So Google has finally decided to get serious about computer operating systems. This can be nothing but great news. Of course, we can’t expect it to compete with the good old contenders as soon as it’s launched, it will most likely be used in the dark by linux enthusiasts. I expect it to be a flawed gem, but around the third release it should at least be good enough to run on netbooks. Around that point, if Google starts a heavy ad campaign, who knows? It’s working for Microsoft’s Bing, and Google is already well known, and used by many. It’ll never be a Windows killer, not even Steve Jobs will be able to do that, and that’s because Microsoft is just too deply embedded in the common man’s perception of computers. Until the computer world is revolutionized, Microsoft will likely be around to torment us all, their blue screens barring their nasty teeth at every corner of every street. 
Error: Missing system file: Chrome.dll
In other news, the Chrome browser is almost done for the Mac! Maybe I’ll be able to browse the web without crawling back to firefox now… There are some nasty bugs in the 64bit version of Safari 4 on Snow Leopard. It can’t make comments on facebook, but that’s happening on their server, can’t blame Apple for that, as proven by it’s fluctuation status. More importantly, the browser dies every time I try to use the blogger editor! As I dislike Firefox, I might just not write a lot of blogs until the issues is fixed.
Song of the Blog: Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Sincerely
Bjørn
Have you tried Bing yet? You know, that new Microsoft search engine, powered (and advertised for) by Microsoft?
Why Microsoft thinks we need another old school web search engine is beyond me. With Web 3.0 about to bloom, and real-time search making it’s entrance, showing up sporadically as we speak, how could they possibly think that there is a market? WIth all the big bloggers raving about the real-time web every other day, why would anyone endeavor to fill a niche that Google beat to death a decade ago?
That being said, Microsoft is doing a pretty decent job. As a standard text search it doesn’t do anything new, it’s basically just Google with a new logo. It’s supposed to have all these nifty features, but they just don’t show up. I’m thinking maybe they only work in Internet Explorer, which is just a childish decision if that turns out to be the case, but neither google nor Bing provides any kind of fast confirmation. Supposedly, Bing will categorize your search results, pull up online stores when you’re searching for a product, look up reliable medical info, etc. Sadly, as far as I can tell, this is not the case. Simply put, none of the features touted are actually available (at least not to mac users).
I very recently wrote a blog on how I felt about Snow Leopard, and my first impression with the OS. This is just an update to that post, so if you have not read it already, you may either ignore this post, or put it on hold while you read this.
One thing that I talked about was the apparent lack of Quicktime X, one of the innovations of the new OS that Apple touted the most at the World WIde Developers Conference. While it has suddenly appeared, and is indeed very nicely designed, it has some serious issues, surprise surprise. It seems Apple hasn’t done such a good job with the 64bit environment as I first gave them praise for, at least not yet, this might (and should) be fixed by the official release. Now the Quicktime player in and of itself is fully 64bit, there are no issues there, but it seems Apple has chosen to split up the processes, letting Quicktime handle the GUI and design, while a separate process, the QTKit Server, handles some of the more hardcore processing. When it turns out that the QTKit Server shows up as a “normal” 32bit process in the activity monitor, the alarm bells start wailing.
Come on Apple! You can do better than this! Or maybe there’s something I don’t understand, it’s not like I’ve done any research on this new thing, it might be that a 32bit process is necessary to play movie files that were made on a 32-bit processor, and therefore the QTKit needs to be 32bit for these movie files? I don’t think that sounds very reasonable, but it’s possible, and I will test the hypothesis some time in the future, I shall simply make a movie myself and see how Quicktime handles that, but for now I stand disappointed.
Edit: I googled a bit, and found an article suggesting that the QTKit is in an even worse shape than I thought… Read more about it here.
Song of the Blog: The Static Age
Sincerely yours
Bjørn
I have, through completely legal channels, of course, gotten my hands on a copy of the Snow Leopard developer beta! For those of you who do not spend hours watching Apple keynotes, and I assume that means most of you, Apple just held their World Wide Developers Conference, where they demonstrated some of the new features that will be present in the next big release of their current operating system, Mac OS X. At this conference they offered a seed (torrent address I think) of a beta version to the developers, so they could check that their software would run on the new technology, an make tweaks if it didn’t. This helps Apple because it means there will be more software available when the system ships, and it helps the developers because it gives them something to fiddle with, and developers love fiddling.
I had some trouble installing Snow Leopard, mainly because I wanted to circumvent the whole “Burn this to a dvd” step, as I do not have a proper DVD-burning utility. I attempted to run the hidden mpkg file that contains the installer from within Leopard, and install Snow Leopard onto another partition. This failed, several times. I have no idea why it failed, but something went wrong, so I had a splendid idea. I partitioned my disk again, leaving me with one large Leopard partition, and two tiny snow leopard partitions, each of roughly 8 gigabytes. I should have made one larger, and one smaller, but it all worked out in the end. I then “burned” the .dmg disk image to the last partition, booted from this, and proceeded to install onto my second partition. There was barely enough space if I took away most of the extras, but there was enough room, which is the important part. Everything ticked, and after removing the install dvd partition, I was ready to try it out.
Mother of God! This seriously fuckin hurts! I have got to start remembering to bring swim goggles! Had to swim a kilometer without them! I think I have some sort of allergy or something, but I never bring the goggles anyways. I mean, they look absolutely retarded, and I look fantastic with red eyes! It really enhances the green irises! Haha, well anyways, that was the last time I had gym class in the swimming pool, so I don’t have to worry about it any more. This isn’t really relevant to my blog at all, but I felt like informing everyone of the situation.
