Watch Video *Here:

Danny Glover and Jon Hammond speaking about American ex-pat aritists in Paris, Richard Wright who died there in 1960, Charlie Parker and Danny’s history in San Francisco CA. Jon Hammond lived in Paris for one year, culminating in playing in concert on Radio France Inter. Part 3 of 4 on Jon’s daily radio show on KYOU & KYCY Radio ©2009 www.HammondCast.com Asake Bomani Gallery S.F. CA “Paris Connections”

Bomani Gallery, Charlie Parker, Danny Glover, HammondCast, Jon Hmamond, KYOU KYCY Radio, Lear Jet, Paris Connections, B3 organ, XK-3c, Fillmore, Aretha

The reason I call it Our GM is if the statistics are correct, we the people of the United States will have a 61% stake in the corporation. I realize that the government has stated they will not dictate the models of vehicles the company will sell, but one can see a problem already for the 2010 model year. It seems that GM is going to introduce some models that may already be niche cars that may have low sales projections and obviously low profit margins.

Here are some of the losers GM is going to try and sell:

2010 CTS SPORT WAGON
This is very much a Eurocentric model. Cadillac initially considered the wagon a niche car for the U.S., with volume in the 3000 to 4000 range. The entire brand sold just 4508 units in Europe in 2007, so even if the Sport Wagon becomes its volume model there, total sales probably will be well below 8000 units worldwide.

You gotta be kidding. Who thought this up? 8,000 units to be sold worldwide? This is crazy!

Pontiac Solstice Coupe

GM will only make about 1,100 of these cars, so expect them to be hard to find and, if you get one, take good care of it.

Only building 1100 ? Why even bother building it?

GMC Terrain

The Terrain is GMC’s version of the new Chevrolet Equinox. The basic idea was to create a small crossover that appeals to people who want a look that GM calls “tailored toughness.” Looking it over, we might suggest a different tailor but, hopefully, buyers will like what they see on the showroom floor.

Why two of the same? I never really understood the difference between a Chevy and a GM model of anything. Isn’t it time to reduce the number of models? This beast comes with a 4 cylinder engine plant for better gas mileage. But will it be enough to even move this off the dealers lot? 0 - 60 in two days! LOL

What do you think?

Comments welcome.

Source

Source #2

The reason I call it Our GM is if the statistics are correct, we the people of the United States will have a 61% stake in the corporation. I realize that the government has stated they will not dictate the models of vehicles the company will sell, but one can see a problem already for the 2010 model year. It seems that GM is going to introduce some models that may already be niche cars that may have low sales projections and obviously low profit margins.

Here are some of the losers GM is going to try and sell:

2010 CTS SPORT WAGON
This is very much a Eurocentric model. Cadillac initially considered the wagon a niche car for the U.S., with volume in the 3000 to 4000 range. The entire brand sold just 4508 units in Europe in 2007, so even if the Sport Wagon becomes its volume model there, total sales probably will be well below 8000 units worldwide.

You gotta be kidding. Who thought this up? 8,000 units to be sold worldwide? This is crazy!

Pontiac Solstice Coupe

GM will only make about 1,100 of these cars, so expect them to be hard to find and, if you get one, take good care of it.

Only building 1100 ? Why even bother building it?

GMC Terrain

The Terrain is GMC’s version of the new Chevrolet Equinox. The basic idea was to create a small crossover that appeals to people who want a look that GM calls “tailored toughness.” Looking it over, we might suggest a different tailor but, hopefully, buyers will like what they see on the showroom floor.

Why two of the same? I never really understood the difference between a Chevy and a GM model of anything. Isn’t it time to reduce the number of models? This beast comes with a 4 cylinder engine plant for better gas mileage. But will it be enough to even move this off the dealers lot? 0 - 60 in two days! LOL

What do you think?

Comments welcome.

Source

Source #2

A story on the ComputerWorld site tells that Intel has known about the Chrome OS for some time, and that Intel is helping with the project. Perhaps all is not peachy with the Microsoft-Intel relationship these days.

The world’s largest chip maker is working with Google on the Chrome operating system and has been privy to the project for some time, a spokesman for the company said Friday.

