Geek In Me

by Donald Melanson via engadget.com

We can’t in good conscience recommend trying this one at home for sake of your own sanity, but one enterprising PS3 enthusiast has thankfully gone the extra mile and installed Windows Vista on the console so you don’t have to. As you might have guessed, however, it’s not a pretty sight, with the OS running under emulation and requiring nearly 25 minutes to fully boot up. You can also add an extra five minutes and thirty seconds on top of that to load the start menu, and about twelve minutes to load up that most demanding of applications: Notepad.

via ubergizmo.com

Microsoft has had enough to see Apple communicate (negatively) about Vista: they have launched an initiative that aims to “educate” customers on the current state, but also the benefits of Vista. First, there’s some recognition that things went well (honesty) then they move on to the Vista “good stuff”. The thing is – it’s not going to work, because this campaign is poorly designed:

Microsoft cannot fight funny 30 seconds videos making fun of its product with pages of (boring) text.

Finally, let’s be honest: Vista gets (some) IT people excited because it will eventually make their life easier. For consumers, there’s really not a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade. Eventually, we’ll have to upgrade because support for new features won’t make it into XP, like DirectX 10.

by Darren Murph via engadget.com

SSDs have been quite the hot topic of late, with conflicting power usage reports and free-falling (almost) prices being the two angles most commonly yapped about. Now, however, we have a completely different reason to mention ‘em in passing, as SanDisk’s dutiful CEO let loose some questionable comments during its Q2 2008 earnings call. Noting that Windows Vista would present unique challenges for SSD manufacturers, he stated that “as soon as you get into Vista applications, you start running into very demanding applications because Vista is not optimized for flash memory solid state disk.” Furthermore, he proclaimed that the “next generation controllers need to basically compensate for Vista shortfalls,” and finished things up by asserting that “SSD performance in the Vista environment falls short of what the market really needs.” It seems all those statements were just used to deflect blame for it being behind schedule, but we’re a bit curious about how it intends on defending said statements with real-world numbers. Hmm?