I should have purchased iPods

The saga continues with the SanDisk Sansa players. Now I know why everyone purchases iPods. Apple’s shit just works.

I went to install the software on my back-room computer which is Windows 2000 machine, it complained and said it needed Windows XP SP1. Oyee! I am not going to spend $300 bucks on an OS upgrade. So, I decided I would load it on my XP on my MacBook Pro, however it was a mini-cd and it won’t work with slot loading ROM drive.

Long story short I was able to get the software loaded on my XP install and then I had to update the USB driver because it didn’t recognize my SanDisk player.

However, the whole reason my wife and I purchased the SanDisk “Play For Sure” Sansa players is so we could let our kids listen to the free audio books from the “Net Library”. But when I downloaded the audio book(s) and tried to acquire the “license” it says I have already checked it out on another machine. It happened with 2 different audio books.

I booted over to the OSX and plugged in the player and it picked it up immediately (mass storage device). I copied some MP3 and I was off and running.

However if I wanted just MP3 players I would have purchased iPods.

Anybody want 2 SanDisk Sansa 1GB MP3  players hardly used. I’ll probably eBay the damn things and go buy a couple of iPods.

What a waste of time.

Sitemaps

This is particularly good news to my ears. “Google sitemaps has been adopted by Yahoo and Microsoft.”

We have been participating in the Google sitemaps program for awhile for our new sites at Indoff. Here is a sample sitemap.xml file from one of our sites.

TechCrunch has the sitemap scoop.

Microsoft and the Gates transition

Bill Gates is going to transition out of Microsoft over a 2 year period so that he can work at his foundation full time.

IMHO, the wrong guy is leaving. It should be Ballmer leaving instead of Gates. I doubt Ozzie and Mundie will be able to get anything accomplished under Ballmer, he lacks the vision of a great leader.

Update: Ehh, not 2 seconds after I posted this article. I found this article on CNN that says the same thing. - Via Slashdot

MSN adCenter

I don't think I am going to bother with MSN's new adCenter. It's bad enough I have to deal with two confusing poorly designed ad systems.  So, I don't think I will be adding a third. I am not sure it's going to be worth the hassle considering MSN trails Google and Yahoo in the amount of traffic they drive. 

Here is a free idea for Microsoft. Sell MSN to Google or Yahoo and focus on shipping an Operating System that works and is on time.

Apple Bootcamp

So Apple computer released a public beta of "Boot Camp" which will allow a users to install Windows XP nativley alongside of OSX(Intel Based Macs Only.) It will be included in the next release of OSX aka Lepord.

Why is this significant? For multi-platform developers like myself it's awesome. I can now work on our Oracle ERP system without having to switch over to my Windows machine in my office. That's a big deal! I originally purchased a copy of Microsoft Office with Virtual PC for my Mac. But Virtual PC is so slow you can hardly do anything on it. So, I stopped using VPC all together. 

However it doesn't mean I would go back to using Windows for everyday work as it still it way behind the curve as far as usability and security goes.

Now I have to trade in my 15" PowerBook for a MacBook Pro.

Microsoft should buy Sun

Interesting discussion over at Mini-Microsoft about Microsoft’s latest woes. It really seems that Microsoft Management is not the only one to blame for their OS delays. According to the discussion at Mini-Microsoft their ISV’s are placing a huge demand on the company and the OS division. This would explain why it’ seems little old Apple can ship software and Microsoft can’t. Apple doesn’t have the same set of problems Microsoft does. Apple like Sun really doesn’t have to answer to anyone on the scale that Microsoft does.

So, why couldn’t Microsoft buy Sun and produce there own hardware software solution?

Solaris is a hardened OS but lack’s the usability of Windows. Sun’s hardware IMHO is the best in the world. They could release a version of their OS for their hardware first. Then work on delivering their OS to fit the need’s of there ISV’s after their core OS/Hardware solution was released. They could also release a backward compatibility layer like Apple did with Classic for OSX.

This might help with Microsoft’s 2 biggest problems.

1. Security
2. Innovation

I would be bending over backwards to figure these 2 issues out even if it meant swallowing a little of my own pride. Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good wheel that just needs a new vehicle?

Ray Ozzie’s web clipboard

Dave Winer wrote:

At first, you’d think it has to be some terrible ActiveX hack, but it’s not — it’s a hidden text field and a bit of JavaScript that moves the data around.

Dave if that was the case then why is there a little clipboard application running in the tray, in the bottom of the screen cast?

Ok so apparently it does work? Great, so I wonder what that little app was running in the tray with the “Scissors” icon?

Apparently that little tray app that was running in the screencast demo is a clipboard bridge that takes the Micro-xml format and converts it to a native format.

Microsoft has relased the whole thing under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike liscence.

I think Microsoft and (Ray Ozzie) deserves some kudos for this, it’s an excellent idea. Check out the Screencast and the Demo page.