Archive for November, 2007
Help give a PC to a poor kid
You can personally participate in the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project that is discussed in the previous post. OLPC has a campaign where you donate a laptop and get one for your own child:
Since November 12th, OLPC has been offering a limited-time Give One Get One program in the United States and Canada. During [...]
Microsoft and Intel try to make a few bucks off poor kids
Several years ago, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte started a non-profit project called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) to help bring computing to poor children around the world. To their shame, Microsoft and Intel have tried to kill the idea. Bill Gates personally went out of his way to make disparaging remarks and Microsoft has [...]
Some suggested reading
In the United States, tomorrow is the major holiday Thanksgiving. I wish a happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate this American tradition. For many, it will begin a four-day break. For those who might like to get in a little reading, here is a link to the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the [...]
Eldercare site
I can’t personally vouch for its usefulness but CNET has a post about a new site for information on caring for the elderly. The site is called Caring.com and CNET says:
Another tool has emerged for Baby Boomers and Gen Xers faced with caring for an aging parent or grandparent.
Caring.com, which debuted Monday, offers how-to [...]
What if Gmail had been designed by Microsoft?
The heading of this post is the title of a satirical piece over at Google Blogoscoped. Needless to say, it isn’t in praise of how Microsoft does things. Here’s the opening premise:
Today I want to ponder the question: what if Microsoft, not Google, had created Gmail? What would be the differences in that web mail [...]
Windows XP keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts can be useful and periodically I post about some collection of them. Microsoft has a page with many shortcuts applicable in Windows XP. Some are the usual ones that have been posted before but there are also some more esoteric ones listed. For example, there are shortcuts given that apply when using one [...]
Firefox 3 beta
A beta release of the next version of the Firefox browser is out and is receiving some good reviews. Ars Technica says:
Firefox 3 delivers an impressive assortment of new features and interface improvements. There are lots of changes under the hood as well, which improve performance and reduce resource consumption.
At ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes:
Without [...]
Kindle: Amazon’s new wireless ebook reader
The media and blogosphere are full of stories about the new ebook reader from Amazon. Actually, it is more than a book reader and also offers various wireless services through the Sprint network. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article comparing the new device to the iPod and says:
Besides ease of downloading, Mr. Bezos believes [...]
Progress for service pack 3 for Windows XP
Development of service pack 3 for XP continues on its timetable for release sometime in the first half of 2008. According to Mary Jo Foley:
Microsoft has begun rolling out to testers a near-final Release Candidate (RC) build of Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3.
Testers said they began pulling down the bits from Microsoft’s private download [...]
The size of software always expands to fill the resources
Not only does the size of the Windows operating system seem to always increase to match available resources but other software does the same. In a posting, What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away, XPNet reports on the latest version of Microsoft Office:
“What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.†Such has been the conventional wisdom surrounding [...]
No matter how powerful your machine, Vista won’t be any faster
There is some sort of rule that Windows expands in complexity to consume any new or faster resources. One of my disappointments with Vista is how sluggish it seems on a fast, dual-core machine with 2 GB of RAM. Actually, an old, much less powerful system running XP seems to have just about the same [...]