A Frustrating Journey
I was lamenting the lack of an iPad competitor (if only to spur Apple on) when I got into an friendly argument with a co-worker about whether or not the popularity of the $99 HP Touchpad proved there was a way to compete with the iPad. I was on the side that said the $99 Touchpad proved nothing except people like a deal. Read the rest »
The WWDC keynote is over. It met my low expectations and here's my two-cents. Read the rest »
Apple is kicking of WWDC today so naturally the Apple rumors are flying. I find it hard to get exited about anything that might happen there. Apple is primarily a consumer products company these days and while important, computers are just one component of their business. Naturally there will be a new iPhone announced along with iPhone OS 4.0. I don’t really care. As long as the iPhone is locked to AT&T I will never have one as long as they’re the telco provider. Rumors of the iPhone arriving on [...] Read the rest »
This is the non-story that just won’t go away. The big bad Google drove around stealing data by “hacking” people’s wireless network. Articles such as those at the Huffington Post contain quotes such as “one of the most massive surveillance incidents by a private corporation that has ever occurred.” Google collects a hell of a lot of data that concerns me more than this. In this case what seems to have happened is Google collected data from unsecured wireless networks as it’s street view vehicles drove around. The real lesson [...] Read the rest »
While there are companies I won’t do business with due to poor experiences with them, there are very few companies I refuse to due business with for reasons that have nothing to do with their product. Monster cable is one of them. For awhile I didn’t buy their products simply due to their price and lack of value. But theses days I wouldn’t buy their stuff even if there were no other options. I’m happy to say I’ve never purchased any of their products. They are a greedy company using [...] Read the rest »
There wasn’t much forward movement on the Quest this week as my day job tended to take up all my time. I did add some disk to my Windows Home Server and began ripping some DVDs and moving other files to it. The only software update was a very minor update to iPhoto. On the Windows side of things I’ve completed a migration from my Windows XP Home virtual machine under Parallels to a HP Vista Ultimate virtual machine under VMware on my iMac. This wasn’t much of a migration. [...] Read the rest »
Two cellphone related stories caught my attention recently which together showed how consumer unfriendly the telcos really are. Both stories involved AT&T, now the largest cellphone network in the U.S. The first story was actually all the stories covering the upcoming spectrum auction and Google’s announcement that they would bid at least $4.6Billion even if the FCC required the spectrum to be open. They wanted open applications for users, open devices that will work with whatever provider the consumer wants, open services on a wholesale basis, and open networks that [...] Read the rest »
The release of the Safari 3 beta triggered another one of my pet peeves. Beta software – or software labeled as beta – being treated as production software. This pet peeve is typically triggered by public betas but “invitation” betas can trigger it too. Wikipedia defines a beta software release as: A beta version is the first version released outside the organization or community that develops the software, for the purpose of evaluation or real-world black/grey-box testing. To me this means I should expect problems and I shouldn’t use the [...] Read the rest »
Microsoft made news again this week when Steve Ballmer and Microsoft’s top lawyer were quoted in Fortune. The tone of the article is that Microsoft will go after open source software users for royalties, From the Fortune article: Microsoft counters that it is a matter of principle. “We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property,” says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to “play by the same rules as the rest of the business,” he insists. “What’s fair is [...] Read the rest »
My first reaction was this was a new low for our legal system. But after reading the article I realized it’s still on the fringes and that system seems ready to laugh them out of court, should they decide to go there. Two companies (one is a subsidiary of the other, so just one bonehead decision was made) sent cease and desist letter to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and RealNetworks because they aren’t using their product. Since this is probably a publicity stunt I decided not to print the company names [...] Read the rest »