Instead of using their $300 million on customer services/refunds for wrongly-installed Vistas on brand new laptops/PCs, Microsoft is trying to copy Apple Genius strategy by having 155 Microsoft Vista experts roam around your local BestBuy and CircuitCity.

As someone who had a horrible experience at BestBuy trying to return a digital camera, (which BestBuy didn’t let me return it for whatever reason so I now have TWO identical digital cameras) I will be officially boycotting BestBuy and CircuitCity stores for the duration of this Microsoft stint.

Even without Microsoft, I have a hard time getting around the retail stores without sales people annoying me with their “Can I help you find anything” questions.

Call me bitter but Microsoft deserves it after I bought a new HP desktop PC last year and of course it came with a Vista that wouldn’t work with any of my printers, mouse, pretty much all my USB devices.

Now, Microsoft should be paying me at least $25/hour during the time I formatted my PC using a special Linux Boot CD (because harddrive gets junked when you install Vista, you need to partition it and get rid of the root Vista thingee) and installed a fresh copy of Windows XP, which took me a total of 5 hours.

Now that’s $25 x 5 = $125 + Cost of Vista = about $500.

There, what Microsoft needed to do in order to survive and turn people like me into fans is about $500 for all my troubles and $500 for every PC/laptop I buy that come with Vista.

My next operating system will definitely hang around Ubuntu or another Linux system, but definitely Microsoft needs to realize for the good of human kind that their new Vista sucks so much even with their new $300 million marketing.  (Marketing...not product features or upgrades that Microsoft is spending money on)

Here’s to Bill Gates or whoever is in charge of Microsoft:

“Please stop re-selling consumers an outdated, poorly designed operating system.  No matter what marketing tatics you employ, I will do my best to let everyone else know that Vista has not changed (Yes, your mojave marketing had a reverse effect on me) , it’s the worst operating system I have ever used in my life.  We are smarter than you think.  Just having a new Vista  Period. (and there’s goes my middle finger too.)”

Interesting facts:

There’s 525,000 search results about “Vista Sucks” on Google today.  (Probably more as we go on)

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a new way to skate down the gravel road with the Dirtsurfer, a hybrid surfing system consisting of skateboard and bicycle wheels flopped together.

It looks promising and fun but I am not sure if I am inclined to wear all that safety gear just to get on one.

The Freestyle Dirtsurfer features all the upgrades of the Flexi-Pro on a shorter length frame and smaller
16″ tires. The reduction in size allows for a lighter board that is more maneuverable so you can pull off
the biggest tricks imaginable! This board skates extremely well, but can still tackle the rough terrain.

via gizmodo, Product Page

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Here’s a cool Multi-Touch Sphere thingee in development by Microsoft.

REDMOND, Wash.– A group of academics will be among the first people outside Microsoft to see Sphere, a spherical surface computer developed by Microsoft Research.

The sphere-shaped, multitouch computer is similar to the tabletop Surface computer that Microsoft announced last year after years in development. This incarnation, however, remains a project within Microsoft Research and the company has no current plans to bring it to market.

The university researchers are at Microsoft as part of its yearly Faculty Summit. Also at the event, Microsoft announced a series of tools for researchers, including a plug-in for Office that lets people embed a Creative Commons license directly into their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.

via coolest-gadgets - cnet

I have always been fond of different windsurfing gadgets people bring to have fun over at Ocean Beach, here’s how to make your own skateboard-turned-windsurf thingee.

If this goes on sand, I might build one.

Here’s my contribution to the movement, a land windsurfer with a 3.6 meter lugsail.

It sails just exactly like a regular windsurfer. Sail tuning is a little different, due to having four corners to adjust rather than the old three. Study up on lugsail tuning.

via make

The unbreakable super umbrella can help you protect yourself against thieves and also might save you where a strong pole thingee is needed.

I wonder how the umbrella itself holds up against the wind, maybe it could be great for golf too.

(Video after the jump)

Continue reading ‘Unbreakable Super Strong Umbrella!’

Wow, check out these images from Mars.  It looks like a barren desert to me.

We even spotted this alien thingee here:

What the heck is that???

via arizona.edu

Yey, I hope that UTW tag import thingee is fixed now although I don’t have use for it anymore as I had to hack Wordpress.

Check out the new features:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

via Wordpress

Cool, you can now officially edit PDF files online! Although I’d never do that. I’d edit the Word file that gets converted into PDFs. Google Docs is probably much better option than this.

Great though, with PDF Hammer, you can move around the pages. (I think that’s the most useful function out of this PDF Hammer thingee…)

via thewebdale