Barack Obama’s website for this campaign will be the model for all future campaign websites.
It really is amazing how they seem to have gotten everything right with the usability and accessibility of the page.
BTW, go here to donate.
Reader Interactions
115Comments
Comments are closed.
jake
This post is sexist.
alyosha
I’m big on user interface design, and so I appreciate the link to BHO’s site. And damn, it is good. Design students should bookmark.
rob!
being self-employed, my income varies a lot from year to year, but i swear, if i could i’d happily donate the full $2300 limit. i’ve been doing it $10 or $25 at a time. Obama the man makes it easy, and his site makes it even easier.
dougie smooth
And go here to make phone calls to persuade WI voters before our Tuesday primary.
John Cole
I actually gave $25 to Obama, and I do not recall the last time I ever donated to a candidate, if ever. Usually I just volunteer, go door to door, etc.
ArtB
This frankly just reinforces the tremendously apt “Obama is a Mac, Hillary is a PC” campaign paradigm. Except that Obama actually seems likely to win.
Greg G
@ArtB: It’s more that Obama’s like the post-comeback Steve Jobs, bringing out the iPod and the iPhone, versus Hillary’s Bill Gates selling us Vista and a me-too Zune. One’s playing today’s game; the other’s playing catch-up.
demkat620
I got sucked in by the MUP. I gave my first political donation and I’m wearing my pink Obama ’08 Tshirt. I’m saving for a hoodie. :)
JR
And when it’s all over, TalkLeft’s output for the last two months will be the model for all future unhinged supporter sites.
It really is amazing how every piece of news is good for Hillary, bad for Obama, and indicative of some form of deeply rooted sexism.
Walker
More akin to “Obama is an iPod, Hillary is a Zune”.
The Other Steve
You guys do realize that Apple’s commercials are really quite terrible if you consider the goal of a commercial is to attract new customers?
Jon H
“Except that Obama actually seems likely to win.”
Obama’s not a Mac, he’s Steve Jobs.
El Cruzado
Well, it helps that unlike the Mac/PC divide, you can vote for Obama for the exact same cost as voting for Hillary ;)
Davebo
Well sure his website is nice. But only because all the truly talented web designers are fascist democrats.
RedState could have a really cool website if it were not for those fascist web nerds.
Perry Como
You know who else had a nice looking designs?
Nazis.
Jen
O/T but I got unnaturally excited when the phone rang and the Caller ID came up “Ipsos”. Finally, a political poll! Finally, my state might matter! A breathless hello!
They were polling about fiber.
Dammit.
On topic, Obama supposedly has a whole following of donors who go back over and over to give small amounts, sort of like giving to the collection plate at church. Cool.
demimondian
And Obama is likely to actually work and do what you want at least as well as Hillary is.
Ted
That’s probably worth quite a bit more than $25. Most people who do anything for a campaign JUST give money. I don’t even know anyone who actually volunteers like that.
Jon H
Hugo Boss for the win!
Phoebe
I was just there earlier today, trying to find out how I could get a paper copy of “Blueprint for Change”, because I don’t have a printer, and also trying to find the contact info for the local campaign. I got voted a delegate at the WA caucus and I don’t know what to do now. I was completely unsuccessful.
This probably means that I suck, not the website, but it is sad, nonetheless.
Ted
Thanks for the reminder of that barrel of laughs. The ‘our website sucks because all the good web designers are moonbats’ excuse is priceless.
tBone
Nah. Obama is Bluray, Hillary is HD-DVD. The first letters even match.
You do realize that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, right? Companies like Nintendo have emulated Apple’s design, branding and marketing for very good reason.
jake
Don’t forget, moonbats have more time to run their blogs because they live off welfare and fetus smoothies.
Just a suggestion: Contact his campaign office.
Ted
OS X sucks, and Windows XP sucks a bit less. There, my work is done.
Oh, and we won’t talk about the profound suckitude of Vista.
Davebo
Yes, because it’s Nintendo’s goal to ensure the Wii has an absolute lock on 8% of the game console market.
