4800 seconds of spontaneous surfing and sharing

And I’m back, starting off with a YouTube video on Apple brainwashing.

After watching this, I’m sure you’ll all agree it’s “very nice”.

I’m supposed to give this post a title, Twitter for Book Readers, but Twitter doesn’t like people using the words Twitter, tweet and tweeting so loosely.

Sony just launched a new website called Words Move Me. I like these website–simple yet cool. It’s a social network for readers to share quotes from their favorite books. That’s it. Simple yet cool.

They could have made the interface look better and not all black but it certainly does what it should do. I like the animations but it was frustrating to traverse through all of the quotes.

The search doesn’t seem to work well yet. Searching shows you categories like literary moments, tags, title, author, and members. What was lacking was it doesn’t tell you if your search term had a match on any of these categories. For example I searched for the “Plato”. By default it will search for “Plato” in the literary moments category. There was no result. People could mistake this as there was no Plato-related quotes in the whole website. At least there should be a notification that there was at least one hit in the other categories.

I also found that it lacked the capability to share the quotes to other social networking websites. I found a good quote  and I wanted to share it with my Twitter and Facebook buddies but apparently I have to copy-paste. Plus a tag cloud of popular keywords would’ve been nice.

Overall, for a new website I’m optimistic with this site. I just hope they continue to build this site and it’s not just a one-time marketing website for their Sony Reader.

I’ve been using Windows 7 since they released the beta version, build 7000. Right now, I’m using the RTC build. To summarize the whole experience, I give Windows 7 two thumbs up.

Note: If you’re looking for a really technical and scientific measurement of Windows 7’s performance, this is not it. :)

You’ve Heard It, Speed

First thing when you ask a Windows 7 tester what’s good on the new OS, the first thing they’ll tell you is “It’s fast.” When I tried out the OS when it was still in Beta test, one notable difference between it and Vista was the speed. I’ll tell you, it’s like you’re using Windows XP. Some even say it’s faster than XP. If you’re suffering right now on your Vista, Windows 7 is like heaven. In Vista, the slowness of the OS was tolerable except for two things. First, even if you upgrade to a bigger RAM, the effect is just minute. Vista still eats up you’re RAM with its pre-loading “feature”. Second, when moving in and out of folders, it has this half a millisecond pause. Those 2 things that I’m pissed off are fixed in the new Windows.

Requirments and  Installation

The requirements are surprisingly low. If you’re running XP right now, I’m 90% sure, you’ll be able to run Windows 7. It’s supposed to run on net books so PCs shouldn’t have problems. I couldn’t find the article I saw this week saying that the guy was able to run Windows 7 on a 266MHz desktop with 96MB RAM. To add to speed, the OS installs fairly fast; around an hour. Also, it pretty much figures out the some of the techy settings for you.

System Requirements of Windows 7

• 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Note: Subject to change

Look ad Feel

Those who are fan of OS interfaces, in terms of look the OS isn’t that far from Vista. We still get the glassy transparent windows and task bar of Aero. Nonetheless, the feel is different. The new task bar is the best improvement in terms of functionality. I normally open a lot of windows of the same app and the OS groups these windows. Sure this is a feature we’ve seen in older Windows but new improvements are: the shortcut icon for the app is also the group, hovering and previewing just rocks. Mac fans didn’t like this though, saying it’s a rip-off of the Mac interface. For us Windows lovers, who cares.

Another new feature is the libraries feature. We can link the contents of many folders into one. Great for network folders and for users like me who have a lot of partitions, all with folders for documents, videos, and music.

Price

I don’t really care about the price of OS since it’s usually bundled with laptops. But according to this article by Ars Technica, we’ll get it for a cheaper price. Something must be wrong with Microsoft. Everything about Windows 7 is good. For a full retail of Windows 7 Home Premium, we can get it for $199.99; compared to Windows Vista Home Premium which costs around $240. Price here in the Philippines is still unknown but I’m sure it’s more expensive.

Overall, I’m really optimistic with Windows 7. Microsoft tested this OS for a long time and the result is a stable, better OS. Vista was just pure disappointment. This new operating system will be the exact opposite.

If you can’t wait for October, better download Windows 7 ASAP. The free download is until August 20, 2009.

I just recently subscribed to Ars Technica and the first post that caught my attention was this.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft just bought office.com.  And the big question is, why am I writing about it? Well, I’m bored. And Google Reader+Twitter is just a haven of stories for my blog. I should rename my blog to Around the Web in Who Cares How Long.

Back to this post’s topic.

Obviously, this is a part of Microsoft’s marketing to brand it’s software package Microsoft Office. When people hear the word office in the context of computers, instantaneously, we think of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. This is a good move for Microsoft and if we think about it (as the author of the post I’m referencing), we ask, “Why just now?” Probably, Microsoft got some loose change after selling Razorfish for $500 million.

Dawn is breaking and I’m still awake. Fine, it’s dawn here in the Philippines.  And I’m still stuck in YouTube.

The folks from the big apple answers  the question, “What is a browser?” This was a survey done by Google covering 50 respondents.

I probably woke the whole house when I watched this. Forgot to turn down my laugh volume (sorry housemates).

In this second video, a group inspired by the survey done by Google tried to replicate the survey in Rotterdam, Europe. Cool survey guys! If I owned a video cam, I might be crazy enough to try the survey here in Manila, Philippines.