Posted 11/06/2009 at 02:34:29pm

If you can grab one off the shelf at the Anchorage Best Buy stores, you should have them everywhere.  srsly.  I just got one for my work computer and it is the shizz.

Posted 10/30/2009 at 07:28:23pm

Simple doesn't mean stupid here, it means elegant.  It might be fun to have all your files spread over a stack of hard drives, but they do fail, they do get corrupted, and putting all your eggs in one basket may be better than putting slices of your egg in four baskets.  Macs aren't easy by any stretch either, or tiny Anchorage Alaska wouldn't have so many Mac fixing stores.

Posted 10/22/2009 at 05:01:54pm

Deregulating the phone companies allowed a lot of innovation but ensured a lot of price gouging.  When telephony was a regulated monopoly, everybody got the service they paid for, but everybody got it.  Like the deregulated power utilities, however, there is again the opportunity for price gouging, market failure through monopoly/oligopoly, and other abuses of consumers.  Once the broken up baby Bells started getting back together,they immediately began colluding to control and manage the pricing structure for phone, wireless, cable, and data.  That is what greedy Ivan is concerned about-the fear is having real competitive markets in the US.  In Europe and Asia they have much higher speeds, more bandwidth, and lower prices, because they have tightly regulated markets or government monopolies. Corporations have to work harder to prove they are working towards the public good in those environments.

Governments are the only hope of consumer citizens against corporations.  Only where governments have been captured by corporations or families are the actions of governments typically against the interests of the public.

Posted 10/21/2009 at 01:36:33pm

but increase work load (number of clicks, etc.) are FAIL.  And your comments are not only sphinctery, they are counterproductive and ignorant because you don't propose any alternative solutions. 

Microsoft's new design trend of trying to more closely emulate Apple user interfaces are a big FAIL, in my opinion, because they have spent 20 years training users to do things a certain way, and now they are making important functions less visible and less transparent.

Posted 10/21/2009 at 12:39:23pm

After the great George Orwell 1984 debacle, I thought the Kindle was pretty much kiboshed by poetic justice.  Who knew dropping it would put it to death?

Posted 10/20/2009 at 02:04:04pm

Dell or HP for a bazillion dollars, creating a new opportunity for someone else to be the next Alienware or whoever.

Posted 10/20/2009 at 01:35:13pm

Yahoo is free.  Yahoo is marketed with cowboy noises and motifs.  Yahoo markets its email as part of a social networking system integrated with web chat, videoconferencing, trendy friendsy-stalker ware, and news feeds, so for people who fear technology or don't trust it, it's one stop shopping.  It seems to always work.  And it has hobby/interest groups with no limit, so birthers/tenthers/wingnuts and crazies of all stripes can have a little interest group for free.  It's easy to spoof in order to hide your identity.  These are people without great credit ratings. 

People with established credit, houses, etc. likely have an isp email by default, and something that integrates with their mobile devices as well. Most professional people are tied to their mobile device like Jason Statham is tied to a movie macguffin. 

Posted 10/19/2009 at 03:22:36pm

I have a separate computer at home with several hard drives and OS versions on it and I use it.  One version is still Win98SE, two disks are XP, because some of my favorite games didn't make the jump to XP very well.  Some are so old they rely on a software layer to convince the game the processor clock is 12 megahertz.

Win98SE.  It just works.

I'll probably get 7, but the fact is the user experience with the ribbon interface is worse than learning Linux in my opinion.  It's not because it is new, it is because some of it is new, and it has been tuned to be less efficient for people who know what they are doing.  In Office 2007 it has nearly doubled the time needed to create reports with formatted pictures and tables simply because they moved the formatting buttons around so it takes 5 more steps than it did under previous editions.  More billable hours for me, I guess.

Posted 10/19/2009 at 02:09:06pm

Especially when combined with anything to do with Microsoft is nothing but a punchline.  Get used to Microsoft Books?  Get used to FRED?  What other Microsoft vapor initiatives are you going to "get used to" there xenogeist?  What other bogus things will you settle for because "they're the future?"  Another trial balloon from a company that has matured to the point that they no longer can innovate in the technological sphere and must innovate in the revenue enhancement sphere.  Maybe they can sell lottery tickets too.

Posted 10/12/2009 at 02:38:12pm

I think this is nothing short of revolutionary and had Microsoft not quit their book digitizing effort there would be even better coverage.  Google along with Archive.org have done a huge service to history and the sciences by putting these resources out where they can be viewed in seconds, searched for keywords and phrases, and that information retrieved and put to use.  This is what the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian as well as other federal agencies should be doing, and are to greater or lesser degrees. 

In a free country the information upon which our ability to make informed decisions is based should be freely available; anything less is an epic fail.