Sometime later in 2007, Apple will be releasing Leopard, their Vista killer. To be more accurate, and excuse the analogy, but if Vista and Leopard were babies, Microsoft's child would be the awkward, shy premature twin, and Leopard would be the vibrant confident loud and bullish one still on the way.

Back in the real world... no doubt, millions on Windows have seen Vista, liked the eye candy, liked the idea of a robust and fairly logical Operating System - at last - and then realised they can't work out which version does what they need.

Microsoft don't care about the hesitancy at home. They have a monopoly with all their ducks lined up in a row. Whichever way the wind blows, they will sell ga-millions and are especially happy, waiting for mega savvy corporate buyers to bite the bullet and pull the trigger for the first time in years.

Meanwhile, major PC manufacturers are also confident they will get a boost in seasonal sales too, but will they actually attract quite as much business as they are expecting? Rhetorical question, to which the answer is - not if Apple can help it.

Intel Macs can run Leopard AND Vista, XP et al, (all at the same time if you feel like it), and if you factor in the halo effect of iPods, iTunes, and iPhones, Safari and no viruses, so, more of the population are debating the switch.

Bottom line, every sale of a Mac is one less sale to Dell or HP etc. Like I care. But it is a double oh dear, because as PC makers look to their Richmond god for a lead of some sort, Microsoft will just shrug and like a happy hooker, rake in the sale from upmarket cash-rich Apple instead.

And to really rub it in to everyone, Microsoft will continue to make more from a Mac sale than Apple do! When you factor in Office and now Windows Vista on the list for shoppers of Macs, Dells, HPs and the rest, Bill Gates legacy software cannot lose for winning. Lucky bastard.

With so many millions of articles being published every week, how do you get noticed? With thousands of new films released monthly, how do you attract the public's attention? With millions of tracks online, how do you get people to listen to your music? The simplest way is to tell people not to read, not to watch, not to listen!



So how many of you will click this banner? If you are under 18, almost everyone will take a peek. And what will you find? Something you really need and can't do without?

A link to yet another movie awaits anyone clicking on this image. The temptation comes in the form of an Australian film called Ken Park. banned left and right because the film-maker dared to keep it all in the family, so to speak. It is rude, challenging and you know you are curious. And the more I talk about its lewd, nude nature, the more curious you become...

And finally, when they thought that Elvis had been the epitome of controversy in pop, along came the Sex Pistols with Never Mind the Bollocks. Of course, with a name like that, the album was instantly banned from Radio, but that didn't stop it being number one album for 47 weeks. It was a piece of masterful shock manipulation marketing, and like the previous examples, played on Man's innate curiosity for the prohibited and rude.

The moral of the story, if you want people to read, touch or listen, all you have to say is Don't read, don't touch and don't listen. It is so simple, the marketing agencies trying to go the traditional route with millions of dollars of sophisticated promotion will surely try to ban this lid-blowing hard core article.

If you took any notice of the following article when it came out last week, you missed out on a few more dollars of profit. Sorry! A couple of weeks ago, the reality roadshow from VMware hit the highways, (emphasis on high) and the virtualisation company's stock, originally priced at $24 became an unreal $29 prior to their debut on Wall Street today. With a couple of flicks of a real life trading button, the stock then hit nearly $56 and a new era in hard drive storage, hard drive storage millionaires and hard stomached speculators has been born.

The biggest news is that the company with software that can turn your single hard drive into a series of data stores (aka virtualization) will have a competitor next year.

The hot demand for virtualization software also has attracted the attention of Microsoft Corp., which has indicated that it plans to enter the market.

Ah, Redmond's photocopiers are hot in pursuit already.

An analyst said that VMware have the market pretty well locked up through 2008, which is what Sony thought about the threat of the XBox and then the Nintendo Wii, so what do analysts and conglomerates know!

In this day and age of equality, it should come as no surprise that a lady heads VMware, and her husband is an employee of hers. This would have been virtually unheard of a few years ago, when women's knowledge of computers was limited to a Casio calculator and the job of cleaning the keyboard of their husband and son's PC. Three cheers for emancipation and virtualization.