Hyuga
Except I can’t stand Apple’s user interfaces. Oh sure, they’re pretty. But not nearly as usable as Apple fanboys would like people to think. Obama’s site is both pretty *and* usable.
demimondian
Jake nails it, Phoebe; get in touch with the party. Depending on what county you’re in, you’ll either need to attend an LD or a county convention.
demimondian
Yeah, it hurts to admit that you’ve spent a year and a half slagging an OS which really rocks, doesn’t it?
tom.a
No. The first goal of a commercial is to get you to remember the company name/brand. Btw, Apple’s increased their customer base in almost every market; desktops, laptops, phones (don’t know about servers off-hand).
McCain’s web site gets some kudos for trying something different, but the lack of color just speaks “old” to me which isn’t exactly something he should reinforce imo.
empty
Yeah, it really is a pretty slick website. But my problem with Obama has never been in terms of his presentation. It is the lack of anything solid behind those presentations. So, affected by the swooning here I figured I would try to see if maybe I was being unfair. I clicked on issues tab and there was “The Blueprint for Change – Obama’s Plan for America” and a listing of the various issues. For somewhat obvious reasons I am interested in the economy so I clicked on “read more.” I specifically looked for his proposal on NAFTA because that is something I opposed when Bill Clinton forced it through. And I know Obama has said he would renegotiate it. What I wanted to know was how he planned to do that? What would he renegotiate? Would he perhaps change the agribusiness provisions and if so how? Would he limit the effect on sovereignty issues? Well maybe he will. Who knows. He doesn’t tell us. Here is what he says:
and no, that is not an excerpt. But wait, down at the bottom it says For More Information about Barack’s Plan (PDF)Read the plan . So I downloaded the plan “EconomicPolicyFullPlan.pdf,and, nothing. No mention of NAFTA. Well, he does promise to “fight for a trade policy that opens up foreign markets to support good American jobs.” No details. I downloaded the “Blueprint for Change.” Beautiful design. No details
Trying to control my cynicism I go back to the economy tab to look for something I agree with and there it was. One of the two points defining the problem with the economy:
I totally agree. So what will Obama do about the goodies that got given to the wealthy out of the national treasury.
Well, guess what. No mention of it again.
I went to Clinton’s site. No contest. Obama’s is way cooler. On NAFTA I have always disagreed with her but what about the rest of her economic plan. Well looks like she actually has one. Click on the first issues tab and the link on middle class taxes. On taxes on the wealthy:
I don’t know, maybe she is lying. Wouldn’t be the first time politicians lied. Let’s accept that she is the shedevil. My question to the MUP cavalry here is – do you know what Obama plans to do? If you do could you provide me with some links where I can find out too.
I’ll take my answers off the air.
ThymeZone
Don’t get me started on Vista. I bought a new laptop and ordered it with XP, which is faster and has fewer problems.
Vista really is an insult to the customer base. And I have a Vista machine right over here, so I’m not imagining the differences, I can show them you right here.
I’m sure after I handle the hairball SP1 it will be … better. Slower, from what I read the other day in a review, but, you know, better.
As for Obama’s website, I am extremely impressed with the way their whole concept works. Very pleasant.
It let me easily set up an embedded blog (see my url) and now I can organize some fundraising. Very easy to do.
Click on my handle and try it out.
LBNL, John, you continue to amaze us. From Bush supporter to Obama supporter, that’s quite a thing. Congrats.
demimondian
Oh, don’t worry, TZ, I won’t. I’m sure that you’ll provide us with plenty of examples unprompted.
And they’ll be every bit as accurate as your crowing about the insufficiency of MySQL for any business-critical application.
ThymeZone
Yeah, like I’m the only person who thinks it sucks?
The web is replete with commentary on the piece of shit, nobody needs to take my word for it.
Or do what I did, put an XP machine and a Vista machine side by side and run your own comparisons.
Let’s see, cheaper, faster, fewer problems …. XP.
Slower, more expensive, more problems. Vista.
Great job, guys. Really, you outdid yourselves.
demimondian
Like I said, every bit as accurate as your comments on using MySQL as a business platform.
ThymeZone
Nobody needs to take my word for it. There is a wealth of information out there, demi. Who do you think you are arguing with, me? Do you think I’m the thing keeping you from getting praise for Vista? Really?
Cnet.
Great, great job. Really. Did you write that SP? Kudos.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Vista sucks. It cam on my kids’ laptops. It’s awful.
