I love Apple, but there are a number of areas in which they fail, some of them miserably. In the case of who I will call Edward, Apple has apparently dropped the ball completely. Edward bought an Apple MacBook 2.16GHz model, in white, in the last week of January, 2006. All Apple computers come with a one year warranty to cover any failures or manufacturing defects. Apple’s process is to vet the issue over the phone and, if the support need is deemed valid, they send you a box to ship them your system. Apple has denied Edward service for his issue. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

I have to say that I’m a little disappointed in the MacWorld Expo 2008. Sure, its usually primarily a platform for Apple to kick off big new initiatives, partnerships, hardware, and software, but it is an expo, which means there are lots of vendors who exhibit on the show floor. True to that spirit, there were a lot of exhibitors, but not a lot of interesting stuff came out of them. As you can see from our CES coverage, MacWorld simply didn’t measure up. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

Yeah, kind and gentle readers, The Dojo is ranking full stop at 12,008,698. Ain’t that sweet! Whatever. I shed the mock enthusiasm for more realistic observations. Alexa, the b@$tard child of search engines, seems to me a pretty useless gauge of who is popular on the internet. Why? Because you need to have a toolbar (or more recently, a FireFox plug-in) installed just to pass your usage statistics to Alexa in the first place. Before the Mac-compatible version of Alexa came out there were no usage stats from Mac users. Yup, all of Alexa was defined by Windows users. For years, in fact, so all of that historical data they have on web trends are all skewed.

So, why is it a big deal to me? Honestly, I could care less about Alexa, though I stuck a stupid little ranking badge at the bottom of the site. However, certain public relations firms will not talk to me or consider the Dojo real unless I have an Alexa rank. Even then, my Alexa ranking must be better than 50,000. I just find it amazing that a site which draws, at the moment, around 120,000 readers a month (250,000 a month back in 2003, yo!) is considered siteus non gratis because Alexa doesn’t know about it. Alexa is a consumer-oriented trends tracking site, so only non-technical people are going to install the toolbar or plug-in anyway. This isn’t you.

If anything, Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Live Search’s statistics should be a good gauge of what goes on over the intarweb. Alexa just isn’t that important.

written by Tyler Regas

Okay, Engadget. Lets have it out, right here and now. You’re irritating me with all of this chatter about the Palm Foleo. I’m really peeved that Palm made one of the worst decisions of its life by canceling one of the greatest new form factors to emerge in a long time. If the UMPC were an actual market, the Foleo would be a UMPC killer. So, if you, too, want to feel bad about Palm’s ill-fated choice to dump the Foleo and truly understand why it was such a mistake, then read this.

PS: If you get the impression that I’m emotional about this, you’re right. This was slated to be the one cross-over device which would have really spanned the gap which laptops simply cannot fill unless they weight too much and phones just don’t grasp. I’m very fond of my MacBook Pro and the Nokia N95 8GB which I’m testing right now is a fantastic phone, but either one is too much or the other isn’t enough. Aiiiyyyeeeeeeee! Foleo, you will be missed!!

written by Tyler Regas

Oh, its no surprise. John C. Dvorak is ranting and raving again, this time about how useless and pointless Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child intiative is. It is, in fact cruel, according to him. How crass and naive we must be to think that giving a laptop to a starving child will miraculously save his or her poor life. You know, John. You’re right. A laptop won’t save a child’s life. It won’t feed them. If they are starving when they get the laptop, they will still die if they don’t get any food.

By the same token, a truckload of rice won’t educate them, either. It won’t teach them how to farm or read or give them weather information. In fact, deliveries of rice merely teaches them about loss and dependence. They don’t get fed all the time because there’s not enough to go around and they just wait for the food to come because they don’t have to do anything to get it. Deliveries of such foodstuffs to the hundreds of thousands of poor villages around the world teach the truly starving how to use crutches.

What this teaches us, the ones who can feed ourselves when we want to (and dive headlong into morbid obesity), is that there are far more than one simple thing we need to do to fix the world’s hunger problem. Providing massive shipments of rice to the hungry is certainly one important thing we can do, and we do it. Your contributions, John, have added to that. Now, however, we have a new direction we can go in to further improve the lives of these people. Education is one of the most complicated problems to solve and the OLPC directly addresses that one issue.

