Before he died, Bill Hicks accused Denis Leary of stealing his material (apparently,
Hicks was the only comedian who ever joked about smoking). Now I'm going to
steal some of Leary's stuff.
The Amiga's not dead, it's just frozen, and when it thaws out it's going be
pretty #@#543&*!! You know what it's like to take a cold shower? Well, multiply
that 15 million times and that's how #@#543&* the Amiga is going to be.
Fortunately, Amiga fans have Bill Panagouleas, CEO of DiscreetFX, a computer
video company. Bill (it's easier to call him Bill than it is to retype Panagouleas)
hopes to complete a documentary about trans fat (a fatter version of "Super
Size Me"?) and use
the profits to buy out Amiga Inc., which owns the intellectual property
behind the dead but surprisingly modern machine. Once all these things happen,
Panagouleas -- I mean, Bill -- will heat up the Amiga's frozen remains and bring
it back to the living.
If that works, maybe Bill can revive Walt Disney and Ted Williams, as well.
Oh, if you want an Amiga, but don't trust the 15-year-old machines for sale
on eBay, just run the old software through an emulator (nothing beats DeluxePaint
III for graphics, I always say!). Bill says you can get the emulator here.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/21/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
ROI guru Ian Campbell of Nucleus Research did some simple math the other day
and calculated that if only one-fourth of XP users upgrade their machines to
Vista, the overall cost would be $13.5 billion (I'm not sure if Campbell rounded
up or down).
Campbell
compares this unfavorably to Jamaica, which has a gross national product
of just $12.2 billion.
I prefer to think of Steve Ballmer, who, with $13.6 billion, could pay for
all these upgrades and still have $100 million to spend on Xboxes for needy
suburban teens.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/21/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
Microsoft's security business is getting broader and broader all the time. This
week, the company
released
a beta of its new Forefront client, one aimed squarely at Symantec, McAfee,
Sunbelt and all the other security vendors.
Redmond also has specific tools, including just-launched protections for Exchange
and SharePoint.
Interestingly, Forefront uses scan engines from CA and Sophos, but not Symantec,
McAfee and others that have complained about Microsoft's plans.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
AMD's low-cost (read: $250) PC for the third world has been pulled
due to lack of demand. I'm not sure what to make of this. It could be that
$250 is still way expensive for poorer countries (or maybe the fact that Dell
and others sell machines almost as cheap was the death knell). Perhaps it's
that Internet access is still nonexistent. Perhaps the AMD machine was a hunk
of junk.
In any event, AMD hasn't given up on helping the world. Instead of pushing
its own machine (on which it hoped to make a profit), AMD will help MIT build
$100 Linux laptops.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
Microsoft has been on an interoperability kick lately, starting with the detente
with Sun a year or two ago, and then the deal with Novell to help ensure that
Windows and Linux servers (with a dash of desktop) work together.
This week, Microsoft announced the Interop
Vendor Alliance. So who are the enemies that have joined hands under this
Microsoft-sponsored umbrella? Why, there's Sun and Novell. Oh, right, they're
friends now!
Well, there are bitter rivals AMD and Citrix, sworn enemies Quest Software
and NEC, and longtime foes BEA and Siemens.
Now, if Apple, Red Hat, IBM and RealNetworks all joined up, then I'd be impressed.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
News that
20
percent of IT folk will move to Vista tells me one thing: Folks can't run
away from XP's security holes fast enough! Twenty percent might not sound like
a lot, but for IT to migrate this number of systems is pretty dramatic. This
is a boon for hardware makers, especially high-end video board outfits, whose
gear is needed for Vista to run right.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/16/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
What do you do if your processor monopoly is being steadily eroded by AMD? Why,
get into software, of course!
To do so, Intel
is pulling out every Web 2.0 buzzword in the book, including Web 2.0 itself,
wikis, open source, RSS and blogs.
But Intel didn't turn hardware hacks into software jocks. Instead, it gathered
tools from various software vendors to build a suite for small and medium-sized
companies.