Inside information about the workings of upcoming multicore chips could certainly help Google programmer’s make Chrome very, very efficient when distributing loads and drawing things in different windows.

Intel’s endorsement is important for the Chrome OS project because of its standing in the personal computing world: Intel microprocessors go into around four-fifths of the world’s computers.

Google is aiming the Chrome OS at desktops, laptops and netbooks, all devices dominated by Microsoft Windows, so supporting Chrome could put Intel in an awkward position with Microsoft. The two companies have so dominated the PC industry over the past few decades that the term “Wintel” (from Windows and Intel) is used to refer to PCs running Windows on a processor based on the Intel-developed x86 architecture.

Uh, yeah.

“We work with Google on a variety of projects, including elements of this one. We’ve been privy to the project for some time,” said Nick Jacobs, Asia-Pacific spokesman for Intel. He declined to elaborate on the extent of their relationship.

Read as ‘We really don’t want to anger the boys in Redmond, especially the dancing one that emulates Tom Cruise doing the sofa dance!”

Intel has also been seeking more support for its drive to put microprocessors into smaller devices, led by its Atom microprocessor, the most popular netbook processor. Google said Chrome will launch first in netbooks, in the second half of next year.

If Intel helps Google with netbooks, Google can help Intel with smaller devices – one hand washes the other. Besides, no one really thinks that Windows Mobile 7 can be that light or fast on small devices.

If Intel gets Google to do the heavy lifting on an operating system for small devices, and netbooks, then Intel can concentrate on doing what it does best, hardware, and Moblin might just quietly fade away, or become absorbed into something else.

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Great news for those who think, and store, big. Just announced is a 7200 RPM SATA II hard drive with 2 GB (2 billion bytes, but not really 2 GB, as others now do) of capacity.

from Tech Connect

Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) was in front when the 1TB milestone was reached but unfortunately it has been lagging behind with its 2TB offer. Western Digital and Seagate both offer 2TB desktop hard drives and Hitachi is going to catch up soon with its 2TB Deskstar.

Codenamed HD32000IDK7, Hitachi’s first 2TB drive comes in a 3.5-inch form factor, has a working speed of 7200 RPM (faster than both WD’s Caviar Green and Seagate’s Barracuda LP), a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, a yet unknown amount of cache memory (32/64MB maybe), and is listed here with a price tag of $269.99 (193 Euro). At $270, the 2TB Deskstar is $30 cheaper than the 2TB Caviar Green, making it a very attractive (to say the least) to those who want/need a lot of storage space. Currently it’s still uncertain when the Hitachi’s 2TB drive will ship.

There is also art for the shipping box, so you know it’s coming soon.

Hitachi has not had anything but great drives since the name change from IBM, and the name DeskStar no longer gets hammered as DeathStar. I own 2 of the 1 TB drives, and they are fast, reliable, and quiet. They run a tad warm, but I suppose no one has it all. Western Digital Green drives run cooler, but are nowhere near as fast.

I looked at Newegg and a couple of other online retailers, but no luck at a listing just yet.

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1609 - The Catholic states in Germany set up a league under the leadership of Maximillian of Bavaria.

1679 - The British crown claimed New Hampshire as a royal colony.

1747 - Persian ruler Nadir Shah was assassinated at Fathabad in Persia.

1776 - The statue of King George III was pulled down in New York City.

1778 - In support of the American Revolution, Louis XVI declared war on England.

1821 - U.S. troops took possession of Florida. The territory was sold by Spain.

1832 - U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed legislation to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States.

1866 - Edison P. Clark patented his indelible pencil.

1890 - Wyoming became the 44th state to join the United States.

1900 - ‘His Master’s Voice’, was registered with the U.S. Patent Office. The logo of the Victor Recording Company, and later, RCA Victor, shows the dog, Nipper, looking into the horn of a gramophone machine.

1913 - The highest temperature ever recorded in the U.S. was 134 degrees in Death Valley, CA.

1919 - The Treaty of Versailles was hand delivered to the U.S. Senate by President Wilson.

1925 - The official news agency of the Soviet Union, TASS, was established.

1928 - George Eastman first demonstrated color motion pictures.

1929 - The U.S. government began issuing paper money in the small size.

1938 - Howard Hughes completed a 91 hour flight around the world.

