Scores of people have been complaining (Digg users mainly, no surprise there) about the 3D dock in Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. Well, you whiners are lucky. According to MonkeyBites, there’s an option to use a “classic dock.” It’s not an exact replica of the Tiger dock, but close enough. It has a cool transparent-black background instead of the blue from Tiger.

Here’s a screenshot.

Verizon is suing the FCC over the 700MHz open-access requirements. Verizon says “Imposing any such requirements in the competitive wireless market would reduce the revenue the government will receive from the spectrum auction and limit the introduction of new and innovative wireless services.” Yeah, and I’m Bill Gates. Who cares if the government is receiving more revenue from the 700MHz spectrum? And how do the requirements “limit the introduction of new and innovative wireless services?” The open-access requirements increase the introduction of new services by keeping telecom companies like Verizon from controlling the band.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Viacom, Real, Napster, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Sandisk, and other companies are being sued by some lunatic “company” that patented the concept of playlists. Oh, and “Premier International Associates” has no company history prior to the lawsuits. How the heck did they get the patent in the first place?

The average consumer thinks of a computer as yet another appliance. To non-geeks it is another device similar to a TV or a CD Player. It’s used for gaming, email, and basic internet usage.

The computer is not an appliance though. It’s a medium. Computers are just another way of storing an manipulating data. You read magazines, sent snail mail messages, played cassette tapes, and edited video with a razor and adhesive. Now you read blogs, send email, play MP3s, and edit video with Adobe Premier. It’s just another way of doing things.

At the same time, computers are more than that. So what is a computer? It’s a medium, and a bit more, but it’s not an appliance.

Did you know the top 5 countries with the fastest broadband are Japan, Sweden, Latvia, Romania, and Bulgaria? How fast is your broadband? Your ISP may tell you that you’ve got “1.5mb/sec”, but that’s a theoretic maximum. It’s unlikely your speed is that fast. Also, that theoretic “1.5 megabits per second” is just the download speed. How fast can you upload files? There’s a 99.9999999% chance that it’s nowhere near the download speed (think 1/5 to 1/4 of the download speed).

How fast is your connection? Find out at SpeedTest.net. Just choose a server and it will conduct a couple of tests. Your download and upload speeds will be outputted at the end, along with the latency (important if your a gamer).

My ISP advertises 1MB/sec download speeds (and it costs $45!), and I was amazed to get the following result from SpeedTest.net

Note that the speed will vary depending on several factors, such as how many other users are online.

Will we all use thought-controlled computers in the future? I think not…

Thought-based input would be cool, but there’s no way it would work. Sure, you have some early attempts, like the Project Epoc game helmet, but there’s no way you could write an email/blog post/book/etc with your mind. If the text you’re putting onscreen comes directly from your mind, hmmm… I should get some more coffee you will likely have unwanted thoughts mixed-in.

Obviously “mind-reading” computers aren’t a good idea. Now, what was that I was going to write next? Hmm…. What was it? Oh, yeah… Voice recognition systems aren’t much better. Suppose you’re dictating to your computer (which sounds like fun). Someone walks into the room and says “you haven’t saved that yet? Be careful not to close the window.” You lose an hour of work that you forgot to save. After all, it’s much easier to save your document by pressing Ctrl-S than by saying “File…Save.”

I’m not bashing dictation software, but merely pointing out that it does have some downsides. As for thought-input? Forget it.

What the heck is an “LOLCat”? Sometimes called “Cat Macros,” LOLCats are pictures of cats with captions, generally in that annoying chatspeek. There’s even a blog consisting only of LOLCats….and it’s the top blog on Wordpress.com. Yeah, kind of dorky.

Most LOLCats are really stupid, though they instantly become funny if they’re related to computers. Examples: (more…)

YES! The Microsoft Empire isn’t about to double in size! Yahoo has turned down Microsoft’s offer for a $50 billion merger. Yahoo claims that competing is “more productive” than merging. It looks like The Tyrant’s outreach from the offline world to the web has been postponed. Take that, Microsoft.

