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PC World's 100 Best Products of 2005
insensitive clod writes "PC World published its top 100 best products of 2005. These include Firefox(1), GMail(2), OSX 10.4(3), Alienware Aurora 5500(6), Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive(7), Skype(8), PalmOne Treo 650(10), Google(16), PSP(19), GeForce6600GT(20), Ubuntu(26), iTunes(34), Half-Life 2(38), Wikipedia(60), ThinkPad X41(67), Mac Mini(75), Acronis True Image(83), Opera(88). Surprisingly, iPod only has IPod Photo at 78."
GMail is good web based email. That in itself sets it far ahead of its competitors. It's really the finest example of what a web interface can do.
Opera is the best browser.
If there is a best browser award, Opera should win.
10.4 is a lot faster in my experience , It works more swiftly on my old g3 iMac (400mhz g3) (turned off the widgets) .. but besides that . .. not to mention the user land programs .. though i do prefer the 10.2 look I don't think there are that many differences on the GUI front
It has a great number of functional improvements on the command line and in the system programs
On my g4 machine it simply flies . spotlight is also grand
I would rather that Ubuntu had placed higher though (not strictly a 2005 thing )
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
It does require at least 512MB RAM but I have never had a problem with it (both my Macs have 768 , though it was not bad on a 256MB mac mini i had a go on .. till you open up too many programs , a ram upgrade fixed that little glitch) .10.4 has some noticeable improvements as a client computer and some great user level improvements . If your friend can afford it , tell him to get 256MB more ram in the machine , s/he will notice a world of difference . .. bars . I suspect the problem they are having is to do with Spotlight or running Dashboard .
I am more a *nix Zealot (though not really a zealot) than a mac zealot , but OS X is one of the best User level *nix's I have ever had the pleasure to use
Honestly though , the GUI has not really changed bar some of the removed um
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
They are trumpeting the 6600GT for exceptional value given its speed and cost. It's really a bargain compared to other 3d cards on the market. Teamed up with SLI, you have a nice box for less money than, say, a pair of 6800's or a pair of 7800's. Personally, I bought the Gigabyte dual-chips-on-a-card, the single board SLI card called the 3D1-XL @ http://gigabyte-usa.com/VGA/Products/Products_GV-3 D1-XL.htm. The one I got is the non-gt version, the gt version is faster and of course costs more. Newegg has them if you want to get a closer look. All I can say is, SLI rocks and so does SLI 8xAA and SLI 16xAA.
What is the difference between sorting emails into folders and archiving messages with labels? If you want to know what emails have the label, you click the link ... they're all there and yet... none of them exist in your inbox. If you want to remove them from the folder but still be able to search for them... remove the label. If you quickly want to remove all the messages with that label from the inbox, you click the link, click all, and click archive.
Seriously. The Gmail interface is quite a bit different than a normal email client, in order to be happy using I think one has to abandon previous notions of how to get things done. Using labels is a very powerful tool and can easily be made to mimik the use of folders, all you need to know is how.
~Anders
Use labels. Labels can do everything that folders can, and more. (A message can have more than one label, but in a folder-based system, a message can't be in more than one folder at a time.)
JP
Which is cool and all, except on the other side of the pond (ie: not America) they've had this thing called USB-on-the-go for some time now. Quite simply, you plug in any camera that is USB Mass Storage Device compliant (the ones that you plug into your computer and it just sees a drive, or if you prefer - a decent camera as opposed to a cheap crappy one that requires some sort of manufacturer's application to retrieve the photos) into a USBotG device and the USBotG device is suddenly a host for the camera (or any other USBotG device, like say - another mp3 player) and poof, you've got a 1:1 connection going on.
So, I can take my iRiver H300 series mp3 player, hook it up to your iRiver H300 series player, and we can do sneakernet p2p all day long.
Why would you think Apple would restrict it to just cameras, hmm?
