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The anti-Vista whining has gotten more annoying than the silly "M$" thing or the Slashdot trolls talking about Microsoft users sucking Bill's cock.

The genuine problems with Vista (the multiple versions, the price, lack of solid drivers) were exhausted as a subject months ago. Since then, the computer press has acted like a bunch of 15-year-olds with a nerd fetish. Vista is actually somewhat nice.

Backup management is a hell of a lot nicer in Vista -- XP almost forced you to go with a third-party app. UAC works very well, and makes running Windows as a limited user a reasonable experience -- in XP it was doable, but a serious pain. System restore is _much_ improved with Vista, something I noticed after a borked nVidia RAID driver update. The performance and reliability wizards that can go through and look at which of your apps are crashing are a nice little idea. There are hundreds of these little improvements. It's not god's gift computer nerds, but it's not that bad either.

And yes, I am a Linux sys admin. At any given time I probably have more Linux boxes running than Windows boxes.

The first iteration of the Zune hardware wasn't as bad as the press said it was. Nobody forced you to buy brown. Note: the computer press is worse than the game review press. They're ignorant and like to jump on bandwagons. See what Udolpho says about them on Windows Fucking Vista.

The old Zune software was bad. In my opinion, it was iTunes-for-Windows level bad. The new Zune software is much nicer than the old Zune software or iTunes. (iTunes is rotten software, too, smearing the desktop with its links every time it updates itself, and trying to get you to install other products like Safari and Quicktime with each security patch.)

The new Zune software is really wonderful. It's one of the best pieces of software I've seen in some time. Microsoft's Allchin has better magic than Steve Jobs, any day. Further the Zune's killer feature is its subscription service, which doesn't get nearly enough play. Do you hear about any of this from the computer press? No, because they suck. See above.

The Zune players themselves are very good and priced quite competitively compared to ipods. The video screens are very nice for watching videos. Unless you are a semi-serious computer user, however, you will have trouble converting your own videos to make them playable. (I recommend the free Encode360 software.) Also, the Zunes are not bright and shiny. They're the sort of device a straight male doesn't mind carrying around.

The author of those pages is a right wing religious nut; have a look at his diatribe against atheists:

http://www.udolpho.com/weblog/?id=01170&title=Athe ism-and-Morality

Such as? What necessary piece of functionality does IE have that Mozilla (or Opera, or others) don't have?

I'm not sure these qualify as "necessary" but... Seven reasons IE is better than Firefox from a developer's point of view (not my page).

Nice link. Perhaps you'll be interested in another post from that site?

Charming.

DVORAK is another way to show other people that you're different. Any benefits are minuscule and are outweighed by the incompatibility downsides. It's another symptom of the "geek" disease.

"First point: FUN is not the goal of learning. Please consider that, Mr. Baude [he is responding to another blog]. The goals of formal education are to discipline the mind, establish correct methods of problem-solving and analysis, and provide an essential baseline of (systematized) knowledge for further growth. Learning can be immediately rewarding and interesting, but even when it is not - or especially when it is not - school curriculums should still work toward these goals, not give up and let students watch nominally interactive multimedia presentations, frittering away school hours that would otherwise be spent - groan! - reading textbooks." More at Udolpho.com: "Computers, huh! What are they good for?."

Anybody remember the colleges that were giving away laptops to every incoming student? That really took off, huh?