XP is pretty good. OS X is pretty good. Ubuntu is pretty good. Fedora 8 is pretty good. Vista sucks.
Incidentally, MySQL is indeed inferior to PostgreSQL, and they cost the same.
JR
I went from an HP notebook running XP to one with a faster processor running Vista last spring.
Vista is a piece of crap compared to XP.
It’s not that it doesn’t offer functionality that I need–it does. The problem is that the sheer amount of functionality is WAY more than I need, and WAY more than my processor can take. My computer is slower, more finicky, and less useful overall now that I use Vista. It’s not supposed to take five minutes for an Office program to start up. If I had the cash to “downgrade,” I’d do it in a heartbeat.
It may be a good platform two or three years from now when processors are powerful enough to handle the volume of crap Vista slings, but until then it’s much more burden than blessing.
demimondian
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds like a bunch of riders of the magical unity pony talking about Hitlery. The data are clearly in favor of Vista: how many critical vuln have there been in Vista since its release (hint: you can count them on one hand). Now, how many have there been for XP *during the same period*? Yeah, a lot more. Far fewer than for either the Linux kernel (to say nothing of bodgepodges like Ubuntu) or for OS X in the same period, to be sure, but still more than for Vista.
You guys wanted a safe, solid secure OS. You got it. Now you bitch about its success? Hmm…couldn’t be job security you’re looking for, could it?
demimondian
And PostgreSQL will be on a par with MySQL when it can run Google’s ads business.
So there.
ThymeZone
Sorry, demi, I seem to have been trampled by a stampede of people coming to the defense of Vista.
Whoops, another shoeprint on my buttcheek. Ow.
Stop it! Stop it! I give! Vista is da bomb! I swear!
I don’t quibble with the security aspects of the product because the internals of OS security are not my thing. I just don’t know. But I do know about performance and reliability, and cost. And if you put two machines in front of me with Vista on one and XP on the other and tell me I have to go out into the mean world with only one of them and rely on it to keep me hooked up to my network wherever I go, even if they are the same price, I will take the XP machine because I have learned that that’s the best choice for me. That’s why the XP machine goes in the backpack and the Vista machine stays behind.
I’ve been resisting Apple for years, but I am about ready to think that I should start looking at Apple for my next laptop. I don’t like their UI, or their pricing, but hell, if you get the apple down to the price of the equivalent Windows machine, I’d be very tempted at this point.
Gemina13
Having friends who worked in Microsoft’s Shell team, I decided not to buy Vista until I stop hearing them bitch about the asshattery of the product and start praising it for more than just looking pretty. But I’m not buying a Mac until its specs match its price. I can buy a fully-loaded, fast-moving Dell for about half the price of an iMac. And I love Apple; Apple IIes were the first units I learned to use.
Scotty
What’s the deal with this? I haven’t seen anything on it outside the actual NY Times article. Anyone know?
Ted
Not sure what in the world you’re talking about.
But when I refer to Vista’s suckitude, I’m not talking about its design and features. It’s a quite good OS. I’m talking about its BUGS. It was released without adequate QA. I’m getting tired of having to make registry hacks or other tape-jobs to fix and/or find workarounds for bugs that disable what most people would consider basic features. And it REALLY sucks when running HD or other high-quality video using codecs that work perfectly on XP, on the same damn 4 month old top of the line video card.
It just sucks.
wasabi gasp
I’m wiping a brand new Dell of Vista as I write this. It was a planned wipe, but I figured I’d play with it a little before installing XP. After 15 minutes I gave up; it’s just too friggin’ slow.
The strange thing is that Vista almost feels designed to be slow, like a its a feature or something. They should have named it Quaalude, instead.
Perry Como
If you want a real laugh riot install VMWare on Vista. Then uninstall it. Have fun reinstalling your OS.
Ted
TZ, I completely agree about the performance problems with Vista as well. All the time at my job I’m running software QA-related performance comparison tests between Win2k, XP, and Vista. And damn near every day we find yet another Vista-related problem with the same pieces of software. We’ve even had to try to figure out why Vista causes some of our product software to use more bandwidth than when running on XP, etc. It’s ridiculous.
