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Desperately Seeking Revenue (Microsoft, not me)September 18 2006

(Originally posted on Monday, July 31, 2006, updated Monday, September 18th)

So Microsoft is going to charge $1.50 (USD) for Office beta downloads. Here's what CNet had to report on the new item.

Consumers who download the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2 will be charged $1.50 per download, beginning next Wednesday at 6 p.m. PDT, a Microsoft representative said.

“Since the end of May, Beta 2 has been downloaded more than 3 million times...That’s 500 percent more than what was expected,” the representative said. “The fee helps offset the cost of downloading from the servers.”

Although Microsoft’s Information Worker Product Management Group decided to initiate a fee for new users of Beta 2, the “technical refresh,” or update, for current users of the software will remain free, the representative said.

In related news, the rest of the world’s population asked, “Wait, is the world’s richest man asking me to help pay his bandwidth bill??”

In other related news, some anonymous “representative” was later reamed out for causing even more people to download the beta, install it, and think “Huh, weird” and then never both to launch it again.

The article went on to say:

Those who want to

Opera 9.01 ReleasedAugust 2 2006

Opera 9.01 has just been released.

Wondering what’s new? Changelog for Opera 9.01.

I can’t say that I’ve been personally effected by any of these issues, but the x.01 release generally means that any particularly hairy bugs have been worked out.

Download Opera at the usual place.

CNet on Opera 10July 31 2006

I was dumbstruck not once but twice while reading Opera reveals version 10 vision (CNet)

Once in the same way most people probably were, wondering: “Why are they talking about Opera 10 already, didn’t 9 just come out?”

Secondly, I was amazed because CNet actually managed to put together an article (341 words) without mentioning Firefox.

Surely someone will be getting sacked later.

Extremetech Browser Review fails the testJuly 20 2006

Which New Browser Is Best: Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7, or Opera 9? is about the worst review I’ve seen in a long time. (CNet ought to be happy that someone has finally published a worse review than they usually do.)

I’m not saying this because I think it’s a bad review of Opera (it is) but because it is a bad review of all 3 browsers. How bad? If this review was a high school report I would give the reviewer an “F” and send a note home for a parent teacher conference and possibly a drug test.

First of all: comparing Opera 9 final to Firefox 2 Beta and IE7 beta? Hello? What’s next, a comparison of a gourmet meal with raw McDonald’s ingredients?

It even started out strangely with this quote: “So, three new browsers in the same year, after no action for a half decade.” (citation). Um, what? 2 of those new browsers have been churning out new versions pretty much constantly. It’s only IE which has been idle for 5 years.

Then there’s the chart at Features at a glance has apparently been updated since people started pointing out mistakes on the feedback page but it still lists Opera as not having Anti-Phishing features.

rooSwitch: Multiple Profiles for MacOperaJuly 13 2006

2006/07/13: Note update below since the original version of this article was posted.

Folks who know me well know that my biggest complaint about using MacOpera (compared to WinOpera) is that all of the installations of Opera will share the same preferences.

WinOpera users can install separate versions of Opera and have completely separate preferences, which is a huge boon for beta testing, especially because you can have more than one version of Opera running at the same time.

A MacOpera using friend recently directed my attention to rooSwitch, a $15 utility which basically allows you to have an unlimited number of profiles for the various Mac apps that you use.

This solves part of the problem; namely, it lets me have different profiles. However it does not solve the bigger problem of letting me run two different versions of MacOpera at the same time with different preferences.

But some progress is better than no progress, so I’m testing it out, and so far it’s working OK once you tweak rooSwitch just a little bit.

The basic idea is that rooSwitch will look at the various preference files/folders which an app (such as Opera) uses, and makes a copy of them. Then if you totally bork your installation, you have a safety net to go back to.