1940 - The 114-day Battle of Britain began during World War II.

1943 - Arthur Ashe, the first African-American inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, was born. He had won 33 career titles.

1949 - The first practical rectangular television was presented. The picture tube measured 12 by 16 and sold for $12.

1951 - Armistice talks aimed at ending the Korean conflict began at Kaesong.

1951 - Sugar Ray Robinson was defeated for only the second time in 133 fights as Randy Turpin took the middleweight crown.

1953 - American forces withdraw from Pork Chop Hill in Korea after heavy fighting.

1962 - The Telstar Communications satellite was launched. The satellite relayed TV and telephone signals between Europe and the U.S.

1962 - Fred Baldasare swam the English Channel underwater. It was a 42 miles and took 18 hours.

1969 - The National League was divided up into two baseball divisions.

1973 - Britain granted the Bahamas their independence after three centuries of British colonial rule.

Also born this day, in 1856, Nikola Tesla, electrical genius – celebrated on Google with his own special Google!

Woo!

&

Best wishes to all Bahamians!

•

For the past few days we have been reading about the new Google Chrome Operating System and I believe many of us thought it would be a full blown operating system similar to Microsoft Windows or Linux. This may not be the case. In what is being described by one of the Google co-founders, it is an anti-operating system.

This is how Larry Page describes the new non operating system:

Mr. Page described the Chrome operating system as a kind of anti-operating system — one that is basically indistinguishable from a browser. Netbooks loaded with Chrome will boot up almost instantaneously and will store data on the Internet instead of a hard drive.

“I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way,” Mr. Page said.

“If you live your life in the browser maybe you don’t want all the stuff that came from Eric’s generation,” Mr. Page added, putting his hand on Mr. Schmidt’s shoulder.

Messrs. Schmidt and Page were also careful not to position Chrome as a competitor to Microsoft Windows. They argued that Chrome will expand the market for netbooks, rather than eating into Windows’ share of the netbook market.

“Microsoft is welcome to put Internet Explorer on our operating system,” Mr. Schmidt said, although he conceded that “it’s highly unlikely they would do it. They would have to port it and the port is not trivial…the ball is in their court.”

He added that because Chrome is open source, Google won’t be able to block Microsoft.. “All of it is open,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Even if we had an evil moment, we would be unsuccessful.”

Although Chrome will be free, Mr. Schmidt said it will still boost Google’s business. “We benefit when people spend more of their life online,” he said. “So for us it’s a very straightforward strategic initiative that ultimately results in more revenue.”

I am glad this has been clarified. Google Chrome non OS is going to be what most of us originally envisioned. Here is what i see happening. The Google Chrome non OS will be quick to boot into the browser and get us online immediately. We will be using the cloud to work on stuff and also to store our stuff.

Is this going to be for everyone? It will not. There will still be those that will need a full blown operating system like Windows to do real work on. We will want a hard disk to store our precious stuff and will not entrust our stuff to anyone, no matter what they say about safety and so forth.

With that being said, I can see where a Google Chrome non OS will work on the midget laptops commonly known as netbooks. These pint size computers will be great for those of us who need a light weight device to lug through airports, hotel/motel room and have no need for a 6 lb weight on our shoulders.

So much for the OS war.

Comments welcome.

Source.

Google is touting their Image Search as being an easy way to find images that are licensed as Creative Commons. This will allow you to legally use images in your blog or other purposes, that you find using Image Search. On their blog Google states that:

Today, we’re launching a feature on Image Search to help you find images that you can use for free, while respecting the wishes of artists and creators. This feature allows you to restrict your Image Search results to images that have been tagged with licenses like Creative Commons, making it easier to discover images from across the web that you can share, use and even modify. Your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain.

So give Image Search from Google a try and see what you think.

Comments welcome.

Source.

Google Blogging For Dummies, written by Susan Gunelius, is described by reviewers as a beginning guide for newbies who want to blog. But is it enough to get a person who hasn’t blogged before started in the right direction?

Here is why I am asking. My wife received an email from a nephew who inquired about starting their own blog. They had no specifics on what they wanted to do or how they wanted to go about doing it. They wanted to know if there was a book or something that would help them to get started. So my wife turned to me for answers.

