Quick first impression is favorable. Need to use it regularly before I get a good feel for her, but I think the OS seems very elegant and well laid out.

I’m slightly perturbed that my Wireless card doesn’t seem to work automatically with Windows 7, but we’ll see what I can do to maybe remedy that.

Anyway – seems to work well enough thusfar. I’ll keep you updated.

If you ever get an error message in Windows Mail, (not Windows Live Mail, mind you; Windows Mail. Which comes with Vista.) that looks something like this: “Cannot spell check, this language file has been removed from the spell check module” I have a temporary fix for it. (I discovered this while helping a client the other day.)

Start Windows Mail.

Click on tools.

Click on options.

Navigate to the Spelling tab.

At the bottom, change your language from English (or whatever) to French, (or some other setting.)

Click Apply.

Change the language back.

Click Apply.

Click Okay.

Spell Check the document.

I had a two hour long call the other night at work.

I do Tech support, by the way. For notebooks.

Anyway, I got this older gentleman on the phone and we started talking. He has an issue with his TV Tuner card: It won’t work the way it used to.

I pulled up the troubleshooter for tuner cards because I don’t know much about them, and quickly set to work trying to fix his issue.

The long and short of it is that we had to uninstall the drivers, re-install the drivers, and then use it in QuickPlay. Thing is he wanted to use it in Windows Media Center. That’s fine, we’ve got a thing for that, too. I actually tried to walk him through that before QuickPlay because that’s what he was wanting to use. However, he kept getting an error, something about needing an IR Control Cable.

The IR Control Cable connects to the back of the Cable box or satellite box and lets your laptop change channels for you. He didn’t have one of those, though.

This wouldn’t normally be a problem, I’d have told him, “Sir, you need that cable in order to use that with Windows Media Center.” and that would have normally solved that situation.

A little back information: He’d once sent his laptop in for service at one of our Repair Centers. When he got it back, he set the system up just like he had it before. Before he sent it into us, Windows Media Center worked just fine for watching his TV Shows without that IR Control Cable. Now, however, that he got it back, it no longer worked.

I have no clue why it won’t install/work properly in WMC without the IR Control Cable, but I do know that it’ll work in QuickPlay without worrying about it.

So I got it working for him. The guy was really nice, too. He used to work for Intel making the equipment that checked the chips. He did maintenance on them and such. Even though I had a headache by the end of the call, I was pretty happy with the overall conversation.

They need about 23k a day in 2008 to meet sales expectations of 10million. I doubt they’ll get that. That’s an increase of (roughly) 3k units a day.

There are a few reasons I don’t see that happening. A.) They think that they’ll get 1% of the overall market. That’s pretty nuts in and of itself for a single phone to do.

Secondly, they want to nab up about 50% of the smartphone market. That’s incredibly insane; the fact that they have 20% is already pushing it. Their company just got record numbers and they’re saying that they won’t be able to match anything near that in the next quarter.

So a decline in sales.

Instead of a surge of sales.

And they’re expecting to meet quota.

Does anyone else see how that logic fails?

I mentioned this days before Macworld happened to my friends as we were talking about various different things. (Including some D&D content I’ll be releasing later.)

The thing is, part of this can be blamed on the economy. But only part. Most of this needs to be shouldered by the people who put so much into Macworld.

They made unreasonable expectations, and then Apple said, “Oh, yeah, we’re going mediocre this year.” and they did just that.

The iPhone was cool. The Macbook wasn’t s’much. (Still sleek lookin’, though.)

To be honest, I’m glad, but that’s just me.

I didn’t like the idea when AOL was doing it.

I don’t like it now.

If this is what their company wants to do, though, that’s their business.

I honestly think it’ll lose them a lot of customers, but that’s just me. (Both Apple and Time Warner.)

All the guys on DIGG were shouting up a storm about it, though. Some of them were even blaming Comcast for their issues in defense of their favourite ISP’s. I wonder if any of these guys understands that rampant fanboi actions make them appear like morons?

Oh, right. They’re fanbois. They -are- morons. My bad!

Peter Parker and Mary Jane are calling it quits. Actually this wasn’t today’s news, but I didn’t get to read it yesterday. In a move specifically designed to shake up the comic book world.

I love Spider-Man dearly, but I think that the reactions to this have been overblown. Sure, I like a movie to stick with continuity to some extent, but there’s a reason movies can stick to continuity and new stories have to change continuity.

All in all, I think people are making a big deal out of nothing.

Next on our plate we have the MacBook air! The latest in thin Notebooks, the Apple MacBook Air sacrifices things like an optical drive, firewire/ethernet ports for a sleek looking design.

It incorporates the features that made the iPhone popular on the MacBook, just not in the same way. No touch-screen, like everyone was hoping.

Some MacFanatics tried to justify the price-drop that day as a result of the rest of the market dropping, but it followed, (and continues to,) the tradition of other MacWorld Keynotes. Everyone jumps ship for a bit.

Steve Jobs called Robbie of Microsoft a drunk, all for supporting his product. Good way to make good press. Good thing Microsoft doesn’t attack you guys the way you attack them. You’d be all up in arms about how they were trying to stifle the ‘little guy’. I guess when you’re the top dog you have to get used to people throwing punches at you constantly.