Vista was put out as a Frankenstein, and I don’t want to hear about XP pre-SP1. Yes, it sucked as well. Why not admit that Vista will too until another SP or two?
demimondian
Now, let me get this straight…third parties release software which is broken, and, because Vista’s engineers took the stand that you *all* demanded, that security should trump backwards compatibility, the broken software is shown to be broken.
And somehow that’s *Vista’s* fault?
No, chuckie, sorry. That’s the fault of the software vendor who who the broken code in the first place.
Ted
I was referring to Demi in my last two sentences there, btw. Not TZ, who agrees Vista sucks.
If you want a real laugh riot install VMWare on Vista. Then uninstall it. Have fun reinstalling your OS.
Good to know, thank you. I use VMWare (not yet with Vista, though).
rachel
Fewer vulnerabilities? Goodie. OTOH, an OS that runs like a hog on ice and keeps crashing* isn’t even worth hacking. Still, now that the kernel has been replaced in SP1, maybe it will finally start to work as advertised for more of MS’s customers.
*An acquaintance bought a brand-new top-of-the-line laptop with Vista pre-loaded, and the thing blue-screened on him at least once a day, sometimes on boot. Tech support couldn’t do a damn thing to help him, either. After six weeks of this BS, he had the system wiped and XP Pro installed; now it runs like a dream.
Ted
I bet Demi thinks the User Account Control was a good security solution.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Word and Excel (2003) run slower on a one-year old Core Duo laptop with Vista than Word and Excel 2000 on an upgraded 10-year old box with W2K. How upgraded? All the way to dual 300MHz CPUs and 0.25GB RAM.
I guess I’m glad Vista isn’t so vulnerable, although one doesn’t hear much about actual exploits of Linux kernel vulnerabilities. But it isn’t usable on consumer-priced hardware.
borehole
Has there been an in-depth study of the efficacy of Apple’s ads? Back when I was a PC partisan, they acheived the exact opposite of their desired effect on me–John Hodgeman is adorable and has TDS cred, and part of the PC’s charm for me is its counterintuitive awkwardness, so the ads were just reinforcement.
Then I got a Vista machine and suddenly I find myself listening to what Justin Long has to say.
demimondian
Of course, had tech support actually replaced the main memory, which was the real problem, it would have fixed the crashes, too. But that would have cost the company money, and we can’t have that, now can we?
You do know that your acquaintance is running his system on borrowed time, right? Sooner or later, his system is going to try to access data on the bad chip, and it’s going to die on him.
demimondian
You’ve never used a Mac or a Unix box, have you?
Yeah, didn’t think so.
Ted
You do realize that if you happen to be correct about that, your entire point there is supported by the fact that Vista is a MEMORY HOG and that XP and the usually run apps just haven’t gotten to that chip yet, right? Because I’ve just about had it with Vista’s corpulent memory usage with damn near nothing else resident, even with 2 gigs of ram.
Ted
Yeah, every day. Both, in fact. Careful with your arrogance there.
PeterJ
Ted said:
Exactly.
Linux. Linux. FreeBSD.
—
Windows Server 2003…
Windows Server 2003…
Corporate candidates?
demimondian
You are an ignoramus, aren’t you? Wow.
Back in the dark ages, when memory was faster than disk and most programs fit comfortably into main memory, , we had this thing called a “RAM disk”. When we wanted out program to run faster, we’d put them in a portion of main memory which we accessed through the disk interface.
Well, guess what? These days, memory is still faster than disk, and we now have excess memory. So, what do you think the kernel folks in Bldg 43 did?
Bingo! They use excess memory as a RAM DISK.
If Rachel’s acquaintance had turned that off, then his machine would suddenly and mysteriously become rock solid, just as it did when he downgraded to XP.
But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good rant. It’s no fun, now is it?
demimondian
Oh? The I guess you must log is as root on the Unix box.
Otherwise, you’d recognize “sudo”.
Perry Como
Can you tell me which control panel in CentOS lets me turn on root access from any account without using a password, permanently? kthx
Notorious P.A.T.
More akin to “Obama is an iPod, Hillary is a Zune”.
What I think is, Obama’s site reflects a campaign built on the importance of large numbers of grass-roots supporters, where Hillary’s campaign is more oriented to the existing, top-down power structure.
