Friday, July 29, 2005

Leo Laporte predicts the end of Windows

Excellent interview with Leo Laporte, one of the hosts of Tech TV's Screen Savers show, who agrees with my own personal view: that Windows' clock is ticking in the face of the combined power of the open source movement and Unix.

Couple of choice quotes to whet your whistle:
It's gonna get increasingly difficult for private enterprise to compete against open source, because open source combines the goodwill and efforts of thousands of people in all different areas in a way that they can marshal so much more brainpower than any private company can. What open source teaches us is that while money is an important motivator for people, it's not the only motivator.
and
Well, the PC platform is going to outlive the Windows platform. In other words, because the PC platform is essentially open, it can run other operating systems, and it's open to people modifying it. So it will have a longer life span than Microsoft Windows, which is maintained, operated, and completely controlled by a single corporation. I don't think Microsoft is going to maintain its ascendancy forever. In fact, I would be surprised it it's anywhere near as dominant 10 years from now as it is now.

On the other hand, while the PC will be different 10 years from now, we will recognize it the descendant of the computer today. I don't think it will be that much different. Will it be running Windows? Probably not.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

Australian woman saved by by her Gadgets

The Age is reporting that 36-year-old Australian Alison Sayer was saved from major injuries in the London bombings last week by her iPod headphones, which kept her eardrums protected from perforation and tearing, and her laptop, which she had in her backpack, helping her to avoid spinal injury as she was thrown from the blast.

More than one reason to keep up in this high-tech, high-terror world.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Linux isn't going away

Recently came across a couple of brilliant little Quicktime movies from Red Hat, the Open Source people, which highlight, amongst other interesting things, just how wrong people can be, in particular when it comes to predicting the path that technology will take.

Short, sharp & super-sweet, download them or stream them directly from the Red Hat Magazine site:

Open Source is Inevitable
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/inevitable/

Despite Opposition, Truth Happens
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05/features/truth_happens/

Monday, July 11, 2005

Citeknet add-in for Windows Desktop Search searches ALL your mail

Citeknet, makers of data indexing and filtering tools, recently released an extension for Windows Desktop Search enabling it to index and search the contents of Thunderbird, Mozilla, Netscape and Eudora mailboxes. Great stuff!

Note that the product is currently in beta and the developers are looking for feedback, so give it a whirl and let them know what you think.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Friday, July 08, 2005

Tom Cruise Is Nuts

It was only a matter of time.

Deliciously dark and satirical, TomCruiseIsNuts.com is online for your viewing pleasure now.

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Coles Recalls Green Water

I shop at Coles Online (love it!), and today I received the following Product Recall notice from the store:
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION & SIZE:COLES FARMLAND NATURAL SPRING WATER 6L
ITEM CODE:9009172
BEST BEFORE/USE BY CODE:03/2007 & 03/3007
APN:9300601188185

The reason for this product RECALL from sale is due to THE WATER TURNING GREEN FROM THE GROWTH OF ALGAE.

Note: To our knowledge no other stock has been affected.
For some reason, I've been chuckling for hours over this.

Brooke Replies to Tom

You've probably read Brooke's article in the New York Times already, as the article has been entered as an ad on Google.

And I just really wanted to try Blogger's new image features. :)

[Edit:
...which kinda suck. The automatically generated code for user-uploaded images uses inline styles rather than classes for the image CSS, meaning there ain't no easy way to set your own styles for the 3 different images placements they use.

Kinda almost there, Blogger baby, but still kinda useless.]

Friday, July 01, 2005

Think Free -- the World's First Online Office App

Earlier this week, ThinkFree announced the launch of the world's first online office suite, ThinkFree Office Online, a free web service giving you access to the tools needed to create, edit and publish MS Office documents. Yes, again -- free!

The distributed client-server/thin client argument has been building steam for a while (CNet's simpleton editor, Molly Wood, wrote a typically unresearched piece a while back that generated an interesting debate), and ThinkFree is one of the first actual products supporting this futurist theory that I've seen.

Great idea, in part. Never need to purchase another expensive piece of doc-creation software: wonderful! Leave my personal (or biz) documents on someone else's server: no way, hosé! What if I can't get connected? At the very least, there's one concern. But there are so many more to consider when talking about using the web as an app provider, let alone a storage mechanism.

But it's late, I'm tired, started this too long ago & have lost my momentum. I wonder if ThinkFree Office Online could help me here? ;-)

Tom and Katie -- Relationship Sealed with a Handshake

This ain't the first time I've heard this particular story, which obviously means nothing in the grand scheme of things except that word does travel fast!

But- "What story?" you ask. Why, that would be the Tom's-been-hunting-for-the-perfect-new-partner story, of course.

Apparently the deal with Holmes is worth $5 million, and lasts exactly five years, with no sex. He churned through a list of other more preferable choices before finding a girl willing to comply with the contract, the list including Scarlett Johannson (who was so freaked out by his text message bombardment of herself that she pulled out of MI3), Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan.

The article linked here, however, goes further than this, claiming this is all part of Cruise's ongoing and massive coverup of his homosexuality, naming Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas as Cruise's current lover.

Gotta say, this wouldn't surprise me one bit. Cruise and Katie's LoveFest has been rather sickening and overly cheesy, to say the least.

More extremely interesting info (for gossip-hungry mavens like myself) here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,160192,00.html

Like the fact that Tom Cruise was actually never Katie's favourite actor -- it was Tom Hanks.