This posting from Wil Shipley reports the response of Marco Pena, a Dell spokesman to the news that the new MacPro’s were up to $1000 cheaper than similar spec Dell machines. The response has to be read to be believed… Some of Will’s suggested alternative replies are quite amusing too. Seriously though, from the response you could almost believe that Dell are so comfortable in their position as a leading manufacturer that they think that they can’t be touched – but $1000 is a big price difference…
Monthly Archives: October 2006
Things People Forget
Lisa was having somewhat of a moan today listing off things she hates, however she did demonstrate something that we’ve noticed a lot – part way down she includes on the list ‘Foreign Immigrants – All of them’, I guess a reaction to the news over the recent surge in numbers thanks to the EU expansion. In similar situations where in conversation friends and colleagues have complained about immigration, right to Beth’s face at times, it takes quite a while before it clicks that Beth is an immigrant too…
Careless Talk Costs…
I had a bit of a shock when, prompted by Dave, I looked at the Channel9 site this morning. Right at the top was this slightly blurry, but definitely recognisable picture of Dave, and an attached video. The video has been uploaded by one of the Microsoft employees who are involved in the Channel9 site, and was actually filmed a few months ago, and as well as Dave features Barry Dorrans and Ian Smith both of whom we’ve met up with a number of times.
Dave has admitted that based on some of the things that were said, he didn’t actually expect the video to appear. Having said that, what is up there is apparently edited having been past the lawyers… Ian’s first comment was “Well that was embarrassingâ€?, and Barry has posted his own comment on his blog.
The video kicks off with Dave and Lou showing Charles around Westminster, and then moving on to the London Eye giving a classic example of the tour guide technique of being totally convincing over what they are saying – whether it is right or not! From there they headed into Waterloo Station, where we get a whole sequence with the Channel9 Guy trying to come up with a suitable voice. We also get a recreation of Dave and Lou’s first date where they met under the clock on the station concourse. At this point Ian meets up with them and we get a bit of technical discussion, before they head off to the bar along the concourse to wait for Barry to appear. There is actually quite a detailed discussion about the problems of keeping up with multiple news feeds as both Dave and Ian, like me, have a lot of feeds. Then Barry appears. Now it’s worth saying that Barry has one or two issues with Microsoft, and is still decidedly annoyed about being turned down by them for not being technical. Considering who is filming, and where the video is hosted, he is surprisingly free with his comments… We then get on to a quite hilarious discussion about the relative merits of the different buildings on the Microsoft Campus, and then on to a discussion about the Windows Genuine Advantage programme. In amongst this there is discussion about Robert Scoble, how Dave doesn’t read his blog as much since he left Microsoft, and also his similarity or otherwise to the Channel9 Guy, a discussion of the best sources of technical information, the problems of moderating an online forum and a whole load of other stuff besides. Although the lawyers have apparently been at work on it, there are still some moments where you wonder quite whether they really said what they just said. What is a bit more worrying is Dave is threatening to invite myself and Beth along to the next one – I guess I’ll have to consult my lawyer on that one…
Anyway, if you’ve got a spare hour or so, grab a copy of the video and see quite how many potentially libellous, rude or generally unfortunate comments got through to the final edit. 😀
Mac: Word Niggles
Now Microsoft may well be the biggest software developer for the Mac platform after Apple themselves, but that doesn’t mean that they produce software which plays nice with the Mac platform. It has to be said that one of the primary reasons we have Office for the Mac is to allow us to interoperate with PC owners particularly with regards to Church where quite often reports and so forth will be sent around as Word documents. Whatever people may say about alternatives like OpenOffice, or that AppleWorks or iWork can load Microsoft Word files, by far the easiest way to interoperate is to use Microsoft Office for Mac itself.
However it’s not without it’s niggles, and points where it doesn’t play nice with MacOS X. One area of regular annoyance is around printing. In both the previous version, and our current 2004 version the way that Word copes with page orientation changes mid-document is to break the print out into multiple prints. That’s not too much of a problem if you’re printing out, but it is a pain if you’re using the Mac’s built in PDF functionality as the multiple prints get changed into multiple identically named PDF files, so not surprisingly you end up with only the last section as a PDF. Producing a PDF of the same document in the windows version doesn’t have the same problem, and other applications on the Mac can manage orientation changes just fine too. Over the weekend I’ve been fighting another annoying problem too. It is a new one for Word 2004, and is related to the fact that Word does not honour the default page size. Like the whole of the rest of the world aside from the US and Canada, the UK has standard paper sizes as laid down in ISO 216, so my printer is loaded with A4 paper, and that is how the printer in MacOS X is configured. It’s no problem in the majority of applications, I just print things out and it works. However it doesn’t work like that in Word 2004. Even if I change the paper size and save the normal template, still whenever I open the application, Word will default the paper size to US Letter. In fact in certain situations where I’ve received Word documents from other people I’ve found that it has changed the paper size on those documents to US Letter too. It is worth noting that this isn’t just a problem for the rest of the world, it occurs with US users too, who have Word defaulting to a different variation of their letter paper size. Indeed the Word MVP site has a whole article on hacking your printer driver to get around the problem.
There have been two service releases of Word 2004, and I’m running the latest version, and it does seem that getting Word to honour the default page size, or even getting Word to honour the page size saved in it’s own Normal template would help…