Hmmm….. I didn’t have a clue. So armed only with limited information I ventured out on the Internet and found the Google Blogging For Dummies book, which had fairly good reviews over at Amazon. But before I recommend this book, I wanted to ask if anyone has read this book?

Do you have any other books you would recommend?

Comments welcome.

Amazon source.

Almost anyone who builds computers has a healthy respect, if not love, for the name Asus. For most, it goes back to the motherboards it released that would do things that Intel did not want done, and did it well. I think of the dual P III motherboard that, by clever trickery, allowed users to have dual Celerons in tandem, when Intel wanted users to purchase the more expensive Pentium IIIs instead.

Those were good days – the ones where if you wanted two processors, you first had to have two sockets on the motherboard, much more visually impressive.

Back to the present – today, Asus is still brining features that others later emulate, like Q-Fan, Express Gate, and for the modders, MyLogo. Well, we have news from Tech Connect that another winner is in the pipeline, and will soon appear.

It is an AMD processor board, that brings Phenom II and DDR3 goodness to the microATX form factor, along with the updated AMD 785G chipset. This chipset is supposed to offer all the performance (read overclocking) of the older 790 chipset, with a more friendly price, so it will find its way into lower cost boards.

Still upcoming and still not officially announced, the AMD 785G chipset is the silicon powering the microATX motherboard seen below, the M4A785TD-M EVO. The new board features a 2oz copper PCB (like quite a few Gigabyte products), the Express Gate instant-on OS, and has support for AM3 processors, four DDR3-1800 memory slots, plus one PCI-Express x16 slot.

The M4A785TD-M EVO also boasts Radeon HD 4200 integrated graphics (Hybrid CrossFireX support included) backed by 128MB of SidePort memory, one eSATA and five SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 channel audio, D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs, an EPU (Energy Processing Unit) for higher energy efficiency, and features like Q-Fan, CrashFree BIOS 3, AI NET2, MyLogo 2 and EZ Flash 2.

If all goes well then the M4A785TD-M EVO should become available later this quarter so keep an eye out for it.

coming attractions!

This is an updated version of the board that I built a system with about 5 months ago, that has remained in my son’s hands, almost never to be used by me. It looks as though I’m going to have to get one of these so I’ll have my own Quadzilla.

For those who have never owned an Asus board, the difference in price is worth it – and if you shop at Newegg, or someplace similar, you won’t really be paying that much more. People talk about things that ‘truly just work’. That is a great description of Asus motherboards. No iffy starts, no flaky service, just flawless performance. They also last a long time, being of quality construction.

If you are planning a Phenom build in the near future, you owe it to yourself to put this board on the shortlist of boards to closely investigate. (This board would also make for a great HTPC build, with the Radeon 4200 and sideport memory. That chipset has already been shown to handle Blu-ray with no hiccups or jerkiness whatsoever.)

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Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.-  Albert Einstein

²

Blah blah blah.

from Tech Connect

Twenty years at Microsoft and Steven Sinofsky continues to rise through the ranks at the Redmond-based company, with his latest achievement being the appointment to president of the Windows Division. Sinofsky has most recently led the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, helping make Windows 7 the uber-hyped, Vista-antagonistic operating system that it is today.

Exactly what are we trying to say here?

At his new position Sinofsky will control the Windows business including both the engineering and marketing functions for Windows, Windows Live and Internet Explorer.

“Steven Sinofsky has demonstrated the ability to lead large teams that deliver great products. The work he and the team have done in getting ready to ship Windows 7 really defines how to develop and ship world-class software,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “He is a perfect fit to lead the Windows group.”

Wow, I’m not sure if this is damning with faint praise, or possibly assigning a captain to go down with the ship.

Well, Ballmer is excited (apparently) so hopefully Steven Sinofsky will live up to his expectations.

Yes sir, with qualifications like that one can only say, “Heck of job, Brownie Steven!”

(I remember when multinational corporations only had one president, I suppose that is not good enough for Microsoft. Perhaps it is positioning the boys at the top on a perch from which to golden parachute, so the young pups have that VP job to shoot for.)

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Technorati Tags: Microsoft - promotion - Windows - Live Essentials - Heck of a job -Brownie!