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
It looks like I beat the odds and got the "1 in 50" Treo 650s that works fine! I've been using my 650 since January 2005 without problems. It's been useful to me as a phone, as well as a PDA that syncs with my Mac, as well as an MP3 player, as well as a picture/small movie display, as well as a wireless modem to connect my PowerBook to the Internet via Bluetooth, as well as a portable web browser and email client, as well as a Palm platform for various Palm apps... ...and so on. I realize that others may have issues with their Treo 650s, but for the record, it's not ALL of them. FWIW.
It's strange that you had such bad experiences them because you seem to be quite alone with that as far as I know.
...) and I haven't seen anything like you mention on there. And those forums are normally very quick in showing if a product has problems. Like they did when the first version had problems with the memory which finally got resolved by Palm. I have the GSM version, so maybe it's the CDMA version that you have problems with?
I have one for some months now and I absolutely love it. I occasionally read the forums for treo users (mytreo.net, treocentral.com,
Personally I think it is finally a usable pda-phone that works as it should. I can totally recommend it.
>And a PDA that needs a 30 meg update download?
Actually, you need 11 megabytes free on the device to upgrade the firmware. Arguably, execs on the go shouldnt even be doing this, their IT departments should be handling system updates. You wouldnt want them to upgrade from 2000 to XP on their own would you?
Granted, it is overhyped, but it does a lot of things people want. I just wish it wasnt so big and ugly.
In my opinion, PC World, and all the product reviewers, sometimes skew results in the direction they want them to go. Sometimes they do that by not reviewing the most popular product, but comparing the competitors only. Sometimes they change the results with tricky writing.
Very unfortunately, it has become entirely acceptable in the U.S. culture to take money to allow corruption. For an example, look at the U.S. government.
An example of what appears to be corruption is that magazines and columnists are recommending Sunbelt Software's CounterSpy. Until September, at least, CounterSpy would crash Windows if it couldn't get an internet connection. None of the reviewers noticed that, giving me the impression that they didn't test the software thoroughly. If they didn't test the software thoroughly, how can they say it is the best? Who supplied the collection of spyware they used to test?
Also, CounterSpy seems to try to take advantage of customers who don't have technical knowledge. For example, CounterSpy sometimes tags text (.TXT files) as serious threats, even when the text file has nothing but printable ASCII characters. Is this done to try to make customers think CounterSpy is more important than it really is?
What I say here about CounterSpy has been verified for me by Sunbelt Software employees.
And its accompanying Itunes software will delete mp3s from your disk if it thinks you shouldnt have them.
2500+ MP3s on my HD. Most probably shouldn't be there.
0 Deleted.
Now shut the fuck up.
Look at PC World's review of Roxio Easy Media Creator: "While version 7.5 remains a bit ponderous to navigate and threatens to overwhelm users with choices, this solid update pulls EMC even with Nero 6.6 Ultra Edition."
Why is Easy Media Creator first choice if it is "even"? Also, did the reviewer take into account Roxio's history of releasing buggy software?
The review of one of the most expensive APC backup power supplies reads like an ad to get customers to pay more for power they don't really need. Also, the reviewer did very little testing.
The reviewer says "Power surges and outages can impair productivity and damage expensive equipment." I've never known a power outage to damage computer equipment. (With the Windows 98 FAT file system, it is necessary to run Scandisk after a sudden power outage.) The statement seems like a sales message. Computers need backup power supplies, but a much smaller one would be fine for most users. That fact isn't mentioned.
I don't know what Treo 650 you've been using, but I've been using one since last spring and have only had about 2 or 3 resets and only 1 lockup.
"Battlefield 2 has given more fun to more folks?"
That's the craziest shit I've heard in days, and I've been watching the Cooking Channel, too. Battlefield 2 is THE buggiest shit-crap beta game I've EVER played.
Even the developers agree.
Steam may have had issues, but they're mostly worked-out, and Steam/HL2 are mostly mature, or close to it. You're very, very silly to put them in the same room as BF2.
-- often wrong; never in doubt
I have had a Treo 650 since last fall. Best phone/PDA I've ever had and absolutely zero problems.
I think you have an axe to grind somewhere because the Treo forums are not reporting these widespread type of problems.