Vista Annoyances
Jan 30th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
Today Slashdot has a review of Windows Vista Annoyances published by O’Reilly Media. I happened to pick it up in Foyle’s bookshop last Saturday.
I flicked through it and I thought
You must be joking
There’s a lot not to like about Vista, but 641 pages? As a Victorian child is said to have opined about a book on the topic of penguins
This tells me more than I care to know about penguins
Which is why some Brits of my past acquaintance muttered “penguins” instead of saying, as Americans are wont to do:
Too much information!
Suffice it to say, Vista is deservedly slammed. Though the irony of 641 pages being needed is pointed up by the typical Slashdot witticism that it was a miracle that so few were needed.
A Slashdot reader points to vlite.net, which I didn’t know about. It allows you to make a custom installation without much of the bloatware. If you use Vista that little tip is probably a better investment than the book.
The Ubuntu books were, if anything, worse. Bigger and more out of date. Are these books for people without Internet connections? Or brains? Or for use as doorstops? I don’t get it. I doubt Mr.O’Reilly has space in his Annoyances franchise for an O’Reilly Annoyances tome.
I’m reading Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur at the moment (or, everything is going to hell because of the Internet). It begins with an account of the author finding himself observing instead of participating at an O’Reilly schmoozefest (on steroids). Inevitably, I recalled some of the rather droll observation of the original dot com boom by Michael Wolff. Wolff didn’t take himself or the goings on around him seriously. Keen has a point, or ten, but I’ll be disappointed if it’s just a Jeremiad.
I’m reading it alongside Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, just to balance things out a bit. A pantomime isn’t a panto after all without both the
Oh, Yes it is!
and
Oh, No it isn’t!
mass collaborations.
Laurence Lessig’s take on Keen’s book hits the right note for me, though I didn’t come across until just now.
I also bought A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, and a few others.
I went to buy one book — which I didn’t find — and I came home with a stack. Randomness and disorder right there. Every January I mean to record my reading for the year and I never keep it up for very long. I’ve reproached myself about my lack of order often enough that the idea of it being in any way a good thing is something I have to read, even if it’s the purest snake oil. (Click here if you’ve ever wondered where that term came from; I just did).
Meanwhile, a little web research persuaded me that a tool called iRecover would be a good bet to automatically recover my Vista hard drive with the deleted partition. In a market with plenty of snake oil products for sale it was nice to find something that worked perfectly and, in this case, at no cost. If I were still an IT manager I’d buy a copy automatically.
Finally, Benjamin Black has proven a more than worthy successor to Ian Rankin on the bedside table. He may prove a little too black in the end, but not yet.