Tell me, John. If its so hard to feed these people how easy could it possibly be to educate them. Is it as easy to build a school, provide teachers, print and deliver text books (in various different languages), provide daily lunches, define local, regional, and state laws regarding village and school safety (think raiders and thieving warlords), eliminate war and conflict, and get ultra-rich people to give away all of their money as it is to drop off a bag of rice?

The real slap in the face of these destitute peoples is the bag of rice, John. Who decides how much rice goes where? Will there be enough to go around? Who gets fed? Who gets left to die of starvation? Who gets to say which poor villages even see deliveries or even which countries poor benefits from such programs? Someone once said that to give a man a fish feeds him for a day, but to teach him to fish is to feed him for a lifetime. The OLPC XO-1 is that teacher where, otherwise, there would be none.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: media, news, social

Yes. Sold to Specialty Equity, CompUSSR is going to be shut down and liquidated. If you’re expecting a rash of fantastic Fire Sale-like deals, though, don’t get too excited. Gordon Brother Group, the owners of Specialty Equity, is known to hold off on steep discount deals until the 11th hour. Combine that with the fact that there are only 103 active stores, very few of which are in major metropolitan areas (check your city) and you’re not going to find much.

Two of the possible reasons behind this collapse are Apple and the market. Apple now holds anywhere from 15-20% of laptop sales and the Halo Effect (not the game) from its very, very significant iPod/iPhone business combined with Microsoft spectacular failure with Windows Vista (Blista?) have been driving upgraders to Apple’s online and retail stores better than any slick Apple advertising campaign.

Second, the market has been evolving for years and that includes people’s decreasing need for a monolithic brick & mortar establishment. Like cars, computers are being built better and, despite Microsoft’s claims that people need Vista, XP is a solid platform with proven tools and support and companies like Dell and HP are building better machines based on a wide range of improved technologies. Tie all of this together with low system prices, a drive towards portable and all-in-one systems, and it wasn’t hard to see coming.

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: business, news

Verizon last week announced that it would be opening up its network to all phones compatible with its wireless technologies, a move which goes completely contrary to the entire market model here in the U.S. of A. Therese Poletti of CBS’ MarketWatch talks about the significant move and what it might mean for the wireless industry in America. While she indicates that it would be a good move, and references the Apple iPhone as a major contributor to the pressure, she only brushes up against what it might mean. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: business, mobile, wireless

If John C. Dvorak, love him deeply though I do, were a field goal kicker he would be able to punt hte “pigskin” for at least a couple of miles, and not even break a sweat. He is not, though. He is a pundit and likely the crankiest. He did, in fact, found the Cranky Geeks. JD, however, often goes off half cocked, and this time its in relation to Google’s admittedly inane Google Phone announcement from earlier this week. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas

Ok. I’ve done it. For my job I’m having to use Microsoft’s Office 2007. I don’t like the ribbon thing which replaces all toolbars all that much, but I’ve discovered that Word 2007 can actually post to blogs. To my amazement, the setup for MoboDojo and COT were dirt simple! Here’s my first post (if it actually works!) to COT from Word 2007. Comment away!!!

written by Tyler Regas \\ tags: COT Migration

I’m apparently a rarity in the volatile world of technology. You see, I’m a multi-platform nerd. I’m equally at home on the Mac as I am in Windows and Linux. I’m pretty skilled with DOS, Solaris, NetBSD, OS/2, and I could even handle AIX again if I had to. I’ve spent time with Amigas, I was in the BeOS developer program, and I started my computing life with a TRS-80 and a TI-99/4a. Finally, I’m deeply familiar with Palm OS, Windows CE, Newton OS, Psion’s EPOC/32 and the later Symbian OS. I guess you could say I’m pretty familiar with a wide range of platforms.

So, why is it that its so easy to find so much platform hate on the internet? Its like there are all these little Nazi-like hate groups out there directing their intense loathing at computing platforms instead of people. Sure, I’ve clearly illustrated my distaste for Microsoft and their marketing practices for years and I’ve even stated that it will be a very long time before I start using Windows Vista, but I still use Windows XP (in Boot Camp) and Windows 2000 (in VMware’s Fusion). I’m just wondering why, like its automotive counterpart Road Rage, people engage so blatantly in what I am calling OS Outrage. Continue reading »

written by Tyler Regas