Microsoft bribes Best Buy to disparage Linux

It’s a measure of how much I’ve neglected this blog the last few months that I found this item a couple of days ago and posted it to Clipmarks and Facebook without mentioning it here.

According to British computer magazine The Inquirer, Microsoft is offering training to Best Buy employees. This wouldn’t be sinister in and of itself, but apparently the training includes FUD claims about Linux. Here’s an excerpt from the article, complete with charming British slang:

MICROSOFT IS INVOLVED in a programme to train the spotty Herberts working at leading US consumer electronics chain Best Buy to disparage Linux and Macs in favour of Windows.

According to MacInsider, Microsoft has created ExpertZone “training courses” to prevent retail employees from selling customers Macs or PCs running Linux.

It provides them with “facts”, consisting of a series of claims about how Windows 7 compares to Linux or Apple, followed by a “quiz” that tells retail employees that their answers are “incorrect” if they don’t parrot back the Vole’s talking points.

Apparently Microsoft bribes BestBuy staff and other chain stores’ retail employees with a ticket to buy a copy of Windows 7 for just $10 for completing the training.

The Infamous Lauren Ad

Mac fans have been all over the new Microsoft ad featuring a redhead named Lauren looking for the biggest laptop screen she can find for under $1000. For my own take on this ad, I’m not even going to get into the debate about whether it’s real or scripted, or the fact that Lauren is an actress complete with her own IMDB page. Instead, I’m going to focus on the substance of the commercial.

The Apple Blog’s entry about this ad is typical of the Mac fan’s reaction. They track down the only HP Pavilion laptop they can find for $699 (Lauren’s final cost) at the HP site and list its inferior features. However, their methodology is flawed. They went to HP’s site instead of Best Buy’s. It turns out that there’s a $699 model at BestBuy.com which is a much better deal than the one pointed out by the Apple blogger’s. This particular model has a built-in graphics card, making it more multimedia friendly than the one pointed out by TAB. It also has the newest AMD Turion processor rather than “last year’s Intel.” Of course, whether this is a good or bad thing depends on your view of AMD processors.

The one unquestionable tradeoff is battery life. Best Buy’s $699 laptop has the exact same short battery life as TAB’s. You had to trade off something to get that screen size for the price, and the battery got screwed over big time in that process. This is where Lauren’s obsession with size (of the display screen) may have blinded her even to better PCs on the market. For example, for $729, she could have had this model. It has the same resolution as the $999 Mac on a bigger screen, making it more readable. It also has a listed battery life of 6 hrs., 45 mins. Even if that figure doesn’t quite hold up in real life, the end result should be pretty good battery life.

In order not to be overly confrontational, I will mention three things I agree with The Apple Blog about:

1. Lauren is totally hot.
2. Nevertheless, she’s clueless about computers.
3. If she really wanted value for the price, she should have looked into Linux. (In fact, if I had Lauren’s laptop with the 320 GB hard drive, I would be dual-booting Ubuntu or Linux Mint on it).

However, I think the Mac fans are exaggerating the quality tradeoffs for low-priced PCs.

OpenOffice 3 Write and MS Word 2007

I got Office 2007 to work in Wine (as in starting up without crashing), an undertaking  which will eventually get its own post whenever I have the time. But today, something happened which gave me the chance to explore the depths of OpenOffice-Ms Office incompatibility.

It’s well known that Open Office can both read and write to MS Office documents made with any Office version before 2007. It’s also well known that some formatting might get lost in the translation. Normally, this means that I don’t want to take a chance with OpenOffice on a school project that demands both precise formatting and delivery as a .doc attachment.

However, today I encountered my first glitch running Word under Wine. I had e-mailed myself a copy of an assignment that I had created in Word 2007 at school. I downloaded it to my home computer and opened it in Word. Every time I scrolled past page 3, Word crashed. The odd thing is that it only happens with this document. All other Word documents open just fine.

Faced with this problem, I decided to see what work I could do on the paper in OpenOffice. There were a couple of problems right off the bat. It appears that  Write (the OpenOffice word processor) won’t import styles from Word documents. This was a huge problem because applying pregenerated styles was part of the point of this assignment. Actually, I have to qualify this statement somewhat. It appears that Write will import any style that matches its own existing style list. For example, if there is a different “Heading 1” style specified for the document, something close to that style will become Heading 1 in the OOo document. But any style with a different name, like “Chapter Title” is out of luck.

Since I had to wait for some laundry to dry, I decided to soldier on and do what editing and formatting I could, using the closest equivalent OpenOffice styles instead of the original Word styles. I figured I could use the OOo styles as visual placeholders and change them when I got to the lab and got access to Word in Windows. Imagine my surprise when I found out that OpenOffice had added a bunch of wingding fonts to the style list. Not only that, it had removed two of the original styles. So I had to go to the trouble of cutting and pasting my assignment into another file to get back to the professor’s original style list.

I love working with OpenOffice. Actually, I kind of like working with Word 2007 too. It has some really handy new features. But today I learned conclusively why the two don’t mix well at all, except possibly in the simplest text-only documents.

Update: My next saved version of my paper works on Word in Wine. Maybe that was just a one-time glitch. Obviously, the huge compatability glitches remain, though.

Vista After Hiatus

I’ve been forced to go back to using Windows occasionally with the start of a new quarter. That’s because my class requires that all assignments to be done in Word or InDesign. Before anybody points out that OpenOffice can save documents in Word format, I should point out that technical writing assignments are judged on design and formatting, so I can’t risk any loss of formatting in the translation. This means that I’ve been using Windows on my home computer for the first time in months.

The first thing that greeted me on startup (besides the much faster startup time compared to Ubuntu) was an interminable backlog of program updates from all those months. I found myself missing the one-click updates for everything that I get with Ubuntu.

The first time I tried to watch a video online, I also missed a little thing that I had taken for granted all those months. I forgot that Windows doesn’t display a volume graphic when you hit the volume button on the keyboard. I kept thinking, “What’s the volume? What’s the volume? I should be able to tell!” One positive, though, was the fact that adjusting the volume while watching a Flash video doesn’t take the video out of fullscreen mode.

Another thing I have to give Microsoft some credit for is Office 2007. Sure it’s a huge, bloated program, but I actually like the look and the interface. The “ribbon” setup is a pretty good compromise between a million toolbar buttons and Adobe’s clunky tools interface. If only I could get it to work in Wine so I could do my homework in Linux.

Microsoft Tea Leaves

According to MSNBC and the AP, Steve Ballmer gave the keynote at the annual Consumer Electronics show yesterday. Basically, it was a bunch of hype about the soon-to-be-released Windows 7 Beta and other near-term product releases. I found a couple of quotes really interesting. First, there’s this:

“I believe Windows will remain at the center of people’s technological solar system,” Ballmer said. “We’re putting in all the right ingredients: simplicity, reliability and speed….”

In other words, Windows is finally catching up with Ubuntu. (I haven’t used enough Linux distros to speak for Linux generally).

This little bit is more distressing, though:

Ballmer is hoping to boost the number of people using Microsoft’s Live Search engine, which ranks well behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in popularity, through a deal with PC maker Dell Inc. Dell will put a special Live Search browser toolbar and Windows Live programs, including Microsoft’s e-mail and instant-messaging applications, on most of the consumer and small-business PCs that it sells worldwide. That deal replaces a relationship between Dell and Google.

If Dell is striking new deals with Microsoft, will it feel pressure to back off of its support for Linux in genral, and Ubuntu in particular. Specifically, how long will those Dells with Ubuntu preinstalled be available?