According to Mozilla, we’ll be seeing Firefox 3 sometime in the last quarter of the year. Take that, Microsoft! It’s amusing that a group of volunteers can build an amazing browser (the best on the planet ) that quickly, while a team of paid engineers working for the World’s Biggest Software Company takes five years for a mediocre product that’s still nothing compared to Firefox.

In Firefox 3, we’ll see security improvements, support for off-line web apps, some “identity management tools”, and a revamped bookmarking system known as “Places”. Uh oh, “revamped”? I don’t like the sound of that…

I hope they don’t go polluting the browser with rubbish I don’t need. Why would I want “support for off-line web apps”? I have broadband! I’m pretty much never offline. What they really need to do is make it load faster. As for bookmarks, they work pretty well right now, but they’re kind of…out of hand. I tend to just through everything in the root of the bookmarks folder. I need to get around to sorting through my bookmarks. IT’s hard to find anything without using the search in the Bookmarks Sidebar.

In the future, will we still have desktops and laptops? What if we all had something different, something better(?). What if we all carried around, in our pockets, a device about the size of an iPod or Blackberry. What if this device was a whole computer? You’d be able to access the web at any time where ever you went. A pocket computer wouldn’t be able to replace the ease of use of a desktop though, right? Who says? We could have docking stations consisting of a monitor, keyboard, mouse, extra storage, and other add-ons and peripherals. You’d just plug the pocket computer in and you’d instantly have something resembling a desktop machine. There could even be laptop-sized docks for people who need more power on the go. There would be docking stations all over the place. Where you now find a public computer, you’d find a dock. Libraries, workplaces, internet cafes, you name it.

There would be docking stations all over the place.

This would be really cool, but only viable if you could fit the power of a desktop into a puny package. It may be doable though. Look at the processor industry lately. They’ve been making chips cooler and more energy efficient instead of faster. They’ve been doing more cores instead of a higher clock speed. Everything is being made smaller as time goes by, and the computer companies are trying to fit more into less space (the iMac is a prime example).

Will the pocket computer become as ubiquitous as a wallet?

Do we want our future computers to be like this? It depends. If it’s pulled off correctly, it would be great. However, I think a lot of people would still prefer to have just a desktop or laptop instead of a computer they carry with them. Will the pocket computer become as ubiquitous as a wallet?

Originally posted on March 12, 2007 on redwallhp.ntugo.com.

In no particular order, here are 10 things you don’t want to hear Bill Gates say:

1. “The next Windows release will require a credit card number at activation, and will automatically bill you at the start of every month.”
2. “A name has been decided on for ‘Codename Vienna’. It will be Windows Mirage.”
3. “You don’t have to worry about adware being installed without permission anymore. Now the advertisers go through us. Your hourly pop-up ad will be delivered through Windows itself instead of a hazardous adware program.”
4. “Since no one liked our talking paperclip in Microsoft Office, we’re giving Internet Explorer a talking donut.”
5. “What, Firefox 3 is out? Send out the Orcs!”
6. “Google had good luck with the ‘invitation only’ approach, so we’re doing the same thing with Hotmail. To get an account you have to either get an invitation from an existing user or bring us a shrubbery.”
7. “We got so many comments about Windows XP crashing a lot, we decided to build that feature into Vista, too!”
8. “Oh, enough of all this Windows stuff already. Just proclaim me your king and send me $500 every year.”
9. “Internet Explorer 8 will be based of the Geico Rendering Engine. I believe that’s the same one Firefox is based off?” [NOTE: Firefox is based off the Gecko engine. ]
10. “Due to complaints about Vista’s sluggishness, we’re releasing a fifteen gigabyte service pack that should correct the problem.”

Originally posted on Feb 26, 2007 on redwallhp.ntugo.com.