I look forward to installing VMware and storing The Pisstakers data in quadruplet on my new hard drive, just in case. (Just in case of what? 4 tsunamis or 4 last minute hurricanes? Sounds like a lot of hype all of a sudden. Quick, sell, sell sell.

Based on an article from serious minds at yahoo finance.

Hewlett Packard just announced a 71% increase in laptop sales. Three cheers to the biggest PC manufacturer in the world, but children and parents, beware!

Hand-written onscreen notes may be a huge advance in aesthetics, ridding every monitor of curly yellow Post-Its, but there will be a huge rise in litigation!

Kids pestered by excessively naggy mothers (the moms who insist on leaving notes reminding their children to clean their teeth, put out the trash and tidy their room once a day), will be able to leverage the ability to save digital hand written notes to disk.

Climbing out of a room full of clothes, rubbish and unused toothpaste, Johnny Junior will be able to wave a CD full of every note their mother ever wrote, and threaten her to back off. "With all this evidence of psychological abuse, the judge will grant me a divorce in a heart beat."

The moms who don't care, will drive their geeky kid straight to the judge and sign the divorce papers in a heartbeat.

On-the-ball mothers who give a damn will whip out their new HP digital camera and take a victorious picture of Johnny Junior's room. "Check mate. No judge is going to let someone who lives like this, loose into the world on their own."

Progress is double edged.

I am dumb, because I thought the quiz was a genuine piece of no-strings entertainment. If you get a final score for this monstrous undertaking, without signing up for anything, you are definitely a genius.

Thanks to 4TV.com you can watch obscure TV programs and old old movies on your PC for free. There seem to be no limits to the B-grade and black and white offerings; dubbed, out-of-sync foreign films and programing that was probably a big hit on ex-pat TV in India in the 60's. But hey, beggars can't be choosers and at least 4TV have made it a lot easier to find material than Comcast ever could.

The content

I had a few minutes of fun this morning checking out the main menu on the left. Under Humor I had a drop-down (or was it drop dead) choice of related channels. I found the Three Stooges in glorious monochromatic technicolor. Don't you just love slapstick? No!

Ramping up the action a little bit, I tried to see how scared I could make myself. The above screenshot includes a still from a horror film where actors speak without opening their mouths. Clever fx, but horrific TV that makes you cringe not jump.

Obviously I was obliged to zoom in on the adult channel, but it wouldn't load. Maybe, like me, it was tired?

Feel the quality, check the bandwidth

In the early days of internet TV, I recall dropped programs, dodgy pixelated images and a scroll through every Quicktime hiccup known to man. Well, in the here and now of a high speed internet 24/7 service, nothing has changed.

To be fair, the pictures that I got were initially quite good quality in the default size. (I didn't like to push it with full screen, you never know what gremlins might have appeared and tainted this review!) But I don't know how many times the picture stalled or turned psychedlic on me. This is similar to satellite TV, so the cable guy without an agenda told me.

Navigation

The menus are great compared to real TV and there are 250 channels in easy-to-scan sub menus. They have definitely made it easier than ever to get Zapping Fever !

Cost

Did I mention it is FREE too. They make their money from Adsense, which is kind of unimaginative, but a start for the company who provide the service, and not too intrusive for us viewer..

Conconclusion

I think 4TV need to partner with Comcast or another provider on the delivery side and shame those robbing bastards into taking responsibility for the smooth delivery of content they carry over their tubes. Until then, this sketchy TV service will remain quirky. A shame because there was a lot of good/curiosity stuff to see, just not all the way through.

Overall it is worth checking out 4TV, and worth them staying the course and competing with Youtube for this niche of recycled oldies. Someone somewhere has not seen The Three Stooges, and 4TV could convert them to a friend for life.

Remember Brownies, or the good old days of traditional 38mm photography where you had to think before you clicked? You better have a good memory, because that era of taking your time and being selective about what you snapped, due to the cost of printing, is a fast disappearing memory.

Now it is digital clickety click anything that moves. Thanks to the likes of iPhoto, Flickr, DoodlePad et al, your family and friends WILL sit through 3000 poorly constructed shots of your granny's tea party just seconds after the last guest leaves. Progress is great, innit!