•

*LISTEN TO HammondCast 27 HERE:

HammondCast 27 from Organist/Accordionist Jon Hammond in New York City. This episode will have some never before heard music from the late JANE DORNACKER who tragically crashed and died in the WNBC Helicopter. This demo of her song “I Know it’s Wrong to Want Another Woman’s Man” was produced and recorded in my old recording studio-BackBeat Productions 20 years ago. Also music from my forthcoming album: “NDR SESSIONS Projekt” just mixed and mastered by Joe Berger and Jim Roberts in Somers NY and recorded in Studio 1 of NDR Radio-Hamburg Germany with Jon on the Hammond XK-3 organ/bass along with saxophonist LUTZ BUCHNER, JOE GALLARDO-trombone and HEINZ LICHIUS-drums. For radio station KYOU 1550 AM in San Francisco California. Including selections: “No X-Cess Baggage Blues”, “Besame Mucho” and from the LATE RENT cd: “Head Phone”, “White Onions” and “Party is Forbidden Here!”. Jon Hammond at the microphone and the Hammond Organ..and the Accordion! Jon Hammond International WebTV

Jon Hammond MySpace JON HAMMOND Band

ASCAP Network Jon Hammond Hosting

I Create Music ASCAP Google HammondCast

Jane Dornacker, Jon Hammond, KYCY, KYOU Radio, NDR Jazz, HammondCast, B3 organ, XK-1, XK-3c, XB-2, Excelsior, Accordion, Blues, Funky, I Create Music, ASCAP, Local 802, Musicians Union

Bill Gates of Microsoft fame and CEO Eric Schmidt of rival Google had lunch together today. But before anyone panics and see pictures of a Microsoft - Google alliance, it was at the Sun Valley meeting for moguls that both were attending. There was one awkward moment that Julia Angwin wrote in her article for the Wall Street Journal.

She stated:

Mr. Gates and his former lieutenant Nathan Myhrvold were walking out of the morning session when two reporters, including this one, asked Mr. Gates for a comment on the new Google operating system.

“No comment,” Mr. Gates replied, while walking out the door.

From behind the reporters, Mr. Schmidt materialized. “It would be better if you don’t make that comment,” he said as he came forward to shake hands with Mr. Gates.

The two laughed, shook hands and walked into the private lunch area together.

I must say that was a class act by both men in handling an awkward moment. Kudos to both of them. But I  would of liked to have been a fly on the wall during the lunch itself. LOL

Comments welcome.

WJS article here.

No one has actually used these words at the Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference yesterday, but one could read between the lines. News Corp CEO and media mogul Rupert Murdoch did state he would not be buying Twitter. Why would he? He bought MySpace for a whopping $580 million back in 2005, and so far the social networking site has not had a stellar presence on the Internet. With massive layoffs, reorganizations and so forth, MySpace appears to be heading for extinction. So when Murdoch said he also wasn’t going to sell MySpace, one would have to ask who would want to buy it?

Softpedia states the following information:

News Corp CEO and media tycoon Rupert Murdoch made it as clear as possible with a definite “No,” when asked whether he would buy Twitter and an even clearer “Hell no,” when asked about the possibility to sell MySpace, as Reuters reports. Present at the Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference yesterday, he went on to say that buying Twitter at this point would be hard to justify, even with the site’s increasing popularity, as it had no clear business model and little signs it would come up with one anytime soon.

So with MySpace in trouble, with newspapers losing advertising and with more advertisers heading to the Internet, it doesn’t appear that News Corp. is in a very good position. But can it bail itself out?

What do you think?

Comments welcome.

Source.

Best Buy and TiVo have formed a partnership to promote each other in a way that could benefit both companies. On the one hand, Best Buy will expose consumers to the benefits of TiVo compared to DVR services that satellite companies provide. Best Buy will benefit in that they will be able to advertise their products on TiVo. TiVo has had trouble getting consumers to know exactly the benefits that their products have to offer. Best Buy is in a struggle competing against Amazon and now Wal-Mart.

In an article from Silicon Alley Insider they state that:

This deal plugs gaps in both businesses. Best Buy will get visibility outside its stores. TiVo can take advantage of Best Buy’s customer interaction to position itself as more than just a recording device.

