Stuff White People Like - Macs

My friend Dave pointed me to this blog and I had to rant on it! Especially the one about Macs. As a white person who uses a MacBook Pro (dual-booting with Vista 64 and Leopard, and drives a VW Jetta) I think this is totally hilarious and all to true! I have often thought the same thing. I see people hanging out in coffee shops, checking their emails, looking at their pictures and surfing the web. All on a machine that costs at least $500 more than a PC laptop that could do the exact same thing (especially when the email is gmail). I have come to the conclusion that having a Mac is a status symbol more than anything else. I bet that 90% of the people who own Macs use them for the three things I just mentioned and not a whole lot else. Steve Jobs is a genius in the fact that he has created a brand that sells based on the guise that it is 'more intuitive to use' and gets away with charging 50% more. Anyway, check out the blog...

The Rise of the Machines!

A friend sent this article to me today and I thought it was interesting enough to rant about. It has to do with the current financial crisis and the fact that nobody can really pipoint how it happened. With movies like Terminator and The Matrix floating through our heads we usually think of computers taking over the world as battle. Maybe they already have and we are doing it willingly in the name of speed and efficiency? Here is an quote from the article:

"But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. ... Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

Read the article to find out who originally wrote that statement in their manifesto. It will blow you away. - dv

Google 'Chrome'

It appears that Google has introduced a beta of their new web browser called 'Chrome'.  I thought I would give it a whirl and have to say that is very fast.  Not available for the Mac yet, but apparently they are working on it.  Since it is still in beta (does Google ever take software off of beta?) you may run into a few bugs now and then. So, if you are running Windows - take a gander. It has a few cool new features that I think are intuitive and in true Google style, they have a different take on the UI. Check it out and see what you think!  Enjoy!

Cool Web App For Finding a House

Once again, my friend Larry sent me a link to a website that is worthy of the rant. A company called 'Trulia' (which helps you in searching for homes) introduced a new tool today called 'Snapshot' which has a very cool UI design (UI = user interface). It allows you to select a price range and shows all the houses that are for sale within that range. Pretty common I know, but it also shows you where they are on the map and includes a little picture of the house (if available). In the words of Larry, 'simple, elegant and it works'. The perfect tri-fecta! Until later, Enjoy!

Career limiting moves...

I ran across this article from Baseline and thought it was interesting enough to rant about. The jist of the article is that you need to be careful about what you put on your 'myspace' or 'facebook' site due to the fact that recruiters and HR folks are using these as a way to screen potential employees.

Imagine, a future employer visiting your social networking site and finding out something about you that is very different from the way they think about it. For example, you like to 'Party like a Rock Star' every night and you are applying for a job working for a high school as a guidance counselor. Although it may not be right (and maybe it is right) that they use that in their decision process, the fact of the matter is that it will influence their position on whether or not they hire you. Kind of like tattoos that creep up your neck and stick out when you are in your 'interview' suit. Like it or not - the interviewer is going to form an opinion about you. (I call these types of things - career limiting moves...)

Another thought is that you can use these sites in a purposeful way to promote yourself. It also talks about the site 'LinkedIn', which could be equated to a 'professional' version of myspace/facebook. Using sites like these, might be a good backup to a resume. On 'LinkedIn' you can create a lot of content about yourself and the potential employer could learn a lot more about you with out having to create (and read) a 5 page resume.

So, I am not sayaying to hide who you are, just be aware of the ramifications..... Until next time - Enjoy!

Doom and Gloom for Windows?

Ran across this article today about the future of Microsoft. Gartner (a pretty respected company that analyses and reports on trends in IT) is claiming that Microsoft "faces serious competition that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts". Interesting thing though. Linux doesn't seem to be picking up steam at the desktop level and, for a business, the Mac (although a beautiful work of art) is generally more expensive and incompatible with most client/server business software. So, who is the competition? The article brings up a good point in that there is not any competition in the enterprise space except for themselves (Microsoft). I would say that the SaaS space is where the competition is ultimately going to come from. When everything (or almost everything) becomes browser based, it won't matter what desktop OS you have, it just has to be compatible with the applications you are trying to run from wherever they may be on whatever you may have in your hand at the time (pc, phone, etc..).

Until later - Enjoy!

Banking Crisis Visually

A friend sent me this link yesterday (thanks Larry!) and I deemed it worthy of the rant. We have heard a lot of press lately about the banking crisis. This blog site gives you a good visual of what we are up against. Kind of crazy what happens at the end of 2007. Time to get out of debt ladies and gentlemen....

As a side note - make sure you are using Firefox for this one. IE doesn't seem to like it. I don't know about Safari.... Enjoy!

Google Sites

A few posts ago I chatted about SaaS. Today I came across this article that is talking about Google Sites. Another example of a Software as a Service application. I am curious to see how it works, so I may give it a try. We use Microsoft SharePoint at work and although I was a little reluctant at first, I have really come to like it. It kind of follows the SaaS idea, although it is hosted locally. It has become our internal collaboration tool. We can (very easily) set up a 'web-page' that people can use to store documents, create surveys, create simple project plans, create issue logs, create discussion boards, blog and wet up wiki sites. There is also a feature where you can have your own 'page', similar to Facebook or other social networking sites. The cool part is that you don't need a technologist to walk you through every step. With minimal training, you can create and maintain your own site. It is starting to become more of a standard for how we collaborate internally. The downside is that is that it is hard for us to let outside users have access to information that they may need to help us on specific projects. I am thinking that maybe Google Sites would be a potential solution for this.

SaaS

OK - I haven't posted in a bit. Sorry about that. I ran across a cool site last week that I wanted to share with all (all 2 of them) my readers. A little background first. Since I work in the IT industry it is part of my job to keep up on different technologies. Part of that includes watching for different paradigm shifts when they happen and seeing if it makes sense for us to move in the direction of the shifts. One of those shifts has been the concept of 'Software as a Service'. From a business perspective I love this idea. My favorite part of this shift is that it lets the folks who are really good at server maintenance do what they do best, and it let's the customers (us) focus on our business as opposed to spending time maintaining servers etc (I know of a certain blogger who might be wishing his Apple server was a SaaS...). Anyway, another part of this rant is the fact that it really is starting to annoy me that I have to run all my own backups for my (and more importantly - my wife's) stuff. When there is all this space on the internet, why can't there be a little bit of space that is easily accesable for us to use. Enter ideas like Google docs and (one that I thnk has the potential to be way better) Zoho. I ran across Zoho last week and thought to myself, man, we are getting close. (I think that Google docs is a little bit sterile and clunky). Not only would we have a place to store all the data we create, but the on-line apps to create and edit them too. there is an on-line word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, database app, etc. I love this idea since I use three or four different computers (Lenovo/Vista, Dell/XP, IBM/XP, Macbook Pro/Leopard) and this solves the 'where is my data' issue that I seem to have. I like the thought of 'anywhere - anyhow'. As I was checking out the stuff on Zoho, I was thinking to myself, all they really need is some sort of email program, like 'gmail'. To my suprise, they are coming out with one Q2. Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.

Along those same lines, here is an article about SaaS. More from an enterprise level, but the thoughts are still the same. As we move forward we are becoming increasingly mobile and we don't want to have to have our laptop or files with us, but rather be able to get to them 'anywhere - anyhow'.

Enjoy!

Microsoft bidding on Yahoo

Looks like Microsoft wants a bigger piece of the internet pie and is shoring up for it's war against Google. At a price of $44 billion. Check out the article here. Interesting...