I would go as far as to say that there is something wrong with you if you don't own a digital camera these days. You have probably either dropped out of society altogether, or you are in the process of making the break from the mainstream and have already thrown out your cell phone, PC and refrigerator. Oh yeah, and you don't wear shoes any more. Either that or you were beaten so badly over the head by an old Brownie camera as a child that you vowed never to get involved with fuzzy megapixels ever again.

Whatever your story, digital camera-less saddoes are in the minority and the rest of us are on the look out for slick ways to sort through the quagmire of unbelievably bad pixelated photos clogging up our camera's flash drives hard drives and online storage spaces.

iPhoto 08

5 years ago, Apple released iPhoto which was a good idea badly executed. As usual the faithful raved about the plug 'n play magic of linking any camera (except the one I had) and seeing their pictures auto-sucked into a slick brushed metal photo manager. It was just a poor relation of iTunes.

The moaners moaned at not being able to find their photos outside of iPhoto, the pros moaned because they couldn't do Photoshop craziness without having to use Photoshop, hmmmm... but now, for their troubles, the Mac community has a rather spiffing iPhoto 08 that should satisfy the sorting, internet and printing needs of any normal camera-head, and then some.

Coming from a background where I took 36 photos a year, and I could tell you about every picture in and out of focus, I found it quite scary to hear the demo guy laying bare the psychology of digital photography. "You take photos based on events. On average you take 50 photos per event. If you have 5000 photos you can now access and easily search them via 100 thumbnails representing each event." I was waiting for the line about, "It is 4.09, time to take your medication, Ed." but not even Apple can research human behavior that precisely.

Flickr

Flickr took the photo game on-line and set standards that I don't believe anyone else has yet bettered. From their warm and friendly welcome, to the gazillion ways to resize, store and share out-of-focus photos, it seems to be everything to all men women and crap photographers world-wide, The Pisstakers included.



Mrs Ed hated it at first because you have to think a little bit before you jump in, but even she now talks in terms of I am going to put this picture on Flickr and link to it from my fave forum. Praise indeed.

Doodlepad

This is neat on-line software from India. You can upload as many photos as you dare, for free, and you can even download them again! (That is quite an important feature, believe it or not, because some freebie photo hosts only let you download degraded versions of the original!) The software then takes photos beyond the album and CD stage and moves more into CafePress territory.

Just like iPhoto and the rest, you can make slideshows and whatever else rocks your boat. But then you can go into Doodlepad and get creative with tees, mugs and all that good merchandising stuff. So now, as well as filling the world with hazy shots of a dog's back leg, you can bless your family with clothing they will never wear and drinking vessels that only get used when 43 other used cups are in the dishwasher and you ran out of soap.

In the right hands, of course Doodlepad is cool. Any right hands in India, that is.

Conconclusion

The photo software and hardware available to us all is obviously wonderful compared to even 5 years ago, but, am I the only one who has issues with a photographic rush to mediocrity? Maybe I am just damaged from having seen my ugly mug in and out of focus 43 times on a Kodak gallery. Maybe everyone else's family is blessed with natural photographers without itchy fingers? Maybe it is good for the tech economy and instead of Shopping for America, the new motto should be more precise - Snap for America. What do you think?

I was reading a well-written article by FiftyFourEleven on copying content, and another, a review by Tyler Cruz, about a company focused on detecting plagiarism Plenty of good illegal anti-copyright stuff for writers to get caught up in and angry about. But as usual, I got to thinking about the negative aspects in a different light. Copy me, baby!

If words are not precious, being copied is not annoying

I can understand that for most people, writing doesn't come naturally, and even when it is fun, it is inevitably hard work. So, if one day, a non-writer really squarts their ass off completing an article or a story or even a book, (and puts their pen down with that feeling of I couldn't (or wouldn't want) to do that again) I can see they would feel very protective of their achievements. Committed writers should feel different, though.

To my mind, litigation and anger and annoyance are a waste of time and effort for most creative types. When there is a whole world to fill with new stuff, why restrict your thinking to minutiae and silliness? Why be like the music copyright people and spend millions hunting down teenagers, when they could be spending millions promoting the wonders of owning your music? Move on.

