Election week isn’t quite over–so I urge you to cast two final votes, if you haven’t already. Those would be votes for the best and worst versions of Windows ever, in our onlikne survey. We’ll use the results as source material for a feature we’re working on, and could use a bit more input to make it all statistically significant.
Thanks in advance for participating.
For the past eleven days or so, I’ve spent a meaningful amount of my computing day in Windows 7. It’s very much a rough draft of the operating system that will eventually ship: It’s missing major features and a meaningful percentage of the apps I’ve tried to use wouldn’t even install. Even so, I’ve been enjoying the experience. The preview version boots up quickly. It’s surprisingly stable. Best of all, it’s the most mellow and dignified Windows environment I’ve used in a long time, thanks to its minimization of pushy notifications and new tools for managing the System Tray and other venerable sources of Windows annoyances.
Attention Twitterfans: Technologizer has launched a Twitterfeed. While I’m telling you about it, I’ll take a moment to recap some of the ways you can interact with us and other Technologizer readers, on the site and elsewhere:
1. Technologizer on Twitter (new!). Follow www.twitter.com/technologizer and you’ll get links to every Technologizer story.
2. Harry on Twitter. I’m also on Twitter at www.twitter.com/harrymccracken. I link to some Technologizer content and Tweet about other stuff every day–much (but not all) of it tech-related.
3. Technologizer RSS. Our feed is at www.technologizer.com/feed.
4. Technologizer Community. Our free community features include forums, photos, videos, and more; you can also create your own blog. Register for the community here.
5. Technologizer on Facebook. Almost 500 people belong to our Facebook group. If you’re on Facebook and logged in, click here to visit it.
6. Comment! You can weigh in on any Technologizer post, and don’t need to register. We’ve had posts with hundreds of comments. They make for great reading, so keep it up!
7. Share! Every Technologizer post has a Share This link at the end. You can use it to e-mail a link to the post or share it via Digg, Facebook, Reddit, and other social sites.
Thanks for being part of the ongoing experiment that is this site–I’m having a thoroughly good time hanging out with you guys…
Here’s a bit of cheery news from the Web 2.0 Summit: AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph De La Vega just told interviewer Michael Arrington that the company is working with Apple to let the iPhone serve as a tethered wireless modem for laptops soon. And he says it’ll be available “soon.”
There have been rumors that this was in the works for a while, but if anyone at AT&T or Apple has made it official until now, I managed to miss it.
There are at least two existing tethering options for the iPhone: NetShare and iModem. The former was removed from Apple’s iPhone App Store and the latter only works on jailbroken iPhones; both violate AT&T’s terms of service. Even if AT&T wants more money for a tethering plan–and I’m assuming it will charge something like $50 or $60 a month–I think a lot of people will sign up.
One major remaining question: Given that Internet access on an iPhone 3G can be pretty sluggish, just how quick will it be if a meaningful percentage of iPhone users are routing their connections to laptops and doing things that are even more bandwidth-hogging than typical iPhone tasks?
I’m attending the Web 2.0 Summit conference here in San Francisco this week. We may be in the middle of a downturn, but you couldn’t tell it from the number of bodies (most of who paid around $4000 for a ticket) on the floor here: The event is a crowded success, with a standing-room only ballroom full of attendees and two overflow rooms. (Of course, conferences may be a lagging indicator of the tech industry’s health–most of these folks probably bought their tickets months ago, when the economy still had a pulse.)
This is kind of clever: A bunch of music merchants in the UK have created a logo to tout the virtues of music in MP3 format:
MP3 is so pervasive that it’s easy to take it for granted–this campaign intends to promote it in the same way that big companies promote their proprietary formats, and therefore get consumers thinking about it and asking for it.
It’s a worthy experiment, and it got me thinking: What if other venerable file formats that are everywhere got their own promotional campaigns and logos? Here, I’ll get the ball rolling…
The people have spoken! TechDecision ’08 polling closed last night, and the results are in. They have no impact whatsoever on our great nation–Technologizer, in case you didn’t know, is not a branch of government and therefore can’t enforce the will of its community on anybody else–but they’re interesting nonetheless. Full report after the jump…
So it’s official: Come January 20th, Barack Obama will be president of the United States of America. What will that mean for technology? The Obama campaign site has a tech section that provides some clues.
A very quick summary:
–Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.
–He’ll support Network Neutrality. (Which is a somewhat squishy concept, which the Obama site doesn’t define. And it doesn’t say how he’ll support it.)
–He’ll encourage broadband deployment through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.”
–He’ll “give parents the tools and information they need to control what their children see on television and the Internet in ways fully consistent with the First Amendment.” (Free copies of Net Nanny for every household?)
—He’ll use unspecified “cutting-edge technologies” to make government more transparent.
–He believes we must “update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.”
–He will “ensure that our patent laws protect legitimate rights while not stifling innovation and collaboration.” .
–He will “invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records.”
There’s nothing in there I disagree with. Come to think of it, there’s very little in there that anyone might disagree with. There’s also little in the way of detail. The idea of a cabinet-level CTO is an interesting one, and the right person could make a big difference. ((Me, I vote for Vint Cerf.) I’d love to see that CTO devote intense, sustained attention to broadband-related issues: It’s truly a national embarrassement that broadband in America is as slow, expensive, and spotty as it is.
More details to come, presumably. The president-elect will have his hands full from the moment he enters the White House; I hope he remembers those campaign promises and fleshes them out…and makes sure that they don’t remain mere promises.
Todd Bishop’s TechFlash site has a worthwhile read up on the unhappy response of Tablet PC enthusiasts to Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s description of the Tablet PC as a “niche” product at last week’s PDC event. I feel for those fans–and as I think about it, Tablet PC lovers are among the most passionate boosters of any Microsoft product I’ve ever met. Whenever I encounter someone who has a Tablet, I ask him or her how she likes it; virtually without exception, those folks are huge boosters of the platform. Microsoft could use a lot more customers like that.
That said, the Tablet PC, which turns seven years old this month, always felt like a doomed platform, at least if the benchmark of success was wide, ongoing mainstream acceptance. A few thoughts on why after the jump.
I woke up this morning looking forward to voting–and looking forward to doing so electronically for the first time. California’s San Mateo County uses something called the eSlate voting system, and I figured my experiences, good or bad, would make for a good post here.
When I arrived at my polling place, though, they found no record of me on the roster of registered voters. I’m pretty sure that this is simply because I’ve only lived in San Mateo county for five months, and registered to vote here at the last moment. But I was only allowed to vote provisionally, and we provisional voters use a very old-school system: I filled in circles on a paper ballot and then stuffed it into a box with a slot on top.
So did anyone reading this vote electronically? If so, I’d love to hear about your take on the system you used…or even on electronic voting in general. I remain skeptical about it–although the eSlate, which has a paper backup, looks OK. But as a techhead, I feel deprived for never having had the chance to try it.
