Microsoft is extending the life of XP for another 6 months.

But it's not because people are rejecting Vista. Honestly.

"As long as the iPod is dominant, they're going to have to reconcile themselves with dealing with what the consumer wants: something that will play on the iPod. The smartest thing they can do is sell music without DRM. It's not as though DRM is stopping pirating in other ways, anyway."

- Phil Leigh, Inside Digital Media analyst, Sept. 24, 2007.

"If you want to compete with the iTunes store for online music sales, you're going to have to take the iPod into account, and that means selling MP'3's, which prevents any and all Digital Rights Management on the music you sell."

- Me, August 23, 2007.

So the New York Times has figured out that walling off your content makes you irrelevant.

Too bad NBC didn't learn from that harsh lesson.

I'm sure this will have all the success that any other online distribution had before iTunes came along.

Information wants to be free. The trick is getting people to make it valuable.

Process your digital photos to look like black and white film.

Very, very cool. Man, I loved HP5+ developed in T-Max, back in the day.

a luxury SUV, or a camera...

Hmmn.

Choices.

IBM launches another shot across the bow of Microsoft:

"IBM is resurrecting an old name for this brand new software: Lotus Symphony. The new Symphony, based on Open Office, is yet another product to support Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard for universal document interchange. There are about 135 million Lotus Notes users, and they will also receive Symphony free. IBM support will be available for a fee. There are no details yet about platform support, but IBM is supporting Lotus Notes 8 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so at least those three are likely."

I use NeoOffice on my iMac at home, and aside the presentation (PowerPoint) module, it's quite good.

Between this and Google integrating a presentation module into Google Docs and, um, mixed reaction to Vista, there just may be some chinks appearing in Redmond's armor.

"Equipped with a 2.4-GHz Core 2 Duo T7700 processor, the maximum 4GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and nVidia's new top-of-the-line notebook graphics card, the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT, our $2949 test unit set new speed records. The MacBook Pro outperformed the rest of the notebooks we tested, all of which claim Windows as their primary--nay, their only--operating system. We loaded Windows Vista Home Premium on the Apple notebook, and it snagged a WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 88. In games it achieved a blazing frame rate of 141 frames per second in Far Cry (with antialiasing turned off)."

Yep. The best and fastest laptop for Windows is a Mac. So says PC World.

Jeff Jarvis nails two fundamental concepts of Web 2.0:

Jarvis' First Law: Give the people control of media, they will use it.

The corollary: Don't give the people control of media, and you will lose.

Jarvis' Second Law: Lower cost of production and distribution in media inevitably leads to nichefication.

The corollary: Lower the cost of media enough, and there will be an unlimited supply of people making it.

On the surface, Apple's new partnership with Starbucks is a good thing. The demographics of the average Starbucks customer and the average iPod owner are probably pretty close, and Starbucks has been making a push into music as of late. The theory is you can download whatever song is playing over the speakers in your local Starbucks right then and there and not have to wait for it when you get home.

But why not team up with the #1 source for new music these days, YouTube? Apple is already cozying up to Google/YouTube with the iPhone/iPod Touch, why not go all the way and put iTunes store links on every music video on YouTube?

Think big, Apple, think big.

You're getting a Dell!

Another one bites the dust.

Look, the only way you'll beat Apple is to not be Apple.

Taken with my Blackberry Pearl this evening on the way back from Payson. It's "only" 2 megapixels, but 4 years ago, 2 megapixels in a cell phone would have been unthinkable.