Writers and bloggers should look at the bigger picture and forget hunting down the copycats for legal reasons. The way I look at it, if someone copies your work, the more people will probably read your work anyway, and the more you have to write about in your scandals column! Far from being negative, copying creates an outlet for your creative juices. Did you hear about so-and-so? The bastard ripped me off - a great headline to attract readers.

Protection against copying and plagiarism

I don't really care if anyone copies me or not, but if I were smart and wanted to optimize the marketing potential of everything I wrote, I would always include my Pisstakers site name in an article and include a link back to the article on my site, and date the article, and keep a hard copy of the article. To me that sounds like I am pretty much copy-proofed, especially as most copycats aren't prepared to edit anything. Take those steps, and bottom line, the more who rip you off and publish you verbatim around the internet , the better for you.

Use Copyscape out of interest and vanity, not so you can track a copycat down via ISPs etc and make them feel stupid.

When you look around the internet and see ideas identical or similar to yours, think how you can improve on what is already out there, instead of getting all possessive, bitter and twisted.

Write your heart out and press publish with a clear head, secure in the knowledge that nearly all bloggers come out ahead of nearly all copycats - as long as you remember to take the above simple steps every time you write. In fact, I would go one stage further and say that if you follow those simple rules, you should subtly encourage others to take your work as their own. When they do, you win, not them!

What about Google?

Some internet entrepreneurs out there would say that copying is a bad deal if Google get involved, because money is at stake. My view is, I would hope that the smashing folks at Google were reasonable enough to compare your track record as a writer with the track record of a scraper site, and decide not to close your Adsense account or penalise you for duplicate copy. And if they did come down on the side of the bad guys, at least you would have plenty of new material to blog about.

Conconclusion

When you get down to it, a few people get away with cheating in the long run. Copycats like Shakespeare or Microsoft Windows inventors spring to mind, and there are always plenty of cases to disprove the rule, but for the most part, the guys who produce original material day after day end up the winners. Keep on writing, don't be too precious about your work, follow those few "rules" and enjoy your ride to fame. I think therefore I am original.

By all accounts, Howard Stern costs Sirius more than $190 / subscriber. Add in his natural born ability to make listeners go "What?" suffice to say, that makes Stern a 360 degree satellite shock jock. Kudos.

If you stand back, though, Sirius seem to be on the nutty side of shocking to pay so much for one character's contract. Just add Stern's costs to the Sirius-XM satellite merger issues, and the general market skepticism about the survival of satellite technology in the face of an ubiquitous iPod, it ain't looking good.

Delving deeper, however, Stern's magnate-style addition to the programing mix has been part of a master plan that could unfold into a backdoor strategy that will save and grow Sirius way into the future.

CEO of Sirius is King

Getting to the nub of the matter, look at the behavior of the guy at the top of Sirius, Mel Karmazin. He is far from a nutcase, and has been buying up Sirius stock to the tune of $10m out of his own pocket, while SIRI has been struggling on Wall St. What does he know that the naysayers don't? He probably knows no more than the next person looking at the facts, but he possibly sees the facts in a different light.

Content is king, satellites are pretenders

At $190 plus per subscriber, Karmazin thinks Stern is a good investment, and in short term truth, Stern has repaid this faith in him by putting enough bums on seats to keep Sirius ticking upwards in line with XM. Without Stern, Sirius would be less attractive, for sure. Those are obvious observations, but look more closely at other content.

Stern is such a mega star, he is dulling the line-up around him. But in truth, NFL and Nascar programing is hardly a marginal offering and there are hundreds of minor stars in the background too. It is the content that Karmazin is probably betting on as he buys shares, not a bet that the rest of the world is smarting at - ie that satellite technology will be the new radio medium forever and a day.

Jobs leads, karmazin follows

Think about it. Steve Jobs saw way beyond a piece of machinery when he marketed the iPod - iTunes double hit. The snazzy iPod hardware helped plant the idea in the public's mind that once you had all your current CDs installed, the meagre MP3 player could be a storage device just a click away from new valuable content that one day would be for sale online - in quantity. The future is now and Apple are going after digital content in a big way. Digital content is where the serious and easy money is, and as a bonus, Apple get to earn trolley loads of income from their hardware.

