Wednesday, June 25, 2008

NBC To Offer Complete Olympics Online — But Only To Windows Vista

Oh, this is rich. For the first time, NBC (which owns rights for the U.S. television market) will offer complete video of the Summer Olympic Games online. Yay! The service, dubbed, "NBC Olympics on the Go" will be available only for users of Microsoft's Vista Home Premium and Ultimate operating systems. Say what?!

But the new service is available only to computers running Microsoft's (MSFT) Vista operating system — a limitation that leaves out millions of Windows XP and Apple (AAPL) Mac users as well as those using mobile devices such as iPods and mobile phones. And only two flavors of Vista — Home Premium and Ultimate — have the Media Center component necessary for running NBC's software. That eliminates most business notebooks.
So, uh, it eliminates all the people who don't have Vista or who have downgraded to XP or who didn't pony up for Premium or Ultimate or who actually might be "on the go" during the games?

It doesn't even look like Microsoft paid for the exclusive. Are these people really this astronomically stupid?

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

A Misconfigured Laptop, a Wrecked Life

Heads up to anyone who works somewhere that has an acceptable use policy for computers (which should be everywhere, but that's another story altogether). Here's a great reason why computer users would be wise to learn a little bit more about using a computer than just what they need to do for their jobs.

And it's an even stronger admonition to IT administrators that circumstances should be throughly investigated before accusations are leveled and action taken.

Don't let this happen to you.

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Firefox 3 Brings Ugliness to the Mac

Firefox does not use Cocoa controls. However when they tried to copy the OS X buttons they must apparantly made a few mistakes, because the buttons does not look anything like the OS X buttons. And as soon as a few effects are added it just gets worse and worse.... It’s not Windows, it’s not OS X and it’s not Linux. It’s something else.
Today might be Firefox 3 Download Day, but I'm not sure how excited I am to install it now that I've read this summary of the UI irregularities in the version for Mac OS. I haven't used any of the betas, so I'm sure I'll go ahead and download today's release just to check it out. But still, what are they thinking?

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Monday, June 16, 2008

Apple's open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web

SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications
Say hello to Cocoa apps for Windows and Linux. Kiss Flash good-bye.

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Sunday, June 15, 2008

IE8 development: Microsoft should learn from Apple, Mozilla

Ars gives the latest rundown on Microsoft's development of Internet Explorer 8 and the challenge they face in dealing with their past inattention to standards compliance. At least standards compliance appears to remain a top objective of this next release.

To stop losing ground to Firefox and Safari, Internet Explorer needs to stand head and shoulders above both of them. But with Microsoft's lack of clear objectives, infrequent releases, and poor communication, IE8 will be struggling to even achieve parity with its competitors.

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GPS Manufacturers Should Be Very, Very Scared

Apple is bringing a faster, sleeker 3G iPhone to market—and it's the end of the portable GPS market as we know it.
Obvious assessment or not, Slate offers a concise analysis of why you should only be selling Garmin short and possibly be considering an investment on Tom Tom.

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