This basically mirrors exactly what I had to say about the MacBook Air when I heard about it: It’s pretty much a useless piece of equipment that looks pretty. Basically, Apple is trying to go the way of Cell Phones: if it looks good, it’ll sell. It’s a fashion statement that is meant to make you look cool and superior to everyone else.

Speaking of the holier-than-thou attitude… Well, I loled at it. It’s pretty much the truth. I deal with Mac users semi-regularly. One of them is pretty modest about it, and doesn’t try to tell me Windows sucks. The others, though…

Well, lets just say that I can’t get through a single conversation with them without hearing how great something is on a Mac and how crap it would be on Windows.

Also, Steve Jobs, apparently, snubbed someone asking for a picture. Well, I guess when you have a lot of money, you can afford to be a jerk. (Oh, wait, Hi there Mr. Gates!)

This fuckin’ thing caught my eye immediately. My first thought? Terminator meets Gumby. (Don’t ask me why.) All I can say is that I’d love to take that thing out for a spin… And I know just which of my friends I would use it on. >=D

Google announced some sexy ideas in the way the Internet is used to garner information. Gone will be the days of “I wiki’d it” in Internet dog-fights. Instead you’ll be able to “knol” it to get the information you want.

I personally like Wikipedia, but I also think that the anonymity through which posting is capable leads to spamming more often than not; it also makes any article available subject to being ‘brushed off’ because anybody could edit it. I know a guy who used to run around spamming every Wikipedia article he could with disinformation because he thought it was “funny”.

Hopefully Knol will manage to fix that.

Dreamhost fucked their clients over, and unlike a night out with an extremely limber girl, it doesn’t seem to be well received. Why? Because $7.5 million dollars worth of over-billing is kinda hard to swallow for most people.

I know I’d be pissed off. But that’s just me.

Amazon.com did something customer friendly recently by spending between €30,000 and €31,000 a month to ship free stuff to France.

I think this is a pretty good trend, but I don’t think it’ll last. If the French Government decides to, they can raise this penalty every month to make the book selling giant go, “Oh, shit. No more free shipping to you, France!”

I’m sorry if you live in France.

Oh, more Apple stuff. The MacBook Air was meant to make environmentalists get off of Steve Jobs’s back. It didn’t seem to do too much, though it does seem to be a step in the right direction.

The letter he wrote last year about this entire situation with Greanpeace didn’t really seem like a good idea to me. Sure, he says he’s been doing a lot, but he didn’t know about it. Not to mention he was saying it in comparison to other’s in the business, (Dell was mentioned a lot.)

I can sum it up in a few words:

“Hey, we’re not as bad as those guys over there, stop picking on me!”

Stop touting yourself (undeservedly) as the ‘biggest name in innovation’ and people will stop looking to you for innovation and change.

Duh.

This watch might have made my pants shrink a little bit. Maybe.

It’s pretty cool, and I’d be seen sporting one, (if it comes in black.) It seems like a genuinely interesting watch that’s easy to use and understand. Hats off to it.

I’ll probably do some political stuff later. Thanks for reading!

As of this day, Sun Microsystems declared that they were buying MySQL AB, the company that develops and manages the popular open-source MySQL database, for about $1 billion in total monetary value. ($800m cash, $200m in stock options)

For those who don’t know, MySQL is one of the cornerstones of the web, the M in LAMP, the main webserver configuration used by much of the internet. (LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

This surprised me, and I’ve got mixed feelings about the deal, but overall, there’s not much better of an entity to do so, off the top of my head. After all, Sun manages some of the largest O/S projects. They handle the entire Java Virtual Machine, OpenOffice.org, and the NetBeans Java framework.

OpenOffice.org, especially, is an excellent display of Sun’s contribution to the Open Source community. (And, of course, to those of us who just love the freebies!) Being a completely free alternative to Microsoft Office, I use it myself. It doesn’t have all the top features and there are some rough edges, but on the whole it’s excellent. Granted, some people would place Java above OO.o there, but Java was only recently open sourced, and I’m personally not a huge fan of the system – however useful it may be for many people. Hey, it all depends on how you look at it, right?

In any case, this deal has only just been announced – it hasn’t actually taken effect yet. The acquisition is supposed to finalize in the third or fourth quarter of Sun’s fiscal year, which ends on June 30th, 2008.

References:
http://mysql.com/news-and-events/sun-to-acquire-mysql.html
http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/01/16/sun-acquires-mysql/
http://blogs.mysql.com/kaj/2008/01/16/talking-to-mysql-founders-monty-and-david-on-sun/
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

Seems to be the common name for what people assume is coming at MacWorld 08.

It seems like a pretty unwieldy name to me; but if that’s what works for’em. Apparently Wired Magazine got ‘inside information’ about the design of the product, (and then made up some images of it in Photoshop.)

I dunno why everyone’s hyping up about this too much, though; it doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal to have a ‘thin notebook’; everyone else has them already, Apple just finally got on board.