As I sit here in my comfy couch with my "The Register" white polo shirt on today I read Andrew Orlowski's article about Apple and iTunes . And I basically disagree with almost everything in it. Which isn't surprising, I usually disagree on such matters mainly because I'm a greedy bastard capitalist while he's more in touch with feelings of an almost human nature. His article basically makes three points: Apple's iTunes isn't netting Apple any money. It's a loss leader use...

Boy was Matrix Revolutions great! I mean, that scene with Agent Smith as a human making his way to the Zion main frame. It really pulled it together in seeing why he wanted into that mainframe and how it was his ticket out of there. That big battle between Neo and the ghost twins. Now THAT is why he's "The one".  Once you free your mind there's nothing you can't do. Seeing them phasing into other dimensions in their battle was just incredible and I loved the way the world shimmered as Neo ...

I'm so far behind on so many things. I also have a bunch of topics to cover. I have a fun article about Hydrogen fuel cells and the problems they have. Short answer: We're not going to have hydrogen fuel cells any time soon. Sorry. The Matrix Revolutions was spectacularly crappy. Shockingly bad. I have two huge projects in front of me to get working on that is on top of all our existing projects. One on the business unit and the other for the games unit. I need to find us a bigger buildin...

If The Matrix was a 9 or 10 and Reloaded was maybe a 7. Then Matrix Revolutions is a 3 or 4. Worst movie I've paid to see at a theatre in a long time. But I say that with a big caveat. No set of movies had built up expectations like The Matrix. Movies like "The One" that came out a year or two ago weren't any better than this. But the Matrix, and the story behind it, had been hyped up beyond belief. A lot of the problem appears to me to be one of editing. A few extra scenes, a few scenes...

What is it with left-wing zealots and the word "lie". It really gets under my skin. For liberals, it seems, conservatives never make mistakes. Oh no. Conservatives aren't, you know, actually human. And so whenever a conservative makes a statement that turns out to be wrong, it isn't that he was mistaken, it is that he lied. Al Franken has made this into a mini-career with books like "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". Sure, other zealots on the left like him will eat...

Little discussed feature about the IBM Thinkpad T40. The Fn-space bar combo will instantly switch the resolution to a the next lower one. this is great when you are browsing the web and want the text nice and big. Just one of the many handy features that makes the Thinkpads rule.

ActiveWin has an article that compares MacOS X to Windows XP. There are a lot of good points in the article and a lot of his findings are based on pretty solid and reasonable analysis. But I take issue with an underlying "ground rule" with a lot of these comparisons -- he is comparing what comes with Windows XP with what comes with MacOS X. Considering that a Mac machine costs a great deal more than a comparable Windows machine, I think a more fair comparison is to look at what ...

Log of Microsoft/Neowin/Stardock chat regarding PDC and Longhorn.. On the last day of the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, Stardock's Brad Wardell, Jed and Jana from Microsoft and Creamhackered from Neowin hosted a Neowin.net live chat to answer questions and provide information on Longhorn, the next version of Windows due out in 2006. Introduction: [Brad Wardell] This week is PDC. This is a show where Microsoft is showing off the big technologies in Longhorn. [Brad Wardel...

Today was the 4th and final day of the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in LA. If you were there, things were a lot quieter than previously. Most sessions had to do with creating software with all the new goodies. There's a myriad of new techs to make it both easier for the developer and more convenient for the user with regards to software. There's what I believe was called "One-Click" which, all hype around it is really about trying to make it much cleaner to use software on yo...

Over as OSNews.com they linked to my article on the PDC.  OSNews.com is one of my favorite sites but it tends to have more than its fair share of "Wannabes". That is, developers who are probably pretty good but exceed their reach by making software development judges beyond their experience. Linux users in particular fall prey to this. But it's not that specific to a platform. What amazes me is how Linux/Apple advocates try to put down what Microsoft is trying to do with Long...

Today was the third day of Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC). The day was mostly broken up into sessions where developers could learn more about specific technologies. Today I'll talk about two of those technologies into more detail. Now, my understanding about the advantages of some of this is sketchy and incomplete since we are, after all, talking about an OS that won't ship for 3 years.  Anyway, those two technologies are: WinFS and managed code in the form of the AP...

I have quite a few portable MP3 players and each one has its pros and cons.  For those of you who like to listen to music when you work out, the Sports MP3 player available at CoolNewGadgets.Com might be exactly what you're looking for. This portable MP3 player also plays .WMA files as well (though it doesn't seem to play Digital Rights Managed WMA files -- i.e. ones you buy) and holds 128MB of memory.  The main selling point of this is that it is just a headset.  So when I...

Today was the second day of the Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) where Microsoft is showing off some of the technologies that will make up the next version of Windows code-named Longhorn (due out in 3 years). And there's some really exciting stuff from a developer's point of view. There's so much to digest that it's hard to get handle on exactly what all the goals are. This is my interpretation of events but I think they're pretty on target in this case.  Microsoft is moving...

PDC, for Professional Developer's Conference, is designed for developers (i.e. nerdy people like me). It's where Microsoft is going to show off the cool stuff that it has in store for developers in the coming years. What I'm going to try to do is explain what is happening and how it affects regular users. The things being shown today will one day be things everyone has to live with. Today was the first day.A lot of what was shown today at PDC is hard to describe since it was so visually oriented...

Do you hear that flush? It is the sound of the Sci-Fi channel taking the potential fan base support of Battlestar Galactica and sending it down to the nether regions.  The more I hear about it, the more convinced I am that it is going to suck.  Not suck in a slightly disappointing way but suck in such a massive way that in 10 years we'll look back and put it up there with Star Trek 5 and Battlestar Galactic 1980 as chapters in science fiction that we feel required to forget about. T...