Many thanks to Patrick for pointing me to the unofficial Get Fuzzy feed. I can now get my daily dose delivered right to my desk.
Category: Tech
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New ship it!
It has been a long time since the PC world migrated away from churning out beige boxes, but major manufacturers have been slow to adopt industrial design standards which can keep up with clean, well-thought-out hardware produced by Apple. There have been periodic flashes of inspiration from Sony and Shuttle, the results, however, have been inconsistent.
With the advent of the Intel-based Mac, speculation of Windows running on an Apple Macintosh has, of course, abounded. With Apple’s latest announcement of “Boot Camp”, an app which allow an Intel-based Mac to dual boot to Windows and Mac OS, we’re sure to see increased adoption of the Mac platform. Users who are willing to pay the premium price of a Mac will no longer have to worry about the issues of incompatibility with the business world.
Seriously, which computer do you thing a grownup is going to buy? (Sorry Michael Dell)
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But… that’s just not possible!
I never thought I’d see it happen… but it did.
One of my compact flash cards failed.
Nothing strange happened. No shocks, no static electricity, no driving over it with a car (Rob). Took ten pictures. Downloaded them. Took three more. Poof.
I think from now on I’ll carry an extra flash card or two when I travel.
Ok, I admit it, smart women make my nerd beanie spin. Brains wins over cheesecake, no doubt about it. If, however, someone tells you smarts and style are incompatible you can give them your best Urkle laugh and walk away.
Here’s a cool thing, laptop bags just for women.
While I may have ridiculed the idea someone would want to put their cell phone in a briefcase pocket which blocks out incoming RF (and, presumably, incoming calls) I do have to commend Mobile Edge for spotting a need: laptop bags which don’t look like laptop bags.
To be sure my super-powered geek-vision wasn’t clouding the issue, I checked with my better 50% (who is a history geek, band geek and photogenic fashion plate). The verdict? Paula agrees, these are great looking bags.
Check out Mobile Edge’s line of women’s bags. If I were a woman (or cross-dresser) I’d totally go right out and buy one of these.
“Microsoft is not even a bad guy… you know… they want to be even more like Apple.”
– Steve Wozniak (from This Week in Tech, 3/5/2006)
According to Reuters, a Chinese Journalist, Li Yuanlong was charged with Subversion for sending e-mails via a Hotmail account. The indictment did not come, however, with help from Microsoft. The wife of the journalist was told by Chinese officials that her husband was arrested for e-mails sent via a Hotmail account, but it is unclear how the Chinese officials came by the information they used to charge Yuanlong. Unlike the case where Yahoo was accused of handing over a dissident’s information to Chinese officials, Microsoft and Hotmail were not the source of the information leading to the arrest.
On a related note, this freedom of speech issue keeps coming back in the news and each time the articles point out that MS closed a Space (blog) last year at the request of the Chinese government. The reports always fail to mention, however, that the MSN Spaces team hated that action and built a solution… Spaces now has adjusted their filtering so it is dependent on the country of the user (see MC’s post for more detail), allowing them to adjust the filtering to align more closely to local standards.
More info:
The story Reuters published yesterday did not have details from Microsoft at the time of publishing. A follow up story today clarifies the MS position with comments from a Microsoft spokesperson.
CNN: the most trusted name in news? Must be on the web, because television is loosing ground to the Internet as a trusted source for information. From that I segue gracefully into… the Edelman trust barometer found Microsoft is the most trusted name in business.
The Edelman Trust Barometer found Microsoft Corporation the most trusted global company, followed by iconic companies in their home markets, including Toyota in Japan, Haier in China, Samsung in South Korea, and Petrobras in Brazil.
I think MS is a great place to work, and having the company get this type of recognition feels good (especially for someone who used to be a closet MS employee). I realize that Edelman is a PR firm which counts MS as one of its biggest clients, but this was, after all, a survey.
While I led off with the fun part of the survey… for me this is the really interesting part:
In the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.
In other words, most people in the US find the average employee is a more trust-worthy spokesman than the CEO. Any connection to the surge in blogging? It’s pretty hard to preen cause from effect here but I, for one, am hugely thankful for the change in culture at Microsoft which made it possible for employees like me to feel comfortable blogging in relative freedom about our work.
I suppose that brings me back to the beginning… perhaps the trust in Microsoft will not be limited to a single survey or a fleeting one-year occurrence. With any luck, as more people are able to get a glimpse of the people working at Microsoft and the pride they have in their work, the world will realize that for us it’s really about building cool software, not crushing your enemies and seeing them driven before you. While our moniker of “the evil empire” is something I look on with amusement, it’s not a nickname I view with pride.
For a deeper dive on the topic of what can happen for company trust when the employees step out from behind the protective shadow of a company’s CEO and PR machine I recommend you check out Richard Edelman’s essay The Me2 Revolution on his blog.
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A place to get your help on
The support team for Windows Live Mail has put up a new blog with a bunch of great information for users (and prospective users) of the Windows Live Mail Beta. There are answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs), common problems and known issues.
Check it out, I give it a 
I just posted to the team blog about upcoming improvements to the Windows Live Mail beta. The languages we were hoping to roll out back in December should be coming out very soon. If they’re not out by the end of this month, I’ll eat…
… um …
… this tasty, fresh Twinkie snack cake (aw heck, I’m just being realistic, this is software, after all, and the wind can shift direction without warning).
At any rate, the English speakers in Canada should be happy to know that they’ll soon be able to join the crowd from the UK, US and AU. As soon as we roll out French for Canada we’ll also be able to roll out English (we want to be fair, after all).
So if you’re on the list, be patient, we’re upgrading servers as fast as we can. If you’re not on the list, what the heck are you waiting for? Get over to http://ideas.live.com and sign up!
And now, a picture of my dog cross-bred with a Brewer’s Blackbird:
