tech
Dell product "designers"
Have you seen the commercial being plastered across the airwaves by Dell featuring the interns and Dell's product "designers"? The thought that Michael Dull employs product designers in the first place is tremendously laughable. It becomes more humorous when you notice the products said "designers" are handling:
- a PDA--designed and produced by an OEM, with Dell's logo planted on it
- a printer--Dell has never made printers, does not make printers, and won't make printers, so there's no need to employ a printer "designer"
- a flat-panel display--designed and produced by an OEM, with Dell's logo planted on it
- Inspiron notebook computer--the only item featured that actually is designed by Dull's product "designers," and is about as inspiring as a Michael Jordan Hanes briefs commercial.
Truly pathetic. Unfortunately, I'm sure Joe Consumer has no concept of how Dull operates, and is buying this hook, line, and sinker. You want truly innovative product design? Come on over.
Content Search on Amazon
How do you know you're the father of a three month-old? When you don't have much time to read your favorite blogs, and note what you read. Lee posted on Amazon's new Book Content Search feature, and this is just a bit of all-right, as Austin P. would say. I'm not so impressed with the new feature in an of itself--I doubt I will personally use it much--so much as I am by the technological feat of processing 120,000 books, not to mention the man-hours Amazon put in to the project. Kudos, Bezos and Company!
iStockphoto praise
iStockphoto saves the day for Eric. Though I haven't had much use for it lately, I have been a registered member since late last year and think it's a wonderful service. I have even thought about contributing photos myself, though I don't believe a majority of mine are at a high enough resolution to warrant inclusion. (via Michael)
Font fights cancer
Speaking of Dan, he has hooked up with one of my favorite cartoonists, and all-around nice guy (have met him twice now!), Michael Jantze, creator of The Norm, to produce the Jantze font. The font is the handwriting Michael uses in The Norm comics.
East, West, Texas
"Now see here...you gotcher East power grid--you know, the one that danged near blew up yesterday--and you gotcher West power grid--you know, the one with all them rollin' blackouts and brownouts--and then you gotcher Texas grid, which has been hummin' along since we went on our own after our energy crisis in the '80s..."
More BuyMusic.com madness
Bob Levitus rips in to BuyMusic.com: bq. Simply put, while iTunes Music Store is the Rolls-Royce of online music, BuyMusic.com is a Yugo. Jon shows how to use Safari to get around that nasty Windows-only business BuyMusic.com has decided to shovel...
Second-rate from the Windoze world once again...
By now everyone has heard about buymusic.com, the Windows answer to Apple's iTunes Music Store. Don't be impressed; don't be worried. According to a few reader notes from yesterday's MacInTouch, buymusic.com is not all it's cracked up to be:
Buymusic.com claims tracks cost "from $.79," though I found most popular music to be either $.89 or $.99. The DRM is also complicated, varying from track to track. Some tracks can only be burned 1,3,5, or 10 times. Others can only be downloaded to an MP3 player a limited number of times. Some can be stored on 3 computers while others can only be stored on 1. (Ryan Greenberg) Dominic Mazzoni writes: BuyMusic isn't nearly as price-competitive as the AP article would have you believe. First of all, their lowest song price is $0.79, not $0.70 as the article claimed. But if you browse their site, you'll discover that the vast majority of songs are offered at $0.99--the same rate as the Apple store. I found a few songs available for $0.89, but in a few minutes of searching through a number of genres, I only found one song available for $0.79.
Not only that, but quite a few of their songs aren't even available for purchase. That makes me wonder how their catalog size (which they claim is 300,000) actually compares to Apple's if you only consider songs that you can actually purchase and burn to a CD. Apple does need to get its act together with getting iTunes and the Music Store ready for Windows users. The iPod is already burning up the sales charts in Windoze-land, and Apple has a huge advantage over any music-selling competitor. Strike while the iron is hot, Steve. UPDATE: 9:20 A.M. More from MacInTouch's Thursday report, as Greg Orman shows that BuyMusic isn't actually letting you buy music... The fine print clearly states that you're only licensing the music, not purchasing it, and furthermore that the license is tied to the computer used for the transaction. If you replace your computer, you lose access to everything you've licensed and downloaded (though you'll still have any copies you burned to CD or transferred to a portable, assuming that the DRM on the songs you licensed allowed you to do that in the first place). So there you go. The Apple iTunes Music Store remains the only place one can actually buy music for their own personal, pretty much unrestricted use, online.