Karmazin is just a little bit behind the curve, but he too is probably looking at the hardware, ie the satellite technology, purely as a vehicle for the valuable content he has in mind / is acquiring already. Admittedly his technology isn't as great as Apple's, so he won't get as rich on satellite radio boxes as Steve Jobs has on iPods, but he probably doesn't care. His growing stable of content is his golden goose.

To understand where Sirius is heading, I humbly suggest you blow up your Sirius radio! What are you left with? Seriously valuable digital Sirius content that will work on an iPod. Howard Stern would be ready in a heartbeat to stream on your iPod. NFL coverage would work on any digital audio gizmo. The Catholic Channel would sound groovy on your new iPhone. I think it is this potential that Karmazin sees when he buys his so-called worthless stocks.

Conconclusion

What do naysayers and XM shareholders see now? They see satellite technology that is being thumped by iPods. They hear Oprah with her gang of interesting friends, or Opie and his really interesting friend. Satellite is limited, XM are dead. What do you see now? Hopefully that Sirius is the next Disney, albeit, a bluer version.

Phew, thank god for Motley Fool insights, I can sleep better at night with my Sirius shares.

If you have a product to sell, idea to promote, or story to tell, you could do worse than adopt a landing page mentality to ensure some positive results. Sounds like a lot of techno marketing fooey? Relax, Google have come to the rescue.

Rather than leaving us wannabe webmasters to sit around debating in a vacuum about what does and doesn't work best for an all-action webpage layout, (that is page not site) Google Website Optimiser helps us get down to some serious and well-constructed testing to determine what page layout will work best.

It's all in a landing page

The biggest single pointer I picked up is the concept of landing pages. If you think in terms of those pages that appear when you click on 100 ways to Improve your Sex Life, you should already be half way towards understanding what you are trying to achieve with the Website Optimiser. Bottom line, any webpage you create can and should generate a response/action from your reader.

The action doesn't need to be a sale, it could be encouraging readers to sign up for your RSS subscription, or take a look at another article, or whatever you have going on with competitions or memes or link trains.

The video presentation spells out the options and key points and variables you need to consider for an effective landing page. Starting from the top (literally) and working down, you can isolate each stage of the psychological process that occurs when we look at a page, and scientifically test what works best as a headline, a sales pitch, a photo and a call for action.

A couple of useful tips

I learnt quite a few things, one of them being, sexy photos draw your eye in to a page, but may draw you away from the call to action - or worse, drive you to perform a different action to the one intended by the webpage designer. Therefore, Ed icons will stay as unsexy as ever.

The video also clarified the meaning of a call for action. I realise that whenever you read an article, all I want is for you to
1- smile
2 - go aaaah
3- sign up to my RSS feed
4- submit an entry to a widget or install one of my widgets.

Simple aims!

If you are curious about web page optimization, take a look at the video.

The Pisstakers is not very automated, but sometimes a living breathing piece of code can work wonders to entertain and amuse you with no effort from me. Naked keyphrase produces the following funny-ish books and DVDs.

Tags: TicTap, Amazon, keyphrase

A quick round-up of breaking unreal tech news, starting with Amazon's announcement of a new online payments service.

We continue to believe that Amazon is one of the most underappreciated innovators in the consumer Internet sector," wrote analyst Scott Devit. The analyst said Amazon's program heralds an era of improving and new electronic payment programs.

In other words, Paypal and Mastercard and Visa are dead, long live AmazonPal. The only thing that marred the analyst's analysis was the unreal statement that he would buy Amazon for mid $60's. Er, right, when the shares have just been $86 and there is no reason to suppose that Amazon's performance isn't going to continue its meteoric rise, who wouldn't want a $25 discount?!

The real unreal Steve Jobs

The blogger lampooning Steve Jobs as part of an experiment on corporate leader blogging, has been unmasked, at last. He was amazed that it took so long to unveil his identity, and all you can say is - so much for the ability of the average Joe geek to expose anonymous bloggers. Basking in his exposure, the unreal Steve Jobs filled us in on his next move.