Included in the suite are RSS tools from SimpleFeed and NewsGator, wikis from
Socialtext, and blogging from Six Apart.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
I thought after all those dinners with Bono and all those hours spent doing good
that we'd have a new, nicer, softer Bill Gates.
We don't. Gates has as much spunk and moxie as ever, as he showed his Bill-ish
bluster when defending
Vista in Europe. Don't forget, it was the Europeans who stalked Vista every
step of the way, pushing for this feature to be yanked, that item to be pulled
and APIs to be opened wider than Bill O'Reilly's mouth. According to Gates,
the European authorities wanted to "castrate" Windows.
I hate it when columnists digress by actually saying "I digress,"
so I'll just briefly and slightly change the subject. The Gates quote reminds
me of the day in November 1989 when IBM and Microsoft announced that OS/2 would
serve as the high-end multitasking enterprise OS, and Windows would remain a
low-end product, leading then-Lotus chief Jim Manzi to remark to anyone within
earshot and with press credentials that Windows had been "neutered."
Who knew that desktop operating systems were all male?
Meanwhile, back in Europe, Gates argued that Vista came through the regulatory
process with all of its parts still attached.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
The Blue Screen of Death is never a pretty sight, though my XP box usually just
hangs and dies without ever turning blue (reminds me how when the old Commodore
Amiga crashed, you'd get a blinking orange "Guru Meditation Error"
-- and with the Amiga you got these a lot!).
If you've managed to get your machine totally stabilized (tell us all how you
did that by writing me at [email protected])
and miss the Blue Screen, have I got a tool for you!
Microsoft has a "BlueScreen
of Death" screen saver that can fool even the savviest IT pro into
thinking that your machine has indeed rolled over and died. I wonder if I can
get a version for my Mac G4?
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/15/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
CompUSA will start
selling
Vista by the end of this month to small business customers. The deal is
aimed at being fair to small shops, as corporate customers with Enterprise Agreements
can pick up Vista this month, as well.
But this all seems so backward. Businesses are the last to move to new versions
of Windows, usually waiting until at least SP1.
Consumers, especially crazed gamers, are the ones who line up at midnight,
not Joe IT. Yet consumers this holiday season won't be buying souped-up Vista
machines -- they'll be on hold until next year.
Maybe this is all a secret plot to get folks to shell out $250 for Zune, which
launches this week. I might change my mind on Zune: With wireless and a
neat video screen, it seems to pack more punch than the iPod. As long as they
leave out the Blue Screen of Death, maybe I'll pick one up.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/14/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
Plus, Jave goes open source, Visual Studio to come with obfuscation tools and
more.
Today is a special day. My daughter Lauren turned 18 (she can now buy lottery
tickets and cigarettes, and apparently doesn't have to listen to her father,
or so she tells me). It's
also patch Tuesday, a tradition that, while not 18, sure feels like it!
Today's fixes may focus on XML Core Services, which is being hacked as we speak,
as well as Visual Studio. Besides miscellaneous Windows fixes, there's also
a new rev of the Malicious Software Removal Tool (does this remove malicious
software, or maliciously remove software?).
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/14/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments
Yesterday, Sun announced that Java would join Solaris as
a
major product that is now open source. I'm the kind of guy that admits his
shortcomings (I've got thin wrists and a thick middle), so I'm not ashamed to
say I almost thought Java was already open source (maybe because my open source-junkie
son David is such a Java fan).
Java just has this image of openness, one that .NET will probably never have
unless it comes with a full General Public License (even David Blaine couldn't
hold his breath that long).
Despite my ignorance, this is a big deal. Java will now be even more embraced
by the young software anarchists who will become tomorrow's code leaders.
I don't happen to think that Microsoft has to make .NET, Visual Studio and
the rest fully open source. But it should think very, very seriously about giving
Java the exact same consideration as Visual Basic and Visual C#.
Posted by Doug Barney on 11/14/2006 at 1:15 PM0 comments