What’s real and what isn’t? So far as the internet is concerned, it’s a good question. The latest example of fantasy masquerading as reality is lonelygirl15. Ostensibly a teenager keeping a video diary unbeknownst to her parents, she turns out to be the creation of a group of filmmakers. Zephoria, over at Apophenia, has the story. And while she is excited about this and "loves the way people are using all of these new social technologies to create cultural experiments", I am less sanguine and confess to feelings of unease.

…about Windows Vista. OK, so we are still working with pre-release software, but there are five pieces of hardware in my system that the hardware manufacturers have so far failed to even produce beta device drivers for. And I’m not confident that in some cases they ever will.

 

Then there’s Creative Technology, which is in a class of its own. The hardware may be fine, but the software is dreadful. We are now just four months away from Microsoft releasing Vista, and yet the beta drivers for Creative’s products (when they exist, which is not usually) are a huge steaming pile of ordure. This is nothing new as far as Creative is concerned, it’s always had a shocking reputation for its inability to write decent software and release it on time. Just a quick visit to its discussion forum for Windows Vista shows that. My experience with Creative’s beta drivers for my Audigy 2 soundcard is mixed. After a BSOD and some other error messages, the soundcard limped into action. But the 5.1 surround sound is still just stereo, and many features of the hardware just don’t work. Ah, the joys of beta software.

So Microsoft has released a version of its Windows Vista operating system that is getting close to what the final version will be. Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1) became available this week. Well, you know me, of course I downloaded it and installed it on a couple of the computers at home. So, what do I think?

 

Well, it’s pretty, I have to say that, but it behaves in different ways to Windows XP, and sometimes that bites me. Take, for example, the act of upgrading the device drivers and application software for my webcam. The first part of the installation proceeded swimmingly, then I was told the system needed to restart in order to complete the installation. Fine, but when it restarted, I saw this:

 

 

OK, I thought, I’ll click, and sure enough, I saw the setup program had been blocked. But even though there was an "enable" button (which I assume would "unblock" the program and let it run to completion), it was greyed out, and I couldn’t unblock the program. I tried several things to unblock the program, but nothing worked, and the device drivers remained uninstalled…

 

 

The balloon does not make it clear that the user needs to right-click on the icon to see a menu where it is possible to unblock the startup programs. Just clicking on the icon (as the balloon suggests) leads to the dialogue box where it is not possible to unblock the programs.

 

Sigh. If I have to google in order to learn how to use software, then I would contend that it ain’t intuitive…

 

 

Google Earth has at last got around to using high resolution images in its coverage of The Netherlands – and what a difference it makes! No longer is our house just a fuzzy brown blob, but it can be clearly seen, as can the pond in the garden. Google Earth is a terrific application, and being used in mashups in a huge variety of ways.