TiVo has been struggling to educate customers that they can also use the device to download and stream movies from Amazon and Netflix, watch vidoes on YouTube and buy movie tickets on Fandango.

I went out to the TiVo site to see if I could use their system with DishNetwork. Unfortunately I can’t. But the web site did state that TiVo was in the process of developing their services for Direct TV.

Does anyone reading this use TiVo? What is your opinion of the service?

Comments welcome.

Source.

…and so it is deciding to call many of the system files infected. That has not happened with any product I’m aware of for a good long while, but i certainly am glad i did not install the new CA Suite for 2010. The beta testers were just announced and i got my invitation, but escaped this little problem.

from ZDNet

…the CA support forums where there’s a lot of chatter about CA Anti-Virus misidentifying key Windows system files as malware.

Here are the kinds of messages that people are seeing:

7/8/2009 16:58:31 PM File infection: C:\WINDOWS\system32\net.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZNPB infection. Quarantined
7/8/2009 16:58:32 PM File infection: C:\WINDOWS\system32\netsh.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZOKH infection. Quarantined
7/8/2009 16:58:38 PM File infection: C:\windows\SERVIC~1\i386\net.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZNPB infection. Quarantined
7/8/2009 16:58:38 PM File infection: C:\windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\net.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZNPB infection.
7/8/2009 16:58:38 PM File infection: C:\windows\SERVIC~1\i386\netsh.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZOKH infection. Quarantined
7/8/2009 16:58:39 PM File infection: C:\windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\netsh.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZOKH infection.
7/8/2009 16:58:42 PM File infection: C:\WINDOWS\system32\reg.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZOAF infection. Quarantined
7/8/2009 16:58:47 PM File infection: C:\windows\SERVIC~1\i386\reg.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZOAF infection. Quarantined
7/8/2009 16:58:47 PM File infection: C:\windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\reg.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZOAF infection.
7/8/2009 16:58:49 PM File infection: C:\WINDOWS\system32\verclsid.exe is Win32/AMalum.ZZNRA infection. Quarantined

The problem mainly affects Windows XP SP3, but users of other versions of Windows are also claiming to see the problem.

Following the quarantining of the files users will be faced by a dialog box warning them that system files have been changed and that it may make the system unstable.

This problems seems to have started yesterday and some users who called up tech support were told that a fix would be forthcoming. A fix was released but for some this just seemed to bring more misery. If you are affected then try updating the malware signatures and then un-quarantining the files and see if that works for you. What makes it doubly frustrating for users is that there’s been no official word from CA about this issue.

If you accidentally deleted the quarantined files then the instructions here should help you put them back.

This seems like a huge blunder and it’s hard to see how it wasn’t caught out at the testing stage before the update was released to customers. It’s also a fine example of how software that’s supposed to protect you from malware can actually turn out to be very toxic to your system.

The last time I had problems with a CA product was when they offered a free antivirus and firewall for upgraders to Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.  I installed it, and after about 3 days, I couldn’t get onto my PC…it was truly secure – from everyone and everything. It took 3 days of calls to the company to get things taken care of, and they never apologized.

I’m going to wait a while to try the beta, on a non-critical machine. Hope this helps someone avoid trouble!

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When Google posted their list of partners on their FAQ site for their new OS, I wasn’t very surprised that the list didn’t include Dell. In fact I don’t believe that the list should of been a surprise to anyone. Here is what Google posted on their blog:

What companies is Google working with to support Google Chrome OS?
The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

You may recall that it was Acer who called Vista the worst operating system ever. [See article here] So Acer take a ride with Google should be a no brainer. Also Acer is go after Dell to try and knock them off of their perch in the #2 spot. [See article here]

ASUS is heavy into netbooks being one of the companies to first introduce the pint sized laptop computers. Both HP and Lenovo have also entered into the netbook markets, in the hope of maintaining their market share. Toshiba and Abobe? Not a clue what their motivation is. But the remaining companies produce cpu’s and could explain why they are going with Google.

So we have left two noticeable exceptions. Intel and Dell. Both of these companies have traditionally been Microsoft partners, even though they have had their spats in the past. But I am sure Microsoft is going to use its influence to try and to corral Google and limit the partners who join in to help to develop the new operating system.