Treo 600
So forget the Kyocera 7135, and the upcoming Samsung SGH-i500 Palm OS smart phone. Jon has turned me on to Handspring/Palm's next beauty, the Treo 600. Mobile Burn has more on the 600's appearance at CeBIT America. Best news: Palm OS 5, something the other two Palm OS smart phone contenders don't currently have access to. Yeah, I'll have to wait until November, maybe December to get it, but I believe in the end, it'll be worth it. Even if I have to drive to Florida to beat Jon senseless for his review model...
Comcast woes
So at some point yesterday morning, our broadband connection died. We both had been using it in the early morning, checking email, pulling up web pages, that sort of thing. But when I went back to do the same around 10:30-11ish, no connection. Checked the cable modem; no connection with cable. Now, we've been experiencing drop-outs left and right for the past few months on a seemingly regular basis. I've chalked it up to the Comcast buyout of AT&T's broadband business, and the switching over, but it is getting a little ridiculous. Not to mention that even before the buyout happening, we had more broadband dropouts in any single month than a I did in a year and a half with Verizon DSL at our old house. Spent about two hours on the phone with a Comcast tech yesterday. The guy was very competent, I'll give him that, and we tried a myriad of things. I had even gone out and bought a new cable modem, just in case that was the problem. It does not appear to be. Other friends in the neighborhood still have their connections, and there's no reported outage for our area. So the tech and I are both thinking that's something's screwy at the junction box. We'll find out later today; an on-site tech is due between 2 and 5. The past year and couple of months with broadband cable as soured me on it, however. Especially when you're trying to run a server on that connection. Said server has now moved, however, to the more reliable business-class DSL line of a friend. DSL was never available in our area when we first moved here, which is why we had to go with cable for broadband. I have begun research on if I can get DSL now, even though it will be "slower" than the shared 1.5 Mbps of the cable connection. The Verizon DSL web site claims that we're "pre-qualified," which you would think means that our line checks out for it, but we've been pre-qualified before, and then I spoke with a live CSR only to be told that we're not in an area serviced by Verizon DSL. Which would leave me the small local telco, Advantex, which does offer DSL service, but for $10 more a month than what I'm paying for cable. (We get $10 knocked off our bill each month for providing our own cable modem.) The question again would be is Advantex's DSL offered in our area. I'll follow up with the two DSL providers on Monday. All I know is that dial-up sucks these days for most everything but email...
How pathetic am I?
So I've spent part of last night and this morning, off and on, installing Fink, FinkCommander, and X11. Why? Why, to play XGalaga, of course, the open source clone of my favorite childhood video game. Geez, you didn't think I was going to go through all that trouble to do work or anything, did you? ;-)
Isn't technology cool?
- Buy the Baby Einstein CD set. (Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and Bach)
- Rip all 4 CDs to MP3 with iTunes.
- Copy all 4 sets of MP3s to your iPod.
- Now you can use your Aiwa noise-canceling headphones plugged in to the iPod and situated on the wife's abdomen to let your developing little son listen to the classics, proven to beneficially stimulate neural development.
DNS Primer
If you've ever been interested in how your email gets from your computer to someone else's, or how your browser knows how to load up a web site, you need to read Dan Benjamin's excellent DNS primer at MacDevCenter. It's geared toward Mac OS X users, but anyone can learn the basics of DNS, IP addresses, routing, and all that other techie stuff that makes the Internet work, boiled down in to simply terms by Mr. Benjamin (of Hivelogic/Hiveware fame). Oh, and hire this dress-code-aware guy, if you have the need. Too much talent to not be getting paid well by someone, somewhere.
More blogging coverage
Business Week Online has a good article on the growing pervasiveness of weblogs, and what they mean to mass media and consumers. I like Nick Denton's term of "open-source media."
Death of PNG?
