In case you hadn’t noticed, the Star Trek movie opened tonight. Which, here on Technologizer, is an excuse to bring you a YouTube clip that never gets old:
Oh, and if you didn’t catch Ed Oswald’s story on Star Trek technology that’s no longer science fiction when we published it a few weeks ago, check it out here.
If you live in the Bay Area and are a FoT (Friend of Technologizer), read on: We’re throwing a party next Tuesday, May 12th from 5:30pm to 8:00pm at Nectar Wine Lounge and Restaurant, a very cool venue in Burlingame. We’re calling it Technologizer’s Tweetup, but Twitter newbies and skeptics are as welcome as hardcore Twitter addicts. The main goal of the night is simple: to relax, enjoy some good food and drink, and talk gadgets, the Web, social media, and all the other stuff we cover on this site. Consider it a sort of in-person edition of Technologizer.
If you’re reading this and can make it, you’re invited–although admittance is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis. Head to TTweetup.com to register.
Technologizer’s Tweetup is sponsored by eHow and by TWTRCON SF 09; the latter is the cool conference on Twitter and business that’s happening on May 31st in San Francisco. (I came up with the idea and will tweet the whole event.) You’ll have the opportunity to learn more about both at the Tweetup.
The standard “Express” installation of the Windows 7 RC does something I thought software had stopped doing years ago:
If you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, and choose the “Express” option when installing, your default browser will be changed to Internet Explorer. Needless to say, this behavior has immediately sparked complaints from Mozilla and Opera, and rightfully so, because it’s shady at the very least.
This sounds so cheesy that I wonder if it’s a unwitting gaffe by Microsoft rather than an intentional ploy. Can we all agree that this needs to be changed for the final version of the OS?
Back, in March, I wrote an article for PC World on the worst Microsoft product names of all time. One of my nominees was Windows Genuine Advantage, the anti-piracy technology that’s suffered at least a couple of major breakdowns that caused woes for paying customers. I wondered what exactly was advantageous about it for anyone but Microsoft, and groused that it was a patronizing moniker. And I suggested that Microsoft change the name to “Windows Anti-Piracy Technology.”
Over at Cnet, Ina Fried is reporting that Microsoft is dumping “Windows Genuine Advantage” for a name that’s close to my recommendation: Windows Activation Technologies. And it’s making activation slightly less annoying:
In Windows Vista, if a user does not activate their software immediately, they get a warning that they still need to do so. The dialog box offers two options, to activate immediately or to do so later. However, the activate later box cannot be checked for 15 seconds.
Microsoft decided this was a bit too annoying. With Windows 7, users can click activate later immediately, but then get a dialog box touting the benefits of activation.
I suspect I haven’t squawked about Windows’ copy protection for the last time. But to be fair to Microsoft, most of the changes it’s made to activation in the last couple of years have been to make it less annoying, and it’s suffered no recent meltdowns. And at least I won’t feel like my intelligence is being insulted every time I hear its name.
I’m moving to southeast England!
Really fast Internet in England.
Your own personal Wi-Fi hotspot.
Anonymous? You can’t watch Hulu.
Indian hacker’s Facebook-compromising tool.
WiGig: Short-range gigabit wireless.
Cnet’s Rafe Needleman has a scoop on ambitious tweaks that Twitter plans to make to its search feature:
…Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages…Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that.
That’s ambitious stuff, epecially for a service that didn’t do search at all for much of its history and only rolled it out to the bulk of its user base a few days ago. I’m not ready to get all wild-eyed and declare Twitter to be a Google killer, but the better it gets at helping Twitterers find information in something close to real time, the more it becomes a resource that does fascinating and useful things that Google doesn’t. Already, I’m turning to Twitter to get answers to some questions I would have Googled for in the past, such as “Which Windows IM client looks and works the most like OS X’s iChat?”
At $23,500, I’m reasonably sure Xerox’s new ColorQube 9200 multifunction printer is the most expensive product I’ve written about on Technologizer–but trust me, it’s neat. This “hallway” device for use by large groups of users for printing, copying, and scanning (it pumps out up to 85 pages a minute) competes with high-end color lasers, but uses Xerox’s unique solid-ink technology–which has meaningful advantages over laser when it comes to simplicity, cost of printing, and environmental impact.