Well, I'm taking a few days off to sit in a lake and do some yoga and meditation and non-thinking. Then I'm coming back next week, badder than ever, with a new sponsor - my homeboys at Forbes.com.

If anyone at Forbes wants to lampoon Ed the Editor, feel free.

Virtual world on your desktop

It has been a while since you needed to sit with 2 computers on your desk, neck swivelling madly, in order to enjoy Mac and Windows simultaneously. The virtual desktop is here, and here to stay. The main protagonist is VMware, and they just released their latest greatest version of Fusion. A shame that the only review they have on VersionTracker is in triplicate and is so glowing it must have been written by the unreal VMware CEO?

Despite what an obnoxious individual on Digg posted about me, I don't consider myself particularly nit-picky, but this next observation should make me guilty as charged. When I am scrolling down a page, it really irritates me how Google ads stop the cursor dead in its tracks.

Look, no wheels. Look, no action

This is my elitist Mac trackpad, and to scroll, I run my superior finger up and down the right edge of the trackpad. It seems very reliable, but perhaps the software is 1% faulty, or were the developers sponsored by Google? Or do Adsense blocks affect the behavior of all scrolling wheels to the detriment of the user experience? Or am I in a minority of one and no one cares except me?

Seeing as Google are the epitome of Content is King, they should understand that if the ad block is that interesting, I would stop scrolling of my own accord. So, please, leave my scroller alone.

Care to share any other niggles that waste milli-seconds of your time? (And please, out of respect for the PC apologist from Digg, I don't want to hear about any references to arcane Dell- and Windows-related woes that waste hours of your time. That is just obnoxious and sooo old.)

Earlier this week I was eulogising about Amazon and their amazing coming of age due to smart investments in technology. Then I get this email.



Sorry, guys, but I never bought an MP3 player in my life! Time for you to check over the code for whatever software gave you the idea I would be remotely interested in this offer. Next.

I just wanted to add to the gazillion words written about the latest greatest phone from Apple. The iPhone is spectacular.

First impressions of the iPhone

It is a lot bigger than I thought it would be, so the guy who demoed it in the advert must have been a giant. All that pinch and stretch finger stuff works, just like on the TV; the navigation is obvious; those iTunes album photos really do swivel as you turn the phone on its side - and we even found the volume button within 2 seconds of saying, "Not as intuitive as they say it is!"

Internet criticisms of the iPhone

Experts like to criticise the internet part, saying it should be G4 or whatever it is that takes surfing over the edge from normal slow US speeds to the real world speeds of everywhere else. All I can say is, that when you type in a URL, it seems a bit slow to kick in? but thereafter the pages load niftily and you can whizz around, zooming and scrolling much quicker than you ever could on a computer. The Pisstakers website looks pretty neat, of course! All being well, the person after us is enjoying the same Pisstakers experience too.

Keyboard criticisms of the iPhone

People say the virtual keyboard is a weak point, but the dainty-fingered Mrs Ed was quite impressed, especially as the letters were highlighted as she typed. She is no tech head or typing phenomenon, so it is fair to say that the keyboard is probably good enough for what most of us want to do on a phone. They say Apple will probably bring out a bluetooth keyboard. so maybe bloggers will be attracted to that extra speed. We shall see.

Is the iPhone worth it?

If they were giving one away free, of course I would take it, but I don't know that it is worth $600 to me. (I make 3 calls a week and have no friends or desire to listen to music.)

The price tag is sort of out there compared to most people's idea of what a phone should cost, but if you are in the market for an iPod AND a phone, then it probably is good value.

The rates for an AT&T contract are standard, so apart from the desire to talk way past your normal minutes and the additional cost of bucket loads of kbs surfing online, it should be just like owning any other phone - except you have fun and don't spend the first month working out how to email a photo.

PS

I feel a bit of a twat, especially after yesterday, espousing the virtues of moblogging. I forgot to take a picture of the iPhone in action! If anyone has the opportunity to take a shot of the Pisstakers site on the iPhone, I would really appreciate a copy! Meanwhile, I have to go now and make a call on my flip-up brick.