Pb
Oh come on demi, you know you’ve been bitching about Linux for way longer than that…
Ted
Wow, you’re apparently trying to be an asshole. I didn’t take this into the realm of silly insults, but whatever gets you off.
And yes, I’m fully familiar with RAM disks. So sure, if you disabled a performance feature of Vista on that particular machine, it might have temporarily cleared up the problem. And the problem in that case wasn’t even Vista. But Vista still sucks from a bug and performance perspective. I’m perfectly willing to change my opinion of it after I analyze it after SP2, and call it a good OS.
The difference is you’re bizarrely dogmatic about how great it is. I’m sorry, but compared to XP, it is inferior in multiple ways, and offers no significant benefits.
But go on with your sputtering insults.
Dennis - SGMM
Oh for crikey sakes. I go back to COBOL, FORTRAN and PASCAL so I’ve seen more than a few OS’s come and go. Mostly, they went (Anyone else ever run BeOS?). The best OS is the one that enables you to do whatever it is that you want to do.
I’ve run XP and I’ve run Vista. They’re okay. I’m such a dinosaur that when I boot into Windows to run those apps that will only run on it I boot into Win2K, SP4.
demimondian
Hmm. So, in fact, what you’re saying is that Vista showed that a particular manufacturer had used substandard memory on a computer, and that a user got caught by that. Previously, you whined about how broken third-party applications failed on Vista machines.
Somebody, please tell me why any of these common anecdotes are Vista’s fault? Why is it that Vista is to blame for other company’s poor consumer service or software development practices? You don’t blame Yahoo when they distribute advertisements which exploit flaws in Adobe’s Flash Viewer, do you? (Never mind — you probably blame Microsoft for that, too, don’t you?)
Ted
Yeah. So broken they’ve run beautifully for years on XP and Win2k, then get to VIsta and have the most interesting problems. Things like not displaying properly on any Vista machines with any hardware, or being unable to access the classic serial port, or crashes during simple user operations.
I’m beginning to think you ARE Vista. And it’s always someone else’s fault.
tBone
No, it was their goal to quadruple their market share like Apple has in the past few years. It’s working out pretty well for them, too, wouldn’t you say?
Well, we got 2 out of 3, anyway, and that ain’t bad. I guess.
demimondian
So what you’re saying is that they went through undocumented and unsupported shortcuts to access hardware in unsupported and frequently dangerous ways. They caused occasional BSOD’s, probably, but you never noticed or cared, since, after all, it was Windows and “Windows is unstable.”
Yeah, well, in Vista, MS did what it’s been threatening to do for a decade and a half and put security ahead of preserving that kind of loophole. They blocked direct access to the serial ports. They enforced the video display abstractions. They actually tried to make the operating system act like it claimed to. And so your program which “used to work” — because you never saw it fail — suddenly stopped being propped up, and it failed.
Now, tell me again why that’s the OS’s fault?
demimondian
Can you tell me how UAC can be so subverted? Ktnxbai
demimondian
Yeah, and there’s a reason that I use FreeBSD for everything except the stupid box in the front room that the family uses for reading CNN. It gets Ubuntu.
ThymeZone
While you guys are arguing is anybody sending money to Obama?
tBone
I tried, but a Flash bug keeps crashing IE7 in Vista. Personally, I blame demi.
demimondian
Nahh–I didn’t work on the Adobe sabotage team. You must be thinking of some other demimondian.
Perry Como
Control Panel -> Security -> No, really, Security -> Stop laughing, it’s Microsoft Security -> User Account Settings -> Install Malware^W^WDisable UAC
Crap, can’t remember exactly. They changed everything around.
ThymeZone
From everything I’ve read (I picked up that phrase from our esrstwhile commenter, The Senator) ….
They were going to call it DemiVista and changed their mind at the last minute.
Perry Como
wth, ^ W doesn’t display on this POS blog software?
PeterJ
A bit OT, but it seems that Charles Barkley was right about the “fake Christians“…
Pb
What, why is it Vista’s fault that it crashes horribly and/or runs like a dog on some common machine configurations when Windows XP performs much better? Geez, I’m stumped, I have no idea why people would blame Vista there…
How I learned to stop worrying and love the Makefile? Oh well, I use Gentoo, after all, which is almost as bad… :)
Andrew J. Lazarus
Yeah, I sent him $25.