Solid ink is nothing new–it’s been around since 1991, and originated in Tektronix’s Phaser printers, a line later acquired by Xerox. But this is the first time that Xerox has scaled the technology up from desktop and workgroup printers to print at higher speeds and in greater volume. The basic idea’s the same: The ColorQube uses crayon-like sticks of ink which it melts and sprays onto a drum, then transfers onto paper. The ink sticks are relatively compact for the amount of pages they can produce (the ColorQube can run for 55,000 pages before you need to replenish ink). And you can just pop them into the printer as it’s convenient to do so–there are no toner cartridges to try and use until every speck of toner has been squeezed out.
Xerox says that solid ink is kinder to the planet than laser: Over four years of use, the ColorQube’s consumables will involve 88 pounds of packaging waste, vs. 815 pounds for a comparable color laser printer. The company even points out that the compactness of the color ink sticks means that it doesn’t need to send as many trucks out onto the road to deliver consumables for the ColorQube.
The printer’s other major news involves a hot-button issue with color printing: cost. Companies that lease color printers often pay by the page: a penny for black and white printing and eight cents for color is typical. The Xerox printer’s cost for pages with lots of full color will remain eight cents, but pages with less color will cost about three cents–and ones with just a splash of color will cost a penny. The idea is to get companies worrying less about color being too pricey and letting employees pump out Word documents, spreadsheets, and the like without increasing the per-page cost by 800 percent. We’ll see how it goes–every color-printer company has been working hard to make color more pervasive for years, but monochrome shows no signs of going away.
When it comes to print quality, solid ink’s pros and cons have historically been quite different from those of laser printer: the ink works well with a variety of media, but the output has sometimes been waxy-looking and duller than that of a good laser. However, Xerox provided me with some print samples from the ColorQube on various types of paper stock that looked quite pleasing.
This article is not, of course, a review or a recommendation–but after spending some time talking with Xerox staffers about the ColorQube, I do know that if I were in the market for a multifunction device in the class that it competes in, I’d want to check it out. The folks within business who acquire equipment like this tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, though, and it’ll be interesting to see if color ink’s real advantages versus laser prove enough to make this printer a hit.
Engadget is reporting that mobile software company Bsquare issued a press release saying it was providing software for Dell netbooks running Google’s Android OS. It’s hard to see how a company could do so unless it was, indeed, working with Dell on such products. But Dell hasn’t said anything about Android, and I’m not seeing the press release Engadget republished on Bsquare’s site.
One way or another, it’ll be fascinating to see if Android (or other contenders, like Palm’s WebOS) does end up on netbooks, and if so, whether it finds success. It isn’t every day that a new consumer client OS arrives and finds success–in 2009 as in 1984, the major players are Microsoft and Apple, and other players are tiny potatoes when it comes to market share (sorry, Linux, I love you just the same). But with more and more of everyday computing happening in the browser, it’s never been more plausible that a new OS might make sense and gain traction. Although it’s still not entirely clear to me why Android would be a more compelling netbook OS than something like Ubuntu already is…
Okay, so the chances of Apple buying Twitter seem nearly as remote as the odds that Twitter will buy Apple. It’s still fun to think about what might transpire if it did:
1. Macs would show the Failwhale when they felt a Kernel Panic coming on, and Twitter would display the Sad Mac when it was over capacity.
2. Already-bizarre terms like Tweet, Tweep, and Twoosh would become iTweet, iTweep, and iTwoosh.
3. Apple would air ads with a hip guy pretending to be Twitter and a nebbish claiming to be Facebook. Facebook would respond with snarky claims about the Failwhale swimming in a sea of unicorn tears.
4. FriendFeed users would continue to contend that FriendFeed was superior to Twitter–but they’d resemble Linux advocates even more than they already do.
5. The Internet would soon be overrun with blurry screen shots of alleged new Twitter features.
6. The new iPod Nano would let you tweet by using the scroll wheel to enter alphanumeric information. There would be no known instances of a Nano owner’s tweets being as long as 140 characters.
7. People would get really excited when @stevejobs responded with a quick direct message to their questions.
8. Actually, Steve Jobs would pause occasionally to tweet during keynotes. Possibly at the intervals where he currently chugs bottled water.
9. A $169 Twitter AppleCare protection plan would entitle you to get in your car and drive to an Apple Store to get expedited service from the Genius Bar whenever Twitter flaked out on you.
10. People would spend untold hours wondering if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would ever sign up for Twitter.
Any possibilities I’m missing here?
That doesn’t mean that it won’t sell, of course, but doesn’t sound like supporting evidence for the idea that Apple is about to buy Twitter. Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:
Stone and co-founder Evan Williams were making an appearance on the morning talk show The View when host Barbara Walters asked about the recent flood of rumors that the likes of Apple, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. all are vying to buy Twitter. Stone said, “No. We are not for sale.”
