Stan's List

New York State’s Attorney General sues Dell for false advertising, failure to provide services and deceptive business practices. The lawsuit alleges bait and switch financial tactics and inadequate customer service. More …

The lack of service was previously mentioned.

ZDNet is reporting that the battery life under Vista is upsetting a lot of customers. Vista is advertised as having more power management, which should appeal to laptops. Important customers, like HP is putting a lot of energy into getting Vista to be desirable for laptops. It appears the culprit is the Aero Glass interface, the translucent 3D look and feel. More …

OpenOffice will now get SUN Microsystems support, according to Philipp Lohmann. OpenOffice currently uses X11 which creates an environment that enables UNIX programs to run on Mac OS X. FreeOffice does run on the desktop, but is totally dependant on the open source releases by OpenOffice. It is my guess that FreeOffice will disappear if OpenOffice can run native. More …

As reported, Vista is failing in the marketplace. The Inquirer adds to the evidence: One, Dell has reintroduced PCs running Windows XP on its website due to customer demand. Two, Microsoft is conducting a worldwide firesale on a bundle of Microsoft Office 2007/WindowsXP Starter. More …

While not on it’s death bead, IT Director, crunching the numbers, shows sales of Vista are contributing to a down turn in the doorstop market. All good news for Apple. More …

Who says Apple doesn’t have time for Mac OS X 10.5 to get it just right?

Mac OS X Hints instructs how you can use your browser, particularly Firefox, to read Word documents faster than it would take for Word to open the file. This is useful if you want to read the document, but not edit it. You are shown the process, which includes installing a Word browser plugin, and then opening the file from within the browser. More …

Word files are in a perverted XML format, which all modern browsers should be able to display, provided they have the plugin.

M$$$$ will submit a new photo format to an international standards organization, as IDG reports. HD Photo (formerly known as Windows Media Photo), can accommodate lossless and lossy compression. Microsoft also claims that adjustments can be made to color balance and exposure settings and will not discard or truncate data as occurs with other bit-map formats. More …

It is sort of like crying wolf.

InformationWeek reports that not only has the US Department of Transportation banned the installation of Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 2007, the federal body is actively considering the use of PCs running SuSe Linux and Macs.

CIO Daniel Mintz says he has placed “an indefinite moratorium” on the upgrades as “there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade.” More …

David Smith reminds me that Vista’s anti-virus software was rated last among a number of standalone anti-virus programs. Considered useless. More …

InfoWorld is convinced that Apple has plenty of corporate integration initiatives. The article points out that Mac OS X Server supports FTP, DNS, and DHCP. POP and IMAP mail, Xsan and Xgrid add storage-area networking and clustering options, together with an unlimited client license. Apple also has open source packages such as Apache, Jabber, Kerberos, OpenLDAP, Postfix, Samba, and SpamAssassin, integrated in a single interface; What IT would not be in love with this package? More …

Ars Technica, always a good read, sampled some Windows Vista reviews for any reference to Mac OS X and found that the majority make some mention. “That would be six of eight: 75 percent. (I started with twelve reviews but syndication is running rampant.)” Then proceeds to list each. Uncle Bill must be fuming. More …