• The Walmart Virus Spreads Like Wildfire, Ignores Mid-West US
• http://www.thegadgetblog.com/2009/02/04/new-mimo-usb-displays-perfect-for-ops-center-dreams/
• MSI Wind vs. iBook G4—Mac OS X Benchmarks
• Captain Kirk’s VoIP Phone: Guaranteed Geekasm
• Why Microsoft’s “Fix it” Will be Broken

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Other pessimism from IDC included a projection that the market wouldn’t recover until 2010, and reports that companies are having a hard time convincing people to continue spending on phones after around 500,000 people lost their jobs in the US over the past quarter.

The good news for gadget geeks? IDC projected an expansion of the smartphone market by 8.9 percent—with an accompanying ” 1.9-percent drop for the rest of the handset industry”.

Source: BusinessMirror

Tags: downturn, IDC, recession, shipments

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Case in point: Monty Widenius, founder of database software company MySQL. Sun’s $1bn acquisition of MySQL was a high point for the open source movement (even if Sun is now generally thought to have grossly overpaid). But when Widenius quit Sun on Friday - along with Marten Mickos, the former MySQL CEO - he didn’t mince words. From his personal blog:

The main reason for leaving was that I’m not satisfied with the way the MySQL server has been developed, as can be seen on my previous blog post. In particular I would have like to see the server development to be moved to a true open development environment that would encourage outside participation and without any need of differentiation on the source code. Sun has been considering opening up the server development, but the pace has been too slow.

In the earlier blog post, Widenius took issue with the premature release of what he claimed was a bug-ridden version 5.1 of MySQL in order to accelerate sales (though to be fair to Sun, he blamed that on Mickos personally rather than Sun’s influence.)

So has Sun been alienating the MySQL community, and is this attempt to combine open source and commercial cultures turning into a mess?

When I caught up with Mickos this day he was having none of it. Though far too polite to engage in a public spat with Widenius, he did permit himself the observation that his former ally was probably suffering from “separation anxiety.” He also pointed out that Widenius hadn’t worked in the MySQL business at Sun after the acquisition, but instead had been reporting to CTO Greg Papadopoulos.

As for the latest release, Mickos states that a fifth of the MySQL users are already on version 5.1, and that there are fewer bugs than the previous version (though that might not be saying much, to judge from Widenius’ account).

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14-year-old Danny Johnson demolished the old Guitar Hero record by scoring almost 1 million points with a rendition of the game’s hardest song, “Through the Fire and Flames.”

More impressively, he came within seconds of hitting every one of the song’s notes perfectly, but a button on his controller broke, the New York Times reports:

Danny stated he’d destroyed about 80 plastic Guitar Hero controllers in the last nine months with his intense play, which is the subject of a regular live Webcast (at ustream.tv/GH3Phenom) and which recently earned him an endorsement deal with a gaming team and event promoter, eMazingGaming.com.

“When you’re hitting that many notes and playing that fast, it just terrorizes the controller,” stated Scott Johnson, 45, Danny’s father.

Danny’s record-setting performance took place at a Best Buy in Manhattan and was sponsored by the Guinness Book of World Records.

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People make and read these lists to answer a need to learn about other people - even strangers. That’s hardwired into human psychology, stated Samuel Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas who studies on the internet social networks.

That may be the rational explanation, but it hardly justifies some of the things our own Jeff Weiss found Dallas-area residents revealing about themselves.

These lists can lead you to only one conclusion: People are weird.

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• Stock-options backdating is no longer confined to tech companies in Silicon Valley. Executives from Toronto-based BlackBerry maker Research in Motion have concurred to pay nearly $75m to settle charges related to their role in backdating that occurred between 1996 and 2006.

• It’s all a bit Massive Brother-like, but the UK has made a serious (£4.7bn) push to produce and distribute digital identity cards for all residents. The new cards will hold biometric information, such as scans of fingerprints and faces, in an embedded chip. The first cards have been issued, but too bad there are no readers that can access all the data. Indeed, the Identity and Passport Service, which issued the cards, has no intention of issuing compatible readers. Instead, it will be up to individual departments and agencies to buy their own.

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IMHO, both Windows and Google Desktop Search consume too many resources.

e.g. Windows Desktop Search advocates Pentium 1 GHz Processor and 256 MB RAM, 500 MB of free hard disk space,… A process that starts automatically all the time. Note that we don’t search for files on our desktop all the time and mostly have an idea which file sits in which folder. A desktop search is for that occasion where we’ve “lost” some file, now and then.

