#FF00AA

@computer@

Microsoft’s notfornoobs.com viral campaign was for… a freaking mouse. Dear god they’re morons.

 

@windows@

Microsoft is likely to leave a compulsory start-up sound in Vista — you know, like my iMac that I just can’t turn on at night, because the startup sound uses the internal speakers and they’re loud. (At least, with Windows, you’ll only have to turn the speakers off.)

And I just love how they rationalize it.

Volume control in a Windows machine is a wild west. A mess. The startup sound is designed to help you calibrate or fix something that got out of wack when you startup your machine.

So I guess it makes sense that Microsoft’s solution would be to do the wrong thing, like Apple’s startup sound, rather than bother to do the right thing, like Apple’s volume control in OS X.

Did you know that Sony has a built in sound? Did you know that Toshiba has one?

Did you know that means Sony and Toshiba computer users will have two startup sounds? (Plus the user-customizable log-on sound.)

Yet they see the bloggers protest, and now they’re beginning to consider the possibility of adding a registry setting to disable that sound. (Heaven forbid it be too easy.) Damn, I already used the “Dear god they’re morons” phrase today.

 

@apple@

Uh, one comment on the aforelinked blog post says:

I can turn off the sound on my Mac from a key on the keyboard, and it will boot silently.

Oh, what do you know — apparently (I can’t test it, it’s two in the morning) if you press the Mute key while booting up it will start in silence. (Too bad my Macally keyboard’s volume keys aren’t recognized.) And the sound’s volume is determined by your system volume setting when you turned your computer off, so I could just lower system volume and turn my speakers up.

(Yeah, I know there are software hacks that will disable startup sound, but they’re hacks, and I don’t like that.)