Meanwhile, demi is invited to comment on Microsoft’s use of undocumented Windows features to make their office suite run better than other guys’ suites that relied on published APIs. Back when there were other guys’ suites.
Maybe Vista runs well with 4GB. Not on a typical laptop. Its security model is obnoxious. Its standard UI (including Office 2007 in this) is clumsy and ugly. The XP GUI was pretty good—what God of Trendiness was it sacrificed to?
I’m writing this on my new Macbook Pro. OK, the GUI isn’t perfect. The best I used was probably Mac OS 7. But installation of programs is great. Basically I have something a little better than GNOME on top of Unix. Geez, that’s nifty. (GNOME has come a long way, too.)
Perry Como
PeterJ Says:
Why do you hate Capitalist Jesus?
NR
The problem with Vista is that it wasn’t made for the users; it was made for the big digital media distributors. The numerous problems users are having with Vista are because the OS wasn’t designed for them, period.
Ninerdave
All User Access Control does is teach people to type their password (and I say this as a Mac/Linux geek)
Some guy named Matt
I managed to throw some money his way. Keeping the ol’ eye on the prize.
and Vista, blah blah blah, never ran it, xp, blah blah blah.
(sometimes i just want to be included in the conversation.)
tBone
Maybe. He’s probably the bastard responsible for Windows Mobile Device Center too. Oh, WMDC, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways . . .
demimondian
Office moved off the undocumented APIs a long, long time ago. Why do you think that is?
John Cole
I use an apple and a pc, so I have no dog (or two dogs) in this fight, but I will say this-
The new Microsoft Office (2007?) with ther .docx bullshit and fucking awful tabs is a bloody mess, and damned near unusable. I am pretty much an absolutist when it comes to the use of torture, but I would probably authorize it on whoever had the final say on that fucking nasty piece of shit.
ThymeZone
To confound the terrorists?
ThymeZone
Word. And I mean that in the non-commercial sense.
My first reaction when I saw the new office was: Retirement.
Dennis - SGMM
Just to add some fun, I downloaded the ISO for the latest version of Mandriva Linux and burned it to a CD. It’s a run from CD version. Threw it into a five year old Windows box and loaded the thing. It churned for a while and then I was at a nice KDE desktop. I put the :”Hooker and Heat” CD in the second CD drive. Now I’m listening to the CD and typing this in Firefox.
I still wouldn’t recommend Linux for everyone but, it’s come a hell of a long way.
demimondian
Interestingly, although I personally hate hate hate hate hate the new UI, the usability types showed that it really is an amazing win for must users.
I actually use a MacBook Pro at home (Gollum is very generous with hardware), and although I don’t like the UI very much, I love the MacPorts and things like that. Now, if I could just get LyX to build so I could actually edit documents (and unless you’re DougJ, the Grand Panjandrum, or Andy Lazarus, you don’t have editing requirements like mine), I’d be a very happy camper.
And the office is all Linux. I don’t like Linux much, and it hasn’t grown on me, but for day to day development, my god is it more pleasant than Windows or MacOS.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Because it looked really, really bad in the DoJ Antitrust suit. That is not a flip answer. That is the real answer. But Gates had, until recently, an excellent sense of timing, and by the time this happened, the competing products stuck with the inferior APIs were relegated to fringe status. FUD, baby.
Andrew J. Lazarus
I’ve been in a mostly-Linux shop for four years, and GNOME of today is vastly better than GNOME of then. OpenOffice writer is now usable. The Excel clone is not (ghastly chart module). I tried LyX once, didn’t quite get it. But then, nowadays I do my writing in browser comment boxes (usually FF) or NetBeans.
ThymeZone
Just one question demi: Do you use vi?
demimondian
I worked with the Office team during the the period that it was moving off the undocumented APIs, so I actually have personal knowledge of the real reason, Andrew. There is a cost to using undocumented APIs — it means you have to issue a service pack if a subsequent version of the OS changes the behavior of that API. Prior to Win2k, the cost of making the documented APIs fast enough to support Office was too high, so Office treated Windows like it treats MacOS, and simply found whatever hooks it can to make itself perform well.