Ric notes a News.com story about the impending expiration of the patent that controls the GIF file format, and what that may mean for the PNG graphics format. See, LZW compression forms the basis for the GIF format, and Unisys owns the LZW patent. A few years ago, Unisys began to flex its muscles in enforcing the LZW patent, and this basically meant the death of free and cheap shareware GIF creation/manipulation software. To compensate, the PNG graphic format was created, and a movement to rid sites of all GIFs was born. Well, Unisys's patent expires in the U.S. later this month; in the rest of the world, next year. The PNG format, despite many advances over GIF, has not caught on heavily outside the geek community. And it doesn't do animation, which GIF does. Personally, I like the PNG format, and use it when possible over GIF. (Unless I'm using someone else's graphic, though I have converted them in the past.) Most modern browsers support it, though perhaps not fully (viz: IE). So after the patents expire, are we going to see an explosion of activity in the GIF creation/manipulation software market? If so, you may see the PNG format remain a second-class graphic file citizen, or worse.
The Samsung Way
The current Business Week's cover story is about Korean tech company Samsung, and its ascendance from third-rate copycat to bleeding-edge envelope pusher. Apple gets quite a few mentions throughout as well; Samsung's MP3 player line is third in the market worldwide, behind Number 2 iPod. Good article, showcasing how Samsung defies the conventional wisdom with its old-school processes, though it begs the question of how long the company can keep that up. Speaking of Apple and Samsung, Jon pointed me to this article, wherein they discuss Apple's threatened lawsuit over the Korean tech-maker's latest revision of their Yepp series MP3 player. Seems it looks just a little too much like the iPod. Samsung's agreed to go back to the drawing board. Seriously, though: I love my iPod, but how many different ways are there to design a good MP3 player? Cool your jets, Steve-o. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As long as it's not an exact, specification-for-specification, look-by-look copy, let'em go. The iPod will still spank'em.
7135 first impression
As I stated previously, I went on my lunch break to the nearby Verizon Wireless store to check out the Kyocera 7135 SmartPhone. I was suitably impressed. Yes, it's a little thicker and bulkier than most phones out there, weighing in at 6.6 ounces. But playing around with it, I didn't find its size to be a deal-breaker. We are, after all, talking about a phone with a Palm PDA jammed in to it. Personally, I didn't feel that it was too much bulkier than my current Motorola StarTac, once it's folded over and in its belt clip/holster. Decided to do a little checking on the web. Walt Mossberg likes it, but doesn't like it. Walt's gripes do not overly concern me, especially the email issue. Call me old-fashioned, but I just haven't quite grasped the concept yet of checking my email on my phone. I like to stay connected and in touch via email as much as the next guy, but I honestly don't have the type of professional or personal life that would warrant such immediate need. Mike Wendland loves his 7135, and has had little problems with it under OS X. Since I'm no longer using iSync, I doubt I would encounter the same issues as Mike. (Said issues may have been fixed with iSync 1.1, but I haven't come across the post yet on Mike's site that may say so.) Reading through one forum on Palm Boulevard sounds like there was a lot of pent-up demand for the 7135 from November of last year to just this April. There's even an entire site devoted to Kyocera SmartPhones. I'm waiting to hear back from our VZW corporate rep, but I think I've found my new phone...
De-iApping
So today I de-iApped a bit. Viz: I had moved all of my contact and calendar info out of Palm Desktop, into OS X's Address Book and iCal. Then I set up iSync to sync my Palm m505 with my TiBook. The thought was that I could then sync this info with my iPod--which I've done once in about six months--and whatever new mobile phone I get when my current contract expires (end of this month). Seeing as how I've never used iSync to sync to my iPod (did it all manually the one time), and now I've got my eye on the Kyocera 7135 as my mobile phone replacement, I've ditched Address Book and iCal and moved everything back over to Palm Desktop. Syncing is way faster now. I think Apple is doing some really cool stuff, but the iSync Palm conduit just plain sucks. Address Book and iCal are now gone from the Dock. Yeah, I may opt for another phone, and that might mean that I'm doing all of this again. The m505 actually is provided by my employer, so if I went with the 7135, I'd have my own Palm, with a phone wrapped around it. I'm going to look one over during my lunch break.
Microsoft targets Google
Is there anyone that Microsoft doesn't see as a competitor? bq. "We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing," said Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division. What's wrong with the Google user experience? I think it's great. I love the simple, minimalist interface on the main page. If you need more advanced features, they're a click away. If I want a bloated, crufty, way-too-much-happening-at-once search engine, I know where to go already, thank you very much. But I'm sure Microsoft is doing some sort of "innovating" in the search engine sector.