A disclaimer: I don't hate Dell; Windows is obviously a joy for many people; and Mac is just what I like and know. Having said that, I don't know how the PC crowd sleep at night, or maybe you don't, and you all suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome - you say everything is fine, just so that Bill Gates and Michael Dell cronies don't come and kill you?

The good side of Dell and Windows

In my limited experience, Dell and Microsoft have some really great ideas and implement them well. (Replacing a hard drive in an Inspiron laptop is so easy it is ridiculous, and Windows has the greatest selection of Solitaire I have ever seen.) On the other hand, these bellwethers, (or is it irresponsible behemoths?) have a knack of making the sublimely easy turn into the sublimely ridiculous.

Dell driver hell

Imagine this. You have a new hard drive with a copy of Windows installed and it is working perfectly, but there is still a maze of installations to go before you can get onto the internet or listen to music, or have a display that doesn't ripple when you drag a window across the screen. This complete novice to the Dell way of doing things was scratching his ass for 3 hours fighting with 2 CDs full of drivers.

If you are a PC user and know nothing about Macs, you probably think that it is reasonable to fart around with drivers before your computer can function properly at a basic level. And maybe it would be reasonable to expect novices to do some heavy lifting, in order to get a feel for the tool they are going to be using day-in, day-out. But the average user surely deserves some easy-to-use software and support? Dell don't help much.

To their credit, there are two CDs full of essential drivers and utilities. You are expected to install the contents on your hard drive. No biggy -Except you cannot copy the content of both disks onto your fricking hard drive at the same time. No, you have to delete one before you can load the other. How retarded (and confusing) is that?

And once you can actually see a list of drivers on one of the CDs, you are confronted with this arcane methodology that demands that you interpret a series of ticks and divine what things do from the most pathetic descriptions ever written. For instance, when you load a video driver, you are not quite sure whether it applies to your machine or not, because, let's face it, who has the necessary paperwork from 4 years ago to double-check the exact spec of your computer, and who has 4 years to find the info on Dell's website? And even if you strike gold and it is the right driver - you then find it is an out of date version. And to take the piss totally, you can only update the driver once you have installed yet another driver to get onto the internet. Give me strength.

Windows registry hell

The laptop was originally set up by Dell and worked great till the hard drive died. Copying the exact set-up of the original hard drive, I made 2 partitions, a small 31MB partition alongside the main partition where I installed Windows. I have no idea why Dell did that, but who am I to argue. Surprise surprise, it had repercussions for me and Windows kept producing a bubble that insists on telling you what you already know, ie the small partition has less than 200MB of free space, do something about it.

Long story short, and after much investigation, you can't just turn off that bubble. The simplest option is to delve into the registry and add a file with a new DWORD. No worries say the geeks, Crap yourself says everyone else, because you risk ruining your whole system in search of peace and quiet.

Why is the Dell and MS mindset so arcane?

I suggest that this inability to keep things simple is because the people in charge are all nerds who have no handle on the technical abilities (and interest) of the majority of their user base. Normal people need normal instructions. What dick head thought that to turn off a PC you should press Start? Why do you need to tell me I have a wireless connection when I am already on the internet surfing without a cable? Why do I need to uninstall one CD to load the complementary contents of another one?

Ed's trip to Mac land

I vowed as a younger man never to get into computers. This was based on the trials and tribulations of working on a 386 PC with some godawful version of Windows. I decided I would go hungry and live my life as a technophobic wastrel, rather than waste my life losing hours of work to inexplicable crashes and never being able to print without re-mapping a network.

One day in France I stumbled upon a display of Macs and saw the light. They looked fun and people insisted they were easy. To be honest, it is hard to take that statement seriously from a Frenchman, because if there is a hard way to do something, they will find it. (Hydraulic suspension, caterpillar buses, trains that go 300mph... all that technology comes with a steep learning curve for anyone involved in their production and maintenance!) But they were right and if you install your Mac equivalent of the Windows CD or DVD, once it is loaded with almost no input from you, you can restart it, listen to music, watch videos, and surf the internet (assuming you have internet!).

