Archive for February, 2009

Can Microsoft Dismiss Apple’s Marketshare as Insignificant?

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked yesterday about its top competitors a couple of days ago calling piracy and Linux as its top competitors. Ballmer all but dismissed Apple’s market share gains as insignificant. He makes the obvious point that Apple only gained 1 percent of 300 million PCs worldwide. He’s exactly right that Apple has a very insignificant hold on the market (around 7 percent), however, can Microsoft dismiss them the way Ballmer did? He placed Linux and piracy as the biggest competitors and Apple coming in third.

The problem with dismissing Apple like that is that market share is viral and Apple is a cult. Of course, Microsoft has nothing to worry about immediately, but the whole reason that Microsoft has the market share is because “the rest of the world uses it”. End users are going to buy what everyone is using. If Apple can gain enough market share to change the perception the market could swing the other way. Granted, this is a long way down the road, but when I, for one, switched to Apple I also brought several people with me. Granted, I was a Linux user (and still am somewhat on the desktop and almost exclusively on the server), but I brought a lot of users with me who used to be Windows users.

Related Posts Related Websites

Tags: , ,
Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Feb 26th, 2009

Safari 4 vs IE Benchmarks Are In

Yesterday Apple released a the first beta version of Safari 4 boasting Javascript rendering “30x faster” than Internet Explorer 7. Today, ZDNet released the results of a benchmark that proves exactly that. In fact, the tests show roughly 42 times faster rendering. The browser was very close to Mozilla Minefield as well as Google Chrome, but still better than the other two. Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and IE8 were all much slower than the other three with IE8 by far the slowest. Then it came to IE7.. It’s not even worth comparing the two as, of course, IE7 was 42x slower at rendering the page. In a world where desktop applications are migrating from the desktop to the browser, Javascript rendering is going to be very important for application performance. Safari has been rated as the fastest browser at rendering Javascript in the past and it appears it has just raised the bar again.

Related Posts

Tags: ,
Filed under News : Comments (1) : Feb 25th, 2009

Apple Releases Safari 4 Beta, Claims 30X Faster Than IE7

Apple has released a beta version of the next version of its browser, Safari. Among some usability features, Apple is boasting some significant performance gains. It is saying that its new Nitro Engine, it can execute Javascript code 30x faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 3 times faster than Firefox 3. They are also bragging 3x faster html rendering than IE7 and Firefox as well. They stated the browser was faster than Google Chrome, but no numbers were given to compare the two.
Safari Top Pages
They made two big changes as far as usability goes. Probablythe biggest changes as far as usability is that Apple moved the tabs to the top of the browser window similar to the way Chrome displays tabs. Also added was cover flow for browsing history. It’s the same coverflow just like you find in Finder (I couldn’t resist) and iTunes only with webpages that you’ve visited.

A new feature that’s been added is something they call “Top Sites”. By default when you open a new tab or window, it displays the top 12 sites you’ve visited in the past and gives you a nice one-click access to your favorite spots on the web.

They finally made the Windows version look more like a Windows application and not painfully obvious that it was an application built for Apple and ported to Windows. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves with applications that get ported to the Mac is some developers don’t adhere to the “look and feel” of the platform they are porting to. I was disappointed to see Safari 3 on Windows, but am relieved to see they’ve finally adopted the Windows “look and feel” on Windows.

Related Posts Related Websites

Tags: ,
Filed under News : Comments (1) : Feb 24th, 2009

Watch Movies from the Command Line

In one of the geekiest (and coolest) things I’ve ever seen, How-to-Geek published a how-to on how to watch movies from a Linux command line. The trick uses mplayer to play the movie using colored text. It’s almost as cool as the ’sl’ command which is clearly just as powerful and useful :) From Ubuntu, you just do:sudo apt-get install mplayer and then run mplayer to open the file with the “caca” option: mplayer -vo caca filename

Related Posts Related Websites

Tags:
Filed under Just for Fun : Comments (0) : Feb 24th, 2009

Vista Fans Are Just as Bad as Linux Fans

The pattern is as sure as the sun rises: Someone writes an article about Linux vs. some other OS. Then someone will say how Linux is far superior to everything else on the market. Then someone will say that common tasks in Linux are difficult and it sucks. Then someone will insult their intelliegence saying they’re an idiot and doesn’t know how to computers since they can’t figure out Linux. Then the insults get more and more personal and more and more insulting. A few in the community around Linux are so passionate about Linux that it hurls insults at anyone who sees differently.

Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing another trend emerging. If you read the comments under any article about some sort of bug or problem with Windows (a very good recent example here), the very same thing seems to be happening with Vista fans. Take the first paragraph and replace every instance of Linux with Windows Vista and you have it. Early in its public life, Windows Vista was ripped on by almost everyone in the blogosphere and even popular media. Now it seems there are a few who are willing to hurl personal insults to defend their choice OS. It seems this could be a good start for Microsoft in their efforts towards rebuilding the community around their products after it was shattered by the bad Vista publicity (deserved or not).

Related Posts Related Websites

Tags: , ,
Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Feb 22nd, 2009

« Older Entries