Disqus - Latest Comments for adondai

Re: Has Louis Gray jumped the shark AND drunk all the kool-aid?

adondai — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:39:07 -0000

Problem is - I never used Google Reader while FeedDemon synced with Newsgator, but since they linked it up to GReader I've found myself using the online service more and more and forgetting about FeedDemon desktop.

Re: Who owns the news?

adondai — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:50:58 -0000

Well yeah, totally agree with your comments about the problem with the newspapers is the huge and overheads and management costs. However what I got out of Shapira's article that I thought was a valid point was the fact all the media gets news and reports from other media companies, both blogs from papers and vice versa. Neither likes to see their stories taken with no compensation and bad sourcing and it does make sense for those big companies to have some kind of accepted method of presenting their sources, and perhaps providing compensation for the stories.

Re: Who owns the news?

adondai — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:12:30 -0000

I find the opening of this post is a little uncharacteristic-ly snarky for you Steve. Sure, I realize the purpose behind the whole 'Shooting at Bubbles' moniker - but normally the subjects you choose are a little more deserving.

I guess what annoyed me is the way you've portrayed Shipira by selectively quoting his article. The fact Shipira willlingly refers to himself and his own article as another whinging old media reporter should give some clue as to his real mindset - that of a journalist who likes his current employment for obvious reasons, can recognize the potential and future of journalism on the web, and identifies some quite real issues.

Re: Something very odd about the Lifelounge study

adondai — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:19:13 -0000

Yeah, these studies annoy me too. I'm 19 and I think I can give a fairly accurate approximation of real social trends around my age group...

Yes, Viynl is cool again - but more as a general atittitude than people actually spending money on it. I know a few who do - but as a group affecting the whole market they're not significant. Suggestions of Teenagers surging back to old media like records is simply a desperate hope for struggling CD shops clutching at straws.

Young people don't use Twitter. They use FB a lot.

Have to say tho - I'm pretty nostalgic about pre-GFC days. I gotta $600 a week job in less than a day, straight out of school for the summer break. Now I'm struggling to get $250 in a fortnight casual work.

Also - I don't really like the Australian's coverage in general - such a repetitive newspaper.

Re: The social media crime scene that doesn’t exist

adondai — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:34:46 -0000

Facebook has just done what every other successful company before it has - take the best concepts and ideas and implement them in a way REAL users can take advantage of.

I don't use Facebook a whole lot - maybe a quick check a couple times a week, however I definetly think its an incredibly useful service and Mark Zuckerman strikes me as one of the smartest people behind online services today. Time and time again he makes huge changes to Facebook which may face a huge amount of opposition initially, before becoming the sites greatest asset. The news feed was the first major change which was hated by many early users and this year the new theme was very controversial.

I would strongly dissagree with the idea Facebook is the AOL of today - far from it, they've shown themselves willing to do what AOL couldnt - continually reinvent themselves.

If only they could make money, haha.

Re: Economic downturn sucks ass

adondai — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 21:10:46 -0000

Bugger... he was my favourite writer on Mashable...

Re: A guilty secret - I want a Zune

adondai — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:03:17 -0000

I really don't understand why the Zune is so hated?

I bought a Zune 120 through Ebay a couple of months ago (it's not released here in Australia) and have not had one regret. I would never buy a Zune simply because it ISN'T an iPod - I find that stupid, if one product is better than the other why go for the worse one? No, I bought a Zune becuase I genuinlly think it is a better mp3 player than the iPod.

Actually let me clarify that - since the Zune 3.0 release the Zune is much better than an iPod Classic or Nano, in fact I think it would be hard to argue otherwise.

Looking at the two products side by side it may be harder to see why the Zune is so much better - but once you actually get the device than there won't be a single doubt in your mind. The whole Zune experience simply blows iPod/iTunes out of the water - not least becuase of Microsoft's development strategy which focuses on the software side of the device and means every few months new features and updates are provided to ALL Zune owners.

I'd list some of the features I love, but really there are too many - I will say though that you'll constantly be discovering new ways to use it and finding new features months after you've got it.

To be absolutely fair - iTunes still has more content than Zune.net (although the gap is closing) and the iPod is thinner with longer battery life. However I think all the other factors make a Zune the obvious choice!

The 'twist' UI on the Zune is hugely more intuitive than the iPod and the navigation pad is much better than a click wheel as you can both skim rapidly through long lists AND easily go up and down one song at a time... something the clickwheel is very bad with.

Actually I'll put it another way - when people see I have a Zune they are quick to ridicule like the comments above, however after a few minutes playing around with it and they quickly change their opinion!

