The week in reYou

A look at the week in Talkback...

John O'Grady had an interesting test comparing the temperatures of Apple's Core Duo and Core 2 Duo laptops. O'Grady found the Core 2 Duo ran significantly cooler than its predecessor.
Swoopee asked:

While your holiday bird is safe to eat at 165°F, what temperature is the Core 2 Duo safe to eat?

Given his wealth, Gates can probably do more good for the world if he stays out of office. Once elected, he becomes part of a highly restricted machine, filled with checks and balances, corruption, compromised agendas. If he remains a free agent, he gets to do what he wants, especially because he can pay for it himself, rather than asking Congress for funds.

That said, I don't understand the appeal of a big businessman as a leader for our country. Sticking with Gates as your example, yes, he did do a great job with Microsoft, but really, who was he helping out there? Big money corporations, and wealthy stockholders were the beneficiaries of his actions. The rest of us, the voting public, were never the recipients of the benefits of Microsoft's successes. MS continually compromised our user experience. Moving our computing ability forward was never MS' priority--selling us things and profiting was their priority.

Richard MacManus commented on the increasing functionality on Web office widgets and Flexewebs had this to say:

"Widgets and flakes are a bit of a time waster, as there is no real proper use for them. Why would one want to have a note pad in a form of a widget really?
In the long term you end up getting together a pile of unsorted notes somewhere from where you usually can't make much use of them.

Widget to Writely? Why? Why not just use Writely. Half of the time I find the actual Writely screen too small for document editing, let alone widget window.

Clock, calendar, power meter, etc. Don't see a point in those as they are just fancy looking widgets that show me what I already know about my computer and don't offer much of the new functionality.

I installed widgets from Google at one point and found them, overall, a waste of time.

I noted how Dell said its customer service was improving. ibabadur1 begged to differ:

Customer service? Yeah right. Called those clowns yesterday and they refused to sell me additional hot swap trays for a 1.5 year old server. They only sell hard drives that include the trays. The reason cited is that the "special" screws aren't included so they don't sell just the trays.

They even gave me the phone number of a completely different company that would sell just the trays.

It was one of those twilight zone moments......

I don't think I'll be buying servers any more from a company that won't even sell extra parts for them.

I also highlighted CIO Insight's top 30 trends for 2007 and lamented CIOs' eternal quest for business alignment. JonathonDoe said:

"Sadly, the real insight here is that CIO's don't have any real insight into what's going wrong with their field and with their businesses."

Meanwhile, the Novell-Microsoft Linux pact turned into a spitting match in record time. David Berlind blogged on how the relationship was getting ugly. And GoPower said:

"Anyone dumb enough to make a deal with Microsoft deserves whatever the outcome becomes. They're the sandbox bullies, better not to play in their cat litter box."

When Matthew Miller asked if the press was being too harsh on Microsoft's Zune. Mikataur had this to say:

"The Zune has indeed been widely criticized, but it isn't only the inevitable comparison with the iPod. I thought it was most telling that on the recent Engadget podcast (and those kids know their gadgets!), Peter Rojas and Ryan Block, who are at most ambivalent about the iPod if not actually hostile to it, actually said that they wouldn't recommend buying either a Zune OR an iPod this Christmas. Instead, they'd buy a SanDisk Sansa, which they consider the current best of breed of MP3 players in terms of design, convenience and function. I think that's a clue to the problem with the Zune: it's an iPod wannabe, but what is most successful about the iPod is it's reputation, which is simply not achievable without actually being better than an iPod. There are other products that in many ways are better, and by extension more worthwhile than the Zune."

Russell Shaw examined the impact of online gaming without Net neutrality. The picture wasn't pretty. Keeping Hands Off said:

"Net neutrality regulations are bad for the gamers out there and a two-tiered system will ensure that the applications run seamlessly without interruption. These are exactly the types of applications that will be hurt by net neutrality. There is no sign that the gaming industry is slowing but forced regulations that aren't warranted will sadly put the breaks on it."

Mary Jo Foley surfaced some of the developer issues with Vista and Office 2007 and No_Ax_to_Grind said:

"Microsoft (Ballmer) yells "developers, developers, developers" and didn't seem to have the first clue what developers wanted or needed."

Foley struck again by noting Office 2007 had a kill switch and Pagan Jim wondered:

"Hmmmmm what if someone wrote a virus that activates the Kill switch? I don't know I just find the whole idea of a "Kill Switch" to be a bit off putting. After all what "IF" MS decides to do something like a change to "Pay as you go" use of Office? What can we say to that? It's pay or get the ole KILL switch. Too much power I tend to think."

 Thanks for participating.