This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about entrepreneurship, design, experience, simplicity, constraints, pop culture, our products, products we like, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago.

Except for the Chicago part, that sounds real familiar. What brought them to my attention was this great entry called “Microsoft has no idea what’s going on” - yet another point of agreement, and another statement of why Microsoft is on the way to becoming a game company with too many lawyers. The blog included this brilliant aphorism:

“Windows in general has been like a confused and slow person. vista is like a person who lost their meds and is trying their best to ignore the voices.”

Here’s the top, go read the rest at: http://www.37signals.com

Web developers: Microsoft has no idea what’s going on

I’ve been working this week to make our applications compatible with Internet Explorer 7.

Some background: As a Mac shop, most of our exposure to the pain of the Windows world has been through support emails we receive. But recently we installed Windows Vista in a Parallels virtual machine for IE 7 testing.

Parallels is an indispensable tool that lets us test our applications in all the browsers we support on a single computer. We can even test IE 6 and 7 side-by-side by running Windows XP in one VM and Vista in another. As a web developer, Parallels is easily the single best reason to own an Intel Mac. But starting with Vista’s release, Microsoft wants us to pay for the privilege: you’ll legally only be able to install the most expensive versions (Ultimate and Business) in a VM, even if all you’re doing is clicking on things in IE.