EDIT: I remember why its so hated - the Zune 1.0 was awful - I don't blame people who bought one hating it. In some ways though - was the iPod 1.0 any better?

Re: What can Fred teach us about video?

adondai — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:43:57 -0000

...or he was the right kid at the right time in the right place.

I doubt he could have any more to offer than the advice you have already suggested.

Re: Windows 7 to play nice with all decoders

adondai — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:25:54 -0000

Hah... well if legit isn't a neccessity than I'm sure you can bittorrent with the best of them =P

I would never pirate a final version of Windows, but for a beta I was just interested to test it.

Re: Windows 7 to play nice with all decoders

adondai — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:24:33 -0000

"Now the only wish that I have remaining for the media player that will be using these codec is that it gets put on a massive diet because it has become one of the most bloated Windows application around."

From that I take it that you haven't used Windows Media player 12 yet?

I think you'll be happy to find they have very much slimmed it down. Actually that's not entirely true... all of the same features are there however the UI has been streamlined and most significantly WMP12 functions essentially as two applications.

There is a light 'VLC' version which launches when you directly play media files from Explorer. This is fast and means I now never have to download VLC again. From here you can then launch into the main media player library if you wish. It seems a lot faster than before, but to be honest I never fund WMP11 too bad... I mean compare it to itunes? That thing is almost unusable with my 5000 song library.

WMP is still kind of the odd one out now though and I wouldn't be surprised to see it eventually only contain the light version and remove the media management features... after all Windows Media Center and the Zune software are both Microsoft's main focus now and provide a significantly better media management experience than media player.

In response to your comment below... it's a great beta and I've been using it as my main OS now for a couple weeks with very few problems at all. The kinds of bugs you'll encounter are primarily usability bugs within Explorer - especially with search and libraries, but not so much as to be unusable by any means. The only stability problems I have had where caused by IE8...

To give you an idea of the improvements Windows 7 is actually giving me double the battery life I was getting previously... from barely 1 and a half hours with Vista power saver to nearly 3 hours Windows 7 power saver. It's also far more responsive using power saver than Vista.

Also with Windows Vista having something like an IM client auto-load on launch would take over a minute from logging in... in Windows 7 its down to about 15-20 seconds which I think is quite amazing.

Re: Some help with RSS Feeds

adondai — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 20:37:53 -0000

The problem is, with most people I know, just about everyone knows what blogs are and even reads a couple, however they don't ever read enough to bother 'subscribing'...

Re: Does a Web Office hurt Google or MSFT?

adondai — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:09:52 -0000

Exactly... I could use Office Live for collaboration I guess, but the other great thing about Google Docs is the simplicity and also the fact you can invite anyone with an email address to collaborate, even if it's not a Gmail account, no sign up involved... Office Live requires signup which is a pain if you just need to do stuff fast.

Also I think the other major point so many tech bloggers seem to forget is that MS moves with the curve, not ahead... no matter how much people have been banging on about moving to the 'cloud', it's really only now that mainstream businesses and users are actually interested...

Re: Windows 7 heading for the gate, Vista exiting stage left

adondai — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:51:14 -0000

Interesting that you seem to know less about it than you think you do.

Firstly most of the major technologies promised for Longhorn did actually make it into Vista, albiet in different forms than initially announced and a lot less flashy... there are actually a lot of good reasons why the WinFS filesystem for example was abandoned and instead the Windows indexing technology was used, other capabilities of WinFS have gone into SQL etc... developers haven't adopted the capabilities of the Windows indexing technology but that doesn' mean it's as capable as WinFS was ever planned to be.

Secondly if you've been following the Engineering Seven blog by Steven Sinofsky you'll know the managment of Windows development has changed dramatically since he came on board and now the Windows build is treated like a finished product that could ship at any time... only totally complete features and shipping quality code is submitted to the build.

Finally Sinofskys philosophy which he reinterated time and time again is 'under-promise, over deliver'... everything you've seen demonstrated about Windows 7 is what you will get.

Re: Does a Web Office hurt Google or MSFT?

adondai — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:27:35 -0000

I seriously don't understand how Google Docs can be seen as anything more than a simple note-taker... I'm a uni student and I use Docs for collaboration on group assignments etc and it really is handy... but anything more than that and it's a joke... I copy and paste into Word of course.

Re: Windows 7 heading for the gate, Vista exiting stage left

adondai — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:56:32 -0000

Do you think we'll see a huge number of people going out and buying boxed sets of Windows 7? I think we will... few people did for Vista but that was because we knew it would run slow on our existing computers... since then everyone who has bought a new computer with Vista installed, or even with XP knows WIndows 7 will run a lot faster than what they currently have.

