I just saw a national TV ad for LG which makes my cell phone. I picked this brand cause it was the least expensive available.
In the ad they said: "LG Life's Good" "LG Digital Appliances"
I'm evaluating the Mariner Calc spreadsheet program. It touts itself as a good substitute for Excel. I don't exactly want to replace Excel. But freeing myself from the Microsoft Office monopoly would be OK with me.
My preliminary estimate is good. It seems to open my everyday Excel files OK. It seems to have all the features I use all the time.
More later.
Andy Carvin is blogging the MIT Emerging Tech conference. His coverage of Tim Berners-Lee's keynote is the best description I've seen of The Semantic Web.
TidBITS has a very good overview of the tools and techniques for improving your digital photographs.
Q: What is woot and who's behind it?
A: woot.com is an online store and community run by the employees of a 10 year old consumer electronics distributor that focuses on close-outs and generally buying stuff cheap. Since the distributor doesn’t sell to end users, Woot, Inc provides us with an employee-store slash market-testing type of place. Hopefully the boss won’t take notice. We anticipate profitability by 2043 -- by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices.
Q: I see only 1 item, do you sell anything else?
A: No. We sell 1 item per day until it is sold out or until 11:59pm central time when it is replaced (see next entry for details). However, each item we sell is in stock and ready to ship that day. Our warehouse manager thinks we are insane.
[Thanks j-walk]
I'm up here in Warren Vermont visiting my brother and his family for the weekend. Nearby Waitsfield is the home of Small Dog Electronics, a Macintosh retailer and customer service company. They have a local "store", and a very active presence on the net.
I was reading in the local paper here that Small Dog has been selected as one of America's "Best Bosses".
Located in sleepy Waitsfield, Vt. (pop. 1,525), Small Dog Electronics hardly seems a company likely to survive a brutal, industrywide shakeout. On any given day as many as 18 of its employees' dogs roam the hallways, plop on comfy sofas, or lounge in dog beds under workers' desks. CEO Don Mayer, 55, and his 32-year-old son and partner, Hapy, shower workers with costly perks such as free weekly massages, guaranteed personal loans from a local bank, profit sharing, and health insurance for their pooches. On days when business is slow, workers are free to hike trails or ski—on the clock.
Wall Street Journal's Tech Guru, Walt Mossberg, really likes the new Mac.
I am writing these words on the most elegant desktop computer I've ever used, a computer that is not only uncommonly beautiful but fast and powerful, virus-free and surprisingly affordable.
Interesting interview at BroadcastNewsroom.com with Frank Governale, Vice President, News Technology & Broadcast Operations at CBS about their progress and plans for digital-only video for their news operations.
...and it's not just the technicians and the people who conventionally edited, it's the writers who we're going to ask to be able to cut their own voice-overs; it's the producers that we're going to ask be able to put together EDLs [edit decision lists], or at least these "pitch reels", as we call them, to cull some of the material before it actually gets into the finishing rooms. We want to keep the high-powered rooms as efficient as possible, doing things that they need to do versus some of the simpler stuff that can be done elsewhere.
[Thanks unmediated.org]
Whenever Bill Gates defended MS in the antitrust wars, by saying Microsoft's lead could go away at any time, we always figured it was just a way to distract attackers. But what if it's true?
CNet is reporting that MS Internet Explorer is losing user-share.
W3Schools.com, a Web development tutorial site, found that 18 percent of its visitors in September used Mozilla-based browsers, compared with 8 percent in January. Internet Explorer use dropped to 75 percent from 84 percent in the same period.Among CNET News.com readers, site visitors using Mozilla and Firefox jumped to 18 percent for the first two weeks of September, from 8 percent in January.
Jim Heid writes at MacCentral about which audio format you should use when Importing your CDs.
So which one should you use?Each format offers a different compromise between file size, sound quality, and compatibility. The key to picking the right format for your digital music library is to find the compromise that best suits the way you listen to music. Here’s a look at the current encoding options built into iTunes 4.5 and the situations that call for each one. I’ll also examine options for converting songs from one format to another.
One of the Macs that I support is an iMac running OS 10.1. Because Safari doesn't run on that system I had set up Mozilla as the browser. But the latest version was crashing a lot. So I decided to give a different browser a try.
I had heard good things about Firefox, but I was concerned that it wouldn't run on the older OS, but my fears were unfounded.
Firefox, a Mozilla related browser, runs very nicely on the machine. Installation was painless, it even imported all my Mozilla bookmarks without any problem. The screens draw fast, and the the look and feel of its controls are pleasing.
In fact, I'm so happy with FF on the 10.1 machine, that I've installed it on my own Mac, and I may be on the verge of leaving Safari behind.
More later.
Engadget is reporting that Yahoo! is about to expand into the consumer hardware biz.
No official confirmation on this, but a well-placed inside source tells us that Yahoo will be branching out in a big way soon with a line of consumer electronics which should be announced sometime within the next two weeks. The initial line up is supposedly a portable DVD player, two LCD televisions, and a home theater in a box system.
I'm not at all convinced this story is accurate, but even if it is, I don't see where Yahoo! has ever shown that they have the brand identity or business expertise to expand into a fundamentally different business. Online info is VERY different from consumer electronics.
Brand extension is almost always a failure. You can't take a brand-name that is successful in one product area, and apply it to a different area. The classic example was Lysol's attempt to put their well-known name on a line of air fresheners.