The way technology is, you always need to update drivers and software, but at least on a Mac, you have what seems to be a logical path to follow and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to find what you need on Apple's website.

Is Mac really simpler than PC?

Many would say I am biased and Macs are just as complex as PCs. Maybe, but I think what it is, if you come from Windows to Mac, yes, it has a steep learning curve, but I never really got contaminated by the Windows way of thinking.Coming to a Mac with untainted eyes, I reaped the benefits of a Mac's relative simplicity.

Hardened Windows users have it ingrained in their head that it is OK to have silly little desktop icons with arrows coming off them, to prove they are aliases. And worse, it is acceptable that these useful icons are hidden from view for most of the time. When I turned on the Mac, I never blinked an eye or thought, How illogical that the desktop was empty apart from some application icons in this big old dock thing at the bottom of the screen. And it was always on view. And how easy to drag my most used applications from the "Explorer" straight into the Dock, - look, no arrows included on these aliases.



I never did enough work on Windows to realise that an application dumps files all over the hard drive, so to me, it was logical, natural and nice that on a Mac you drag an application icon straight into the trash. Apart from some totally benign preference files, which you can safely leave in place, an app in the trash is dead and buried, and you don't have to worry about any bubble-based messages haunting you forever thereafter.

Alert alert, you trashed an application, shared resources, reg.dll.neverhaerdofitfile may not work now, or

Do you know that was very naughty trashing that app, because the clever Windows people spent a long time writing that program and you just threw it away. There is nothing better than Internet Explorer, traitor.

And I certainly never experienced a full install of Windows on a Dell before, so imagine the shock of all this ridiculous song-and-dance to get a computer working.

On balance, it would be easy to repeat the installation and whizz through the steps to get the Dell working again, (I am a hardened Windows head now, having altered a file in the registry, woohoo) but really, if I ever have to rely on that set up to blog, I can assure you, the Pisstakers will cease to exist.

Addendum. In response to an ungracious criticism from a Digger, I slightly re-ordered the original post to make sure my nit-picking, as he called it, is in a more logical sequence.

When you visit a bog and you need to know fast who is behind the scenes, behind the ideas, or behind the times, you look for an About Page. From a site owner's perspective, the About page is also a great opportunity to market yourself or your company in one big hit.

The About page deserves some attention, but this crucial piece of real estate on a website is often neglected. Blogger profiles for instance, seem to fail miserably most of the time. When I started blogging, it took me a while to even add an About page, let alone try and do something creative with it. However, there are plenty of enlightened folks out there, pushing the envelope, and here are 3 that caught my eye.

About pages that rock

It's Monkey Mamou This About page is a quickfire synopsis of a troubled mind with a stomach prone to heaving. She sets the scene well for what it is to come elsewhere in this quirky witty blog. For the inquisitive, you have to go clicking FYI for an explanation of the origins of the title Monkey Mamou. I was a little disappointed, to be honest, after reading that Mamou is a place, not some sort of goddess. Perhaps some important facts are best left off the About page and left to the imagination.

I get tired of trying to find new creative ways to write an about page.... Since this blog site is mostly about me, my views on just about everything, and what I do, I figured I just fill out one of those online surveys , in order to stop Pisstaker from mentioning that I don't have an about page...

This is an About page with info to a magnitude of ten more indepth than any About page out there. I have read 60 lines down, how many more to go? That will teach me for taking the piss.


Larry is different. He has an About Corner. Dispensing with tradition, he tells us all about his blog from a highly public place in the sidebar. Good tactic, especially as his inimitable face beams out from above to attract your attention. (I think like most famous people he has copyrighted his personal bits and pieces, so I will not risk a lawsuit with a photo here of his bonce.)

About page is an important part of the mix

Bottom line, the About page can draw visitors into your world quicker than any other page. Alternatively, if you want to leave visitors in the dark, add a blank or boring About page. (This could even be number 11 on the list of tips to drive people away from your site.) I know I will be revisiting The Pisstakers About page just to check where it figures on a scale of 1 to 10. Maybe you should too, assuming you have a website!