Cygwin provides the ideal alternatives: locate and find.

locate coupled with updatedb helps you find any file (even hidden ones and those in temporary cache folders) in your system.

When you run the updatedb ($ updatedb), as the name recommends, it updates its database creating a easy index of all the files that are present in the system, with full paths. The first time you run it, like any other indexing application, it takes a few minutes to index the whole system. From the next time, it barely takes a minute, if you run it periodically, that is. I run updatedb about once each week to keep the index fresh.

After updating the file index, you can begin using locate.

$ locate

gives you all the files on your PC which contain the substring in their filenames, within a second. Even the files that accidentally got saved in some obscure temporary folder can be retrieved easily.

There are more options to update and locate files with extra preferences but I never had to use them much. The default usage suffices.

The great thing, apart from the speed of retrieval, is that this is not resource intensive and a dedicated process isn’t always running on your system for it. Of course, you need Cygwin installed.

Tags: Cygwin, Cygwin commands, desktop search, find, Google desktop search, locate, search, update, updatedb, Windows desktop search, Windows search

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That’s the point of Microsoft’s new “Fix it” button, which has started showing up on some of the help pages available through the company website:

“If we know what those 15 steps are why shouldn’t we just script it,” stated Lori Brownell, Microsoft’s general manager of product quality and on the web support

The “Fix it” option is still fairly rare, showing up in around 100 different help documents. The effort is growing rapidly, though, up from just four such fixes when the program quietly began in December.

Microsoft continues to offer users the option of doing things on their own if they either don’t trust Microsoft or just like being in control.

“We’re not trying to hide anything,” she said.

Unfortunately, the Fix it button will probably do more harm than good for Microsoft’s reputation.

From my experience, Microsoft has long lacked the capability to properly communicate with its customers, particularly regarding the software maker’s products and how to maximize them. Surprisingly refreshing steps towards a new marketing approach include the Mojave Experiment. But in general, Microsoft’s customers are mainly left in the dark. About just how efficient and productive Microsoft’s products can be. About how even Bill Gates worries about the customer experience.

The point is that the Fix it button is yet another of Microsoft’s projects that are good in intention and conceivably great in implementation. But it will suffer from Microsoft’s communication problems and general reputation.

You see, once the Fix it fails to work—and it will fail to work, more likely because Microsoft has to deal with an endless variety of systems and the corresponding quirks, rather than buggy execution—I can imagine people declaring the feature as yet another Microsoft failure. I also envision some open source suggests pointing this future failure as yet more proof of the superiority of the open source model. And Mac users will smugly declare “We never needed a Fix it button” or “I bet if the Mac had a Fix it button, it would work all the time.

Yes, I know Microsoft has its own share of real flaws and failures. It’s not nice to try and twist other companies’ arms to make sure only your software gets used. But Microsoft today faces a very hostile on the internet environment, where people are swift to dismiss and attack the company at the same time. Before Microsoft tries implementing projects like Fix it, where the chance for error is significant (again not entirely the fault of Microsoft), perhaps the company should reconsider how it connects with the market—and take drastic steps to mend it.

(Image is screenshot of source article)

Tags: Fix it, Microsoft

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Cnet has a fascinating article up on a new software tool Microsoft is starting to offer.

A “Fix It” button is starting to appear in some of the help documents on Microsoft’s support pages.

So, for example, if you go to the Microsoft.com page about what to do if your World wide web Explorer icon has disappeared from your desktop, you can either manually perform the steps to return the icon, or you can click on the Fix It link and a small program will automatically run and replace the icon without you having to do anything.

The Fix It initiative is still fairly small, but I think this is a great idea, and should be extended to every Microsoft error message.

One of the biggest sources of frustration I’ve ever had with Windows is when trying to install a Windows Update, and I get some inscrutable error code that prevents the update from installing.

You’ve to spend hours digging through forums, researching various remedies and trying them in turn, or worse, call Microsoft and sit through a teeth-grinding phone support session (”Yes, I have turned the personal on. No, I have not inserted an ice cream sandwich into the DVD drive.”)

If Microsoft could create an automated tool to deal with those errors, that would be a godsend.

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Hot on the heels of adding offline functionality to Gmail, Google has done something similar for its Calendar program.

Google answers offline Calendar FAQs.

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