

A comment Matt Rosoff over on CITEworld's re-publication of my post on Microsoft's current approach to developer (and other customer) engagement inspired me to do a thought experiment.  What if Microsoft had approached "Windows 8" differently?  There are a number of scenarios that they could have followed, so let's explore a few of the more likely ones.

Most of the criticism about Windows 8 is around how Microsoft attempted to bridge the gap between a modern touch-based, tablet-centric (if you will), UI and the traditional desktop. 

Read more… 1,764 more words

Excellent post. Wanted to write something similar, but this is far beyond my writing/analysis capability.

Surface RT vs. New iPad: A Comparison

And so it has finally surfaced(pun intended), and the tech world is going into their analysis mode to determine which is better and why and which deserves our hard earned penny. So I am going to jump onto the bandwagon and offer my 2 cents. Rather than simply posting a chart and compare few bullet points, I am going to talk about what’s behind those bullet points. Bullet points are easier to look at, but there are always more to those points that everyone should take into consideration before taking out the wallet. What does higher/lower resolution means? What are the benefits of having a keyboard? What about the apps? How does having a USB port benefit me? Let’s take a look.

First thing first and let’s get this over with, that is resolution. I must say I am kind of disappointed about the resolution on RT. The resolution of 1366*768 is kind of disappointing to have, it should have been 1080p, not less but not more either. But I shall thoroughly disagree with iPad fans here and say more resolution is not necessarily better. Yes higher resolution and in turn higher pixel density is great to look at, but it does inarguably come with a few caveats, weight(if not battery life), heat, performance. iPad 3 despite having a stronger SoC inside compared to iPad 2, had visibly worse gaming graphics as this article finds.

Choice Is Good, RIGHT? (Part 1)

PC users always boast one thing(amongst others) over Mac, “we have choices”. PCs come in different brands, shapes, monitors, configurations, case sizes, OS versions, with crap-ware or signature and so on. A moderately savvy user will be able to get exactly what he/she wants in the PC. Now I believe this is what drive down price and computers are now everywhere. Bill Gates’ renowned dream of putting a PC in every home has surpassed even the dream, now every home has multiple computers, one for every person!

Now the situation arises right here. 10 years ago PC was common, affordable and not DOS like scary any more. People are buying them and using for variety of tasks. But now that instead of one computer per household it has become three computer (I am just putting up a number) per household, the  main demographic of computer user has changed. It may sound a bit snobbish and it likely is, instead of technologically aware/trained people using computer, now every tom, dick and harry uses it. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against it nor do I mind, but I am talking about the effect of this phenomenon.

Smartphone Audio Quality

This post was originally written as a comment in a post of a tech-blog site by me. This is a ”bloggification”.

Admit it, if you are by any chance reading this totally unpopular blog written by a completely unknown writer with zero credibility, you probably are a technology minded person. And you either own a smartphone or want one. Now the question is what is it you do the most or plan to do the most on your phone? I personally use my phone to listen to music the most. And I am pretty confident I am not the only one.

Phone makers always try to focus on the camera capabilities of their phones, and that’s fine by me. I can completely understand why they do that. First, taking a picture is a sharing experience and people love to take photos. So even if people use their phone less as a camera and more as a music player, the camera functionality gets focused more. Also when you are in a group, if everyone one takes photo by their phones, it’s going to come out which phone takes better picture.