But does Microsoft really have anything to fear from a Google operating system? What do you think?

Share your thoughts.

Comments welcome.

Source.

I recently came across a new game from Armorgames.com called Warfare 1944 and decided to check it out.  I knew they had previously made a game called Warfare 1917, which focused on the bloody trench warfare style of fighting during that war - I found that game to be absolutely addicting and amazingly well put-together.

The 1944 game is very similar in that you have a set group of units to choose from and those units have a very limited number of commands they can carry out.  The units have different strengths and weaknesses and you must combine those in order to achieve your objectives.  You can fight on either the U.S. side or you fight as a German.  The action is simple, there is a playing field that you must cross in order to win, there are three rows to the battlefield, and you can send your units on either the upper, middle, or lower row.  The units cannot change what row they are in once they start so it is important to make sure that you don’t sent everyone down the same row as an advancing panzer.

In the 1917 game your troops advanced until they got to a trench; in the 1944 version they advance until they get to a wall or a hedge - once there they will take cover.  You can order your troops to lay down covering fire, throw grenades, or have an officer call in air strikes or artillery.  Your opponents can do the same.  Everything is based off of a points system; the more points you have the more troops and firepower you can bring to bear on an enemy.  The points seem to be arbitrary and replenish over time at a consistent rate so it is important to conserve your points if you need things like tanks or air strikes as they tend to cost quite a bit.

It is essentially the same game as 1917, only now there are three avenues of advancement rather than a single path.  The 1917 game feels more at home with the Flash game platform because it is simpler and easier to control.  Flash games that try to be too complex usually end up being unplayable or not enjoyable because the platform just doesn’t lend itself to complexities.  I think that is why zombie shoot-em-ups and throwing games are so popular when it comes to the Flash genre: simple is better.

In this case, the 1944 game seems to have reached a little bit too far.  The action is spread out over a couple of screens and you have to scroll between them to keep track of your squads and then scroll back to check on the enemy - it is very easy to lose track of the action.  Once you do get back to the action, your squads aren’t even that effective in battle; it is up to you to tell them to throw grenades or to lay down covering fire - something that happened automatically in the 1917 game.  I may have missed something, but I’ve never seen a single war movie where soldiers in battle had to wait for a command to throw a grenade at an enemy pelting them with machine gun fire.  All in all, the game is fun but not nearly as fun as Warfare 1917 - which is a game you should try out for yourself; it is a great way to kill 15 to 20 minutes.

Warfare 1944

Warfare 1917

Multitouch is pretty cool technology, no question about that. And for awhile there, many folks such as myself were feeling pretty skeptical as to whether or not we would ever be enjoying this technology on the Linux desktop.

But as you can see in this article and with the video below, multitouch has arrived for the Linux platform. Best of all, it appears to work pretty darn well.

As you can see from the above linked article, everything you need is fully accessible. Now I would point out that this is still very much in development and this is not something that is really set for the casual users just yet. But as a proof of the technology working, I think we have arrived.

I have been a huge fan of VideoLAN for what seems like forever. Both on Windows and for Linux, VideoLAN remains my all time favorite and frankly, most powerful video player I have ever used.

Likely due to the simple fact that it will play nearly anything out of the box, regardless of platform, is likely why VLAN has done as well as it has for this long. And now we enter 1.0.0 status!

What is still rather comical however, is that most users barely scrape the surface of just how powerful this media player actually is. From transcoding video from one format to another, down to streaming movies across your LAN. Clearly there is very little that this media player cannot do.

Why did ASUS suddenly stop supporting Linux on their hardware? What is the benefit of this and how could they choose this course of action? Considering the fact that a properly installed Linux distro runs better on lower end netbooks than Windows ever will, seems fairly obvious that Microsoft must have given ASUS a deal they couldn’t refuse.

Why did Microsoft see what was seen as such an insignificant market share as a threat? There is no real question why ASUS made its choices. They are simply following where the money is and frankly, the believe that the money is with Windows.

As for Microsoft however, it is clear that they were not interested in allowing yet another market slip through their fingers. Just as they doing in Search, it seems like they also want to pickup as much of the netbook market as possible.