Technology

Sometimes we’re posed the proverbial question of "If you could remake the world in your own image, what would it look like?", but most would probably agree that day-dreaming about a self-created world is futile and a waste of time…

Well someone forgot to tell that to the folks at Microsoft, who quite literally re-imaged the world in their own hands.

Earlier this week Microsoft debuted an MSN service called "Virtual Earth".  This web tool is set to compete with the "Google Maps/World" feature.  For those of you who may not know, for the last few months you’ve had the ability to go into Google, type in your address (or anyone else’s address for that matter) and get a map to your house – like Mapquest.  Where this gets better is that not only will Google pull up a map and directions, but also has satellite images of the area as well – so you can pull up a satellite image of your house, work, school, etc..  It’s kinda spooky because of some of these locations you can zoom to the level of your car!  Anyway…

So M$ wanted to get in on this market as well, so they debuted "Virtual Earth" earlier this week.  Since then they’ve received a lot of press about this service, unfortunately most of it has been bad press.

A story in The Register started it all when in their testing of the product, they found that M$ literally has re-made the world in their own image. To summarize:

If you pull up the address for Apple’s headquarters (as in Apple Computers – makers of the Mac and iPod) opening it in Google gives you this image, a beautiful campus with a fully-paved parking lot, green grass and most importantly buildings!

Pull up the image in MSN Virtual Earth and the same location is shown – WITH APPLE HQ COMPLETELY MISSING!  Instead of the beautiful campus with the green grass, you just see a HUGE DIRT LOT!!

It’s erie – almost like aliens swarmed down from the sky and completely vaporized the whole area so that it’s just a dirt lot – like in those sci-fi movies!  I guess in M$’s image of the world, that’s how they view dealing with the competition – blinking them out of existence! 

In seriousness, the maps that you’re looking at are not directly off a live satellite feed by any means.  Both Google and Microsoft have purchased these images from commercial companies and many of them are many years old.  M$ claims that in the "Apple" case the image is from 1990 before the plant was built, but you still have to wonder if someone working on the project thought it’d be funny to pull a prank like this.

Hmmm, makes me wonder if my house still exists in the M$ world…  Whew! Still there!  How about my work?  Okay – looks fine too!

Be careful what you wish for

It’s been a few days, so I thought I’d just post a random thought…

I had a chance to check out the Developer’s Beta 1 of Internet Explorer 7 through my MSDN subscription, and after downloading & installing the bits this morning, here I am 4 hours later uninstalling the damn thing…  I’ll explain why, but unless you’re a ner-eerrrrr-tech enthusiast like me, you might not find it very interesting.

First off, after installing it, I found one of the most obvious changes – a new IE icon!  After all, nothing says "New Version" of an application more than a space-age, gradient-embossed icon!  It just cracks me up because since IE 4 they really haven’t done anything new to the icon, but every release they basically "inject beautox" into it and make it look like some kind of shrink-wrapped version of what it once was.  Just kinda funny…

Alright, so I go ahead and double-click on my new space-aged icon only to find something that I’ve been all-too familiar with:

Hahahaha, same old M$!  It took a bit of trouble-shooting to figure out what was exactly going on, but one of the new features seemed to help.  You can now start Internet Explorer "without any Add-In’s" or as Firefox has deemed it "Safe-Mode".  lol…  But you can go in there and bring up this "Manage Add-In’s" interface that can help you pinpoint and disable anything that’s causing problems (or in this case anything that’s NOT causing problems)..  IE7 didn’t seem to take too well to having a few toolbars, and I ended up uninstalling Googlebar (grrr), disabling the Acrobat Bar, and then removing the SnagIt bar…  Then finally IE7 became happy.

So let’s get to the interface, but before I say anything, M$ put out this little disclaimer that the Developer Beta 1 is a pretty stripped-down version of IE.  It’s not intended for consumer testing, simply to help Developers determine whether or not their web applications will blow up with the new version of IE (I’ll get into my little rant about this later), and they said "Not all new features are available with this edition".  But without further ado, here’s what we have…

On first glance, here are a few things that I liked:

• Nice "New -Tab" feature It’s kinda cool that you can simply just click in to that grey area next to your tabs to create a new one.  It’s espcially pretty cool for a mouse person, but I don’t mind pressing CTRL-T in Firefox at this point.
• "Phishing" Protection – Supposedly IE7 is going to be able to protect you from those hoax web sites (those emails that you get from banks & eBay saying that your account is locked out and now needs to be "verified").  That looks to be pretty cool, didn’t have a chance to check it out yet.
• No more obnoxious Windows logo on the right-hand corner

