IBM has a new logo for consumer products.
Monthly Archives: August 2001
One Billion Wasted on High End Servers
Gartner Group: $1 Billion ‘wasted’ on high-end servers.
High Speed Photos by High-Schoolers
Exhibition of High Speed Photography at pacsci.org. You may remember photos like these from Science or Readers’ Digest — but these photos were mostly taken by high-schoolers.
Safety Surcharge on Indian Railways
The Newspaper Today: Railways to levy safety surcharge from October 1. I suppose we can all expect safer rides on Indian Railways now 
.
Musicmatch Radio
MusicMatch Jukebox is something I liked because it had this great ‘MusicMatch Radio‘ features that would let me stream my favorite music genres to me. Now IE 6 comes with something called a Media Bar. Pretty Cool. Visually very appealing. Lots of music, including Indian Classical (though there’s only one channel for that) — it doesn’t come close to Shoutcast yet though. As far as I can see, MusicMatch is almost toast — but for two teeny facts. One: MusicMatch is still one of the best free rippers/converters/players around and it rips MP3s well, unlike Windows Media Player. Two: While you can use Musicmatch Radio freely, IE6′s Media Bar, believe it or not, requires a login via Passport before it plays anything for you. Tough! (Imagine the possibilities for a moment here — how much would such highly targeted user preferences be worth to a record company? And what would they pay MSN to get at some of this data?)
iPlanet Moves Towards Sun
The Meta Group: iPlanet moves toward Sun
Find the Mac in this XP ad
From the Fun-Games dept: Find the Mac in this XP ad.
Dante's Inferno
Dante‘s Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XIII, 103-108:
| Come l’altre verrem per nostre spoglie, ma non però ch’alcuna sen rivesta, ché non è giusto aver ciò ch’om si toglie. Qui le strascineremo, e per la mesta |
Like other souls, we shall seek out the flesh that we have left, but none of us shall wear it; it is not right for any man to have what he himself has cast aside. We’ll drag |
Trouble in the Kingdom
The New York Times: Saudi Arabia has managed to lift virtually everyone out of poverty. But today, even with lofty oil prices, the petrodollars do not stretch as far, not least because they are being spread among more Saudi citizens. (Free registration is required to read this article.)
Office XP Upgrade Experience
I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to Office XP on my primary work machine today, primarily for a lack of anything better to do 
. I was a bit apprehensive, because Office 2000 had been working well for me so far (and I am very wary of letting unstable stuff onto this machine). Still.
The Good News so far: Installation was smooth – much more responsive than the Office 2000 installation. All Office apps now start up very fast — quite a bit faster than Office 2000, which was no slouch itself.
The Bad News: I run Windows 2000, and upgrading Office 2000 to Office XP killed my thumbnail views in Windows Explorer. This is a known issue — if you’re running any flavor of Windows 2000 and upgrading to Office XP, there’s a chance that thumbnail views for graphics files may stop working after you upgrade or remove your old version of Photo Editor. The workaround is here.
Further Bad News: IE (IE5.5 SP1) started behaving erratically. New windows (even ones I created by shift-clicking) did not show content, they just sort of hung with an empty frame. Installing IE5.5 SP2 solved the problem.
Maybe I should quit while I’m still ahead — but I’m thinking of installing Visio 2002 while I’m at it .