Zune
I would like to be the first to officially claim (live, on this space so that you all can enjoy) that Microsoft's "Zune" (or as some idiots are calling it, MS' 'iPod Killer') will be a tremendous and galactic failure on a scale that only Apple's Newton has seen before.
Hint to Microsoft: People don't like peer-to-peer music sharing networks because they are communist hippies that like to share love and music. They like peer-to-peer music sharing networks because they can type in the song that they are looking for and instantly download it for free!
Again, MS misses the point and comes into the market late with practically an exact copy of a competitor's product. Okay, maybe the screen is bigger and it has some cool features. However, it is no iPod killer. The design of the Zune and the decision to manufacture it in brown should tell you that right away.
Count me out. I'd rather have the new iPods.
The School of the Future
Following up on my Digital Divide entry, I found this article on "The School of the Future". (I realize I have been blogging a lot about technology lately. Deal with it. It's what I do for a living and I haven't gone to any cool restaurants lately) Anyway, Bill Gates and Microsoft decided they could take the concept of "school" and do it better (in fairness, they are not sure they can, but they are making a best faith effort).
Will this work? No idea. However, I like the idea that people who would normally be affected by the digital divide are exactly the students who are getting the opportunity in this unique environment. I'd be very interested to see test scores in the future for a school like this. I would hope they would be higher than those produced from our financial black hole of a public school system.
What also strikes me about this concept is that the students are being treated as adults or more specifically like corporate citizens. Granted, they are not adults nor corporate citizens yet, but what if that sense of responsibility can be instilled in them early? Would that make them more capable to take on life or the business world? I think so.
Google vs. Yahoo!
Google Maps has updated their satellite photography for Connecticut and several places in Europe, but will it be enough? Probably, but Yahoo! is entering the market with their Yahoo! Maps Beta.
First Impressions? Well, the interface is much the same as Google's, but the satellite photography is at a closer level. However, that photography is not as up to date as Google's. The driving directions don't seem all that accurate, but neither did Google when they first started. The cool thing so far is that you can select a specific part of the directions and that portion of the map will highlight. Neat.
Best of all, I can see my house from here. That's nothing that Google or Microsoft can claim. I'll be giving this a try for a few weeks and see how it works out.
Ahhh, Apple
I'm becoming a convert to the Apple cause. I really am. Okay, maybe not on the actual computer front, but their music devices still capture the imagination.
Am I impressed about the new Nanos or the 80 GB iPod? No. Big deal. They're brighter, they have better batteries, they're scratch resistant, and they have multiple colors. Big deal. They should have done most of those things a while ago to deal with their competitors.
Do I think that downloadable movies and games are the next big thing? Maybe, but probably not. People still want to view their movies on their plasmas.
What I think is really cool is the $79 iPod Shuffle. As if the original Shuffle wasn't cool enough, Apple said, let's make it about 1/3 of the size and tack a clip onto it so you don't lose it. As I've mentioned on this space before, it's just seriously brilliant design. It makes me want one and I already have an older Shuffle. Ahhh, Apple.
Bringo!
If you're at all like me, you hate the new automated telephone routing services. Pressing "1" for English is bad enough, but these days, they try (very unsuccessfully I might add) to make it sound like you are having a conversation with another human. I don't know about you, but nobody I converse with says, "I did not understand your response". It's usually more like, "Say what, fool?!"
Luckily for us, one product has been designed to help us. They're called Bringo and they navigate phone trees for you and call you back when they have a real human on the line.
McAfee is on my S list
It always amazes me how companies with such terrible technology products make gazillions of dollars. At first, I thought this trend was limited to companies with absurdly complicated business products such as Computer Associates. Turns out, that's not the case. You can build terrible home products as well and still have enough money to put your name on a pro-baseball/football stadium.
McAfee came pre-installed with my new Dell 9100 a little over a year ago. Now, I have always been a Norton Anti-Virus kind of guy, but I said to myself, "What the hell? I haven't really used anti-virus in a couple of years, someone else might download something stupid on my computer, and it's free for 90-days."
Big mistake. After the 90-days, VirusScan worked just well enough for me to think, "Well, maybe I'll renew for a year." After which, all hell broke loose. McAfee wouldn't update properly because it only works with Internet Explorer. No matter what I did to change the default behavior, VirusScan always tried to open Firefox to update itself making my purchase worthless. Worse yet, it ended up freezing my computer constantly. I am almost certain that this freezing led to my subsequent RAID array failure.
After this rather annoying and time consuming disk failure, I decided to install the OS from scratch without McAfee and everything was great. Until yesterday...
Yesterday, I received an e-mail saying that McAfee had automatically charged my credit card for another year of renewal. The nerve of these people. Fortunately, they did respond to me after a day to remove the charge. However, I just think it's terrible that a company can build such terrible software and then rope you into automatically renewing. I mean, who are they? AOL?
The Digital Divide
So, I was reading this article on the digital divide yesterday. It made me remember that even thought the internet has been a force that I can't live without for the past 10 years, there are still so many people who know nothing about computers. I find this sad because what this means is that information and new learning is not readily accessible to them. I can't even imagine how much I learn every day just by reading the news and blogs online. Granted, I probably could have learned some of this information from TV on the nightly news and the History Channel, but the History Channel isn't on demand like Wikipedia.
Sure, some efforts are under way to bring cheap technology to the third world, like the $100 laptop project, but it probably won't be in great enough numbers and it certainly won't be fast enough before the Western world takes their next technological leap. Much how people complain about the rich getting richer, you will soon see a similar divide when it comes to education.
Saddest of all, no pizza delivery will ever be able to find my new house because they use old paper maps and not Google Maps. When it hits home like that, there's no reason for you not to feel it.
Only Google...
Could make you do their work for them and turn it into a game. Tom Sawyer has nothing on these guys.