After NT4 was released, the tuning wizards went to the OS team, and said “tell you what. If you’ll give us a few performance tweaks and a few extra parameters for a few APIs, then you can document them, and we can use only the documented APIs. That will make everyone’s life easier.” The OS team complied — as they regularly do when large customers came with reasonable feature requests — and, from that point onwards, Office has used only documented APIs on Windows.
demimondian
Heh. Sometimes, yes, I use vi (in the form of gvim), although my primary code editor is Emacs. I’m looking forward to somebody writing an equivalent of Intellisense for Eclipse; at that point, I’ll probably shift over to that.
The Other Steve
No way! Office 2007 is finally done right. Things are much easier to find, more logically laid out. They finally hired a designer to come up with their templates. I did my resume with Word 2007 and it’s the cats pajamas!
I like my comfortable little life. Vista 64-bit, 4 gigs of RAM, dual 19″ monitors at 1680×1050… running Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005. I ain’t going back!
You guys want slow, try Pointsec!
The Other Steve
So what’s up with Georgia?
ImJohnGalt
Well, to the extent that Obama fanboys are as fucking annoying as hipster Apple fanboy-pricks, you are absolutely correct, sir.
I have grown to like Obama, but if I ever go to an Obama meetup I will take a pass on the kool-aid and just drink water.
I’m picturing a bunch of Obama fans waiting for the next appearance of the Hale-Bopp coment.
The Other Steve
I remember the old days of developing on unix. Having 16 xterm’s open, typing at the command line. W00T!
The Other Steve
Only if you find the ones under age 25 or so. The people I know who support Obama are pretty pragmatic.
tBone
I wasn’t a big fan of some of the other UI revamps in MS’s recent past (how the hell can you actually make Windows Media Player more unintuitive?), but I really like the ribbons in Office now that I’ve gotten used to them.
Still, the best UI MS has ever produced is on the Xbox 360, hands-down. Wish that team would take a crack at Windows Mobile.
srv
Mark Steyn finally weighs in on all these Obama hoohaa
srv
Finally, Mark Steyn weighs in on all this hoohaa.
srv
Old days? I didn’t upgrade to vim until 2004 or so, and that was just so I could ignore Bangalores wacky comments format.
SmilingPolitely
tBone FTW!
Conservatively Liberal
Vi Vi Vi, the number of the beast. ;)
I run a couple of old Red Hat 9 servers at home, and XP Pro on everything else. My new Dell laptop came with Vista, but I can’t stand how slow it is either. I switched it to XP Pro and it hauls along just fine now. Aero is cool, but not necessary, and you can secure XP just fine if you are familiar with security, which I have used since NT4.
I am not a fan of Vista because of the hardware requirements. I have a lot of newer hardware and Vista does not support most of it. One piece, a video editing card that cost me over a grand would cost another $2,500 to get the same thing to work in Vista. No thanks.
The DRM stuff is bad too, from the performance standpoint. Not the DRM point, which still sucks as it puts the burden on our computers (and us) to maintain the copyright protections. The ’tilt bits’ for the Protected Media Path and endless checks just uses up resources that could be put to better use (like running the OS).
I am no expert on Vista, but I have played enough to know that it is not a very good OS (for me at least).
Perry Como
Sexist.
Jen
Worst. Thread. Ever.
demimondian
Technophobe.
Birdzilla
More reasons why we dont need BARACK OBAMA he is too much of a socialists a CHE bootlicker
Krista
/shrugs shoulders
Doesn’t bother me any. I’ve been using Vista and Office 2007 since shortly after they came out, and really haven’t had any problems with them. Some of the changes took a bit of getting used to, but that’s to be expected.
HyperIon
yeah, no fuckin’ way that Minnesota and SC can have the same ranking wrt to “power of christians”. but the extreme Payday Loan clustering must have something to do with state caps on allowable interest.
HyperIon
demiGod-in-your-own-mind, you are an asshole.
once again.
demimondian
Anuphobe
Phoebe
Jake: Thanks! I had been trying to find it unsuccessfully and now I’ve bookmarked the website and will hit them up tomorrow. Nobody’s reading this anymore. But thanks!