A few things that bugged me:

• It looks like a cheap rip-off of Mozilla Firefox I know this is stripped-down IE, but it really just looks like a no-frills version of Firefox.  Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but when you’re M$ – who essentially won the browser wars three years ago, haven’t done anything to improve your browser (outside of covering security loopholes) and now all of the sudden are getting you butt kicked by an open-source community – I expect more of a response than "let’s just copy it and put the M$ logo back on top of it".  Lame!
• Separation of Browser Buttons  – The only buttons that IE7 put on top are the "forward and back" buttons, moving the "Home" & "Print" buttons down to the common interface
• The Forced Spacing with "Favorite Links" bar – If you can see in the "Favorites Bar" you can see that regardless of the spacing each link took, they’re defaulting to the size of the largest link on the "Links" bar (if that makes any sense).  This means that instead of fitting 8 or 9 links on the toolbar like I have, I’m forced to fit 5.

So outside of aesthetics (which need to be taken with a grain of salt at this point), let’s talk about functionality.

Right now there is none!  This gets back to the purpose of this Developer’s Beta – with people needing to verify that their application works with the new version.  It bothers me to see the classic M$ arrogance in providing us with an application that says "Here’s how it’s going to be – it’s now you’re problem, fix it!".  All of the sudden capabilities that web developers have enjoyed for years are now all of the sudden obsolete with the new version.  I understand that technological innovation sometimes requires changes and improvements, but at the same time my biggest pet peeve is when you lose existing functionality when you move to a new version.

Let me give you an example:

Using IE6/Firefox, here is what my Xanga "Text Editor Box" looks like:

But you fire up IE7, and here’s what you see:

Now granted, this probably isn’t M$’s fault, as it looks like Xanga run a browser detection and probably gets confused when they see a 7.x version of IE, but at the same time M$ needs to think about that kind of stuff, especially since many web apps haven’t seen a need to upgrade some of their components since the browser wars have ended.

So I ended up uninstalling and as I’m writing this I’m back on IE6… I guess I’ll take another try when the consumer-class beta comes out, but right now my initial experience wasn’t very encouraging.

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p align=”left”>Stick with Firefox…

Tonight should be a quick post.  I’m really tired, but I really wanted to not fall into the habit of not poisting (after going strong for three weeks now).

First and foremost I am writing on Firefox tonight because Internet Explorer is FREAKIN’ STUPID!!  DO NOT USE IT if you ever can…  Now I love to rip on Microsoft as much as the next guy (but truth be told that they make some great quality products – i.e. Office, Visual Studio) but Internet Explorer has definitely outlived it’s usefulness.   About a year ago I made the switch over to Mozilla Firefox (which was in a beta at the time) and I haven’t looked back ever since.  Unfortunately I cannot get rid of that pesky Internet Explorer, due to the fact that many web sites/applications still require it – Xanga being one of them..  Granted you don’t need IE for Xanga, but the text editor module which allows you to apply and retain rich text styles only works in IE.

So anyway I fire up IE on my desktop this evening to make my Xanga entry and what do I find?  My start-up page has changed (it’s usually set to a blank screen), replaced with some stupid URL that is running scripts that are being executed by my machine that my Virus Software is catching and disabling.  NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE!  I know many of you have encountered this before, but for a total computer nerd, I pride myself on my ability to keep myself from computer STD’s (or viruses).  So I’m a bit peeved at Internet Explorer right now, because if they didn’t have their stupid security loopholes that hackers take advantage of then I wouldn’t be in this predicament to begin with.

Moral of the story: if and when possible please use Mozilla Firefox!!

So I’ve fallen off the planet for the last few days – at least to the outside world.  Truth is that I’ve been spending all my time in Loveland with my sister’s high school graduation going on.  We had some family come in which I am taking every opportunity to spend time with, as well as trying to help my mom and the rest of my family maintain their sanity throughout this crazy time.  In the course a few days we have 2 graduation parties to plan (don’t ask why we have two – this is a sore subject), the commencement to go see, a Rockies game to go watch with the whole family (I am really excited about this), and most importantly seeing my sister Amanda from graduation on Saturday to leaving for the summer on Tuesday.  The decisions that brought my sister to make such a drastic and sudden transition are those of her doing (despite objections of the entire family), but regardless we are now trying to support her in getting out of town by Tuesday night.  So things are nuts right now….  I’d like to get more specific, but the lateness of night along with the need for me to be up really early on Sunday prevents me from explaining at this time…  Hopefully more to come…