I plan to buy it, do you? =P

Re: Does a Web Office hurt Google or MSFT?

adondai — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:51:16 -0000

That;s a bit of an arrogant way to describe it, "So Microsoft seems to have finally woken up and decided to get serious about the Web — or at least semi-serious"

MS has been working on this vision for years now, its hardly as if they decided a few months ago and decided to crank out these products.

Re: Are We Fooling Ourselves With Blog Advertising Spin?

adondai — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:04:56 -0000

Good points...

The thing is all too often we like to think in... extremes perhaps, that there are 'bloggers' who do this, 'old media and journalists' who do that...

The reality is everything is about compromises and meeting in the middle. Bloggers will adopt similar practises that the old media uses, old media will adopt newer strategies started by bloggers.

It's just how it works... im too cynical to expect anything to change.

Re: Arrington Heats Up Twitter

adondai — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:28:05 -0000

Great to see this is how the 'new media' will react to things in the future... such an improvement...

Re: When Half-Assed Is Good Enough

adondai — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:41:16 -0000

You pretty much manage to nail every thought I have about the tech industry.... =P

I can't understand it either.... why the hell would I want to go from using Office 2007 (which is great, really great) to using Google Docs, or Zoho and effectively going back to the kind of functionality and interface of what I was using back in 1998... it's just so ridiculous...

Oh and I do use Google Docs, for some quick notetaking and collaberation on assingments for my degree... it's great for that but for anything else why wouldn't you use word?

Re: Call 911 I’m Almost Agreeing With Stallman

adondai — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:30:05 -0000

This is slightly off-topic I know... but the one person I really respect within the open source community is Mark Shuttleworth... being the founder of Ubuntu he is a huge open source proponent... and he has made some interesting statments over the last couple years...

He doesn't rave like Stallman does about commercial software being evil... he believes that simply the creation of a great product will change people's minds far more effectively than just a philosophy...

"I think it takes time to change the habits of hundreds of millions of people! I also think we need to deliver an experience that is simply better than the alternatives. Projects like Firefox don’t define their goal as being “a good browser”, they say “we want to be the best browser on any platform, period”, and as a result they are very popular even on Windows. We need that winning attitude everywhere."

I believe [Ubuntu] is ready for SOME desktop users. If you really want a desktop that is web-oriented, then Linux is an excellent choice, with either Gnome or KDE (I’m really impressed with the work going on as part of KDE4, by the way). We know that there are millions of people using Linux today. And we are focused on solving the problems that prevent more and more people from adopting it.

Free software is intrinsically a better way to build software, I believe. But we should not plan to be judged on our morals, we should expect to be judged on our software. We have to deliver something that LOOKS and FEELS better, then we can expect people to embrace it fully. And once people realise they can have something that is better AND sustainable AND comes with many freedoms, the world will be a fundamentally different place. That is our goal."

I think it's this attitude which has made Ubuntu the success it is today... don't tell people why they should use open source... create a great product and they will use it... just like Firefox. He also doesn't alienate non-users which is something both Linux and Apple could learn from I think...

Re: Bloggers Need To Learn To Respect Some Traditions

adondai — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:16:28 -0000

I don't think bloggers HAVE to have this respect... I just think the successful bloggers will =) They'll be the ones who get the scoops, the relationships and the respect themselves.

Re: Don’t Guilt Me Into Being A Friend

adondai — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:15:18 -0000

Haha actually you know what's more annoying?

When someone (usually on Myspace) DOES resciprocate your request with someone like "Thanks for the add!"

Re: It’s Microsoft So It Must Be Dumb And Smack Of Desperation

adondai — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:03:53 -0000

Haha, agreed!

Oh and incidentally, is it just me or does Mark Jo Foley seem to be getting increasingly 'snarky' and cynical about MS lately?

Re: louisgray.com: Just Wishing for Something to Go Mainstream Won't Make It So

adondai — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:40:34 -0000

Haha reminds me of the other day...

Had a field trip for my uni degree and I was designated photographer. The next day the couple other members of my group asked me if i could send the photos to them. I just automatically told them, "Already have, get them off Flickr"

"What the hell man? Just email them!"

Re: So, What Keeps Me On Windows

adondai — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:41:59 -0000

Woah... those are the two programs which keep me on Windows too! Actually no... they are just the two programs I miss the most when using Ubuntu... also Word 2007. Love that.