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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Mar 15th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Who’s Laughing Now? Windows Mobile to Copy iPhone?

Ballmer’s famous reaction to the iPhone seems all the more funnier now, looking back. According to claims, Microsoft is planning some changes for Windows Mobile 7:

  1. No multitasking
  2. Use a push notification for updates
  3. Use the iPod Touch ZuneHD interface
  4. Force apps to be installed via the iTunes App Store Windows Marketplace

While these changes aren’t confirmed yet, even if one or two of those changes are true, they scream jealousy. Why these changes? Microsoft needs to be able to compete with Apple on speed, battery life, and stability. While I am certainly not in any inner-circles close to this, I’m sure Microsoft is finding that people want stability, responsiveness, and good battery life in their cell phones. I know that responsiveness and stability are top on my list (I haven’t been overly happy with a phone with the exception of my BlackBerry ((no AT&T coverage in my area))  for some time now over those very things).

Whether Microsoft wants it or not, the world is slowly drifting away from do-it-all devices that have to be setup by power users. The world wants phones that they can turn on, install apps, and start using without having to worry about one application slowing down the phone or having too many open causing the phone to crash.

But not to worry, to those now doubting Microsoft, they thought of all of these radical changes all on their own..

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Feb 9th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Gmail to Add Twitter-Like Clutter

While I can’t say that I’m surprised, I’m a bit frustrated and disappointed in Google over the recent news that they are adding a Twitter-like clutter status to the Gmail interface. While I appreciate fancy new tools built into apps I already use as much as the next geek, I really, really don’t need yet another social networking tool to update, integrate, and look at. Seriously, it’s not new content. Does anyone really put unique content on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and every other social networking site they belong to? I certainly don’t and don’t know anyone who does. My accounts are all inter-twined and I’m tired of having to filter out the duplicate data on those sites. Adding yet another list of the same things from my friends is just clutter in a used-to-be clean interface.

UPDATE:

According to a Slashdot article today, the problem looks like it may be much worse. According to the article, Gmail will be adding Facebook-like photo albums and comment feeds. Fortunately, the Gmail social networking tools are opt-in, so perhaps I won’t have to see the clutter when I don’t want to? We’ll see.

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Filed under News, Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Feb 9th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

Soon We Will See Just How Loyal Search Users Are

With today’s announcement that Canonical is changing the default search provider to Yahoo, Apple’s rumored talks with Microsoft, and cell phone providers such as Verizon also jumping to Bing, we may get to see just how big of a role the default settings have on people’s search preferences. Google has been dominating the search market pretty much since the beginning with a significant boost coming from the fact that Google is the default in several of the world’s browsers, though some of it is some good old-fashioned branding and marketing.

Canonical’s decision to change the Ubuntu default search engine and rumors that Apple may be soon to switch the default provider on the iPhone (I’m assuming with regular old Safari soon to follow), Google will no longer be the default on most of the major desktop OS’s of our time. Verizon has also struck a deal with Bing and made it the default search provider on its mobile phones. I personally was pretty mad the day that the Bing icon on my BlackBerry, but that’s a story for another day.

Citing concerns over privacy, there have been several who have spoken out against Google as well. Google has even stated that it is considering pulling out of the huge market of China.

Despite these things, Google’s search market share has continued to increase month after month. These next few months will be interesting to see what happens to market share as these talks fall into place. The true test of the Google brand will be for those users who have to go out of their way to choose Google as their search provider, rather than Google enjoying its nice defaults that it has enjoyed over the past few years.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 28th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

No Dig on Ubuntu 9.10 Minimum Virtual Machine

Well, I guess Canonical has taken the idea of “minimum virtual machine” to the extreme. The 9.10 version of Ubuntu Server JeOS (F4 + select “Minimal Virtual Machine” at install time) apparently doesn’t include dig in the default installed packages.

I was shocked when my new virtual machine was having problems with connecting to the Ubuntu repositories and I couldn’t do a dig as a test:

-bash: dig: command not found

I’ve never seen a Linux distro without dig installed by default, but apparently it’s not as necessary to others as I would have thought..

Anyway, the package comes with the dnsutils package:
sudo apt-get install dnsutils

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Jan 26th, 2010 by Wyatt Walter

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