Apparently, Dell is going to extend sales of XP. This is due to the widely help opinion that XP sucks less than Vista. This wouldn’t be reason for concern except that, well, Vista is over a year old. It should be a mature operating system by now. Leopard had a few bugs at the outset, but all the clucking about them has largely subsided into the cacophony about Snow Leopard. In other words, not only are Leopard’s bugs old news, the OS itself is a little long in the tooth.

Vista is not a mature operating system. Vista, at the age of 18 months – an age where most operating systems have historically been considered ancient – is still a work in progress.

“Vista is excellent” : 6650 results on Google.

“Vista sucks”: 252,000 hits.

I’m researching the possibility that Steve Jobs is bribing Steve Ballmer to keep trying to sell Vista.

J: Steve, here’s twenty bucks. Don’t give up on Vista just yet.

B: Twenty dollars?

J: Yup. And there’s more where that came from if you get my drift (wink, nudge).

B: Okay, but I can’t keep it up forever. People will get suspicious.

J: Just keep it up until January of ‘09 and I’ll buy you a brand new Ford Fusion.

B: A new car? Wow. People will talk for sure.

J; Nah. You’re a CEO.

B: Okay. Hey, can I get you guys to put an MBP in a Lenovo case?

J: Sure. Give me twenty bucks.

…

Firefox 3 is available. I downloaded it. It looks just like a web browser. I’ll play with it some, and if it seems remarkable in some way I’ll say something about it later.

Unless I forget.

…

My company just upgraded to IE 7. Tabbed browsing. At work. Wow. It’s almost modern. Someday maybe pop-ups will be blocked instead of just being announced as blocked.

…

Snow Leopard screen shots are floating around in various places. What the hell is ZFS? Apple has announced it for Snow Leopard. I know it’s a file system, but what does it mean for non-geeks?

Is ZFS faster? More reliable? Low-carb? Available in designer colors? Does it cure the common cold? Beats the crap out of me. Here’s what I know about it —-

Something something file size something Sun Microsystems something 16 EiB (exa-binary-byte) something something something variable block sizes something  I/O thoughput something something dynamic striping.

Not being terribly technically oriented, I’m pretty sure that means it will come bundled with Centipede®, but I’m guessing.

Then there’s something about intelligent scrubbing and resilvering. This may be an oblique reference to beer. Of course, at a certain degree of bafflement everything seems to me to be a reference to beer. Hard to decipher. 

I can hardly wait.

…

There are reports that Amazon is poised to threaten Apple’s domination of the online music download market. This is being reported as news. Amazon has been not threatening iTMS dominance of the music download market for at least a year.

I’ll bet a fresh pack of Lucky Strikes Master Jobst Fimil doesn’t increase his Prozac dosage over this news.

…

No reports yet on Samsung Instinct Sales. I found a Yahoo! Message board post, though, that says there were queues at some Sprint stores. My guess is that they were formed after the store was supposed to be open, while the sales clerks were in the stock room smoking, and mostly comprised of people wanting to bitch about the lousy phone support they got the night before. Just a hunch.

…

I shot the sheriff. I was aiming at the deputy.

So sue me.