You can’t see it yet, but Vista will be before us very soon.  Microsoft starts their long anticipated release in three days.  It is likely to become a dominant operating system all around the world, but Microsoft does appear to be loosing some ground.

Plus, there are new claims from Microsoft competitors claiming that Vista breaks Anti Trust laws in Europe.  So it is likely that we can expect another long decade of Anti-Trust fights against Microsoft.  At the end of the day, Vista may be a bit of a knock off of Apple’s OS X, and Apple has Leopard launching this spring and summer.  However, there is one thing that Microsoft does very well.

They can get the rest of the world to upgrade and move forward.  It may not be the best or safest or many other things, but people do pick it up move forward with the herd and the herd improves.  Maybe more slowly than those cool Mac kids, but it is an improvement.

Technorati tags: Microsoft Vista, Vista Antitrust claims, three days till vista

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You may not stop the subscription to Wired, The Wall Street Journal or Maxim anytime soon, but Nintendo is hoping that you will catch some news on their new Wii News channel and service that will go through the popular gaming device.

Nintendo is launching the service today that will provide news stories in many different languages but primarily sourced from the Associated Press through the Wii devices.

I guess that leaves the question for all of us, Will Wii read the news more or not?

Technorati tags: Nintendo, Wii, Associated Press, Wii News Service

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Since February is such a short month and all, Maven Mapper’s 1 year anniversary is coming up soon. Myself and my fellow collaborators at Maven Mapper’s Information have been writing hard all year long and we have pushed out about 441 articles since we launched in early March of 2006.

When that time comes around we are going to celebrate, and we are probably going to bring some color into our life. Our sponsor at flowershop.com provides great flowers for almost any occasion. One of their specialties is anniversary flowers and flowershop.com recently highlighted this in their own release. Now they provide great flowers from local florists in your area and typically people associate anniversaries with weddings, but really flowers can mark any anniversary from weddings, to civil unions, to a business founding anniversary to the birth of a blog or more.

So when you hit your special anniversary day, think of flowershop.com and don’t forget the flowers!

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I have run out of patience with Outlook.  I have been using Outlook since about 1998 after being forced to convert from Eudora 3.0 or something.  I have been up and down and bugged out and torn and twisted and crashed and terrorized by flaky pst files for years.

I think enough is probably enough!

I have had it up to my eyeballs with problems relating to syncing up portable devices and even simple things like adding contacts in the right folder.

But the biggest reason is probably the spam.  Outlook just does not handle spam well at all.  Working on the web I get lots of spam as my email address gets circulated.  The spam manages to sneak through 2-3 levels of filters and still manages to slow Outlook down as it ‘filters’ a hundred spam messages a day.  It makes me want to try Thunderbird, and I am not referring to the wine!

I am referring to the Mozilla Thunderbird email program.  Thunderbird 1.5 comes as a free download.  It offers full featured email and solid junk email filters.  It also has anti-phishing protection. 

That all sounds like a lot of blather, but here is the main thing.  I love and trust FireFox and Thunderbird is made by the same people.  So that is a big selling point.

The other thing is that like FireFox you can add in a number of add ons and extensions to customize the experience.  So if the software can help me with the fundamentals then I can tweak it to cover the special things that I need it to do with the extensions.

Technorati tags: mozilla thunderbird, thunderbird, email programs, done with outlook

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Hollywood announced a new alliance with Qflix in January.  The alliance would utilize an alternative to the CSS technology that is used to secure current DVD movies.  Hollywood is concerned that opening up home computers to allow the use of CSS locking technology might promote the piracy of DVD titles.  Computers have the key to unlock to play but not to unlock to burn.

So the new alternative provides a different type of key that would allow movies download from services like CinemaNow, Movielink and Amazon.com to encrypt and lock  the movie onto a DVD without opening a Pandora’s box that might allow users to copy other physical DVD’s.

It appears the technology would require device makers (computer and DVD player manufacturers) to incorporate this new technology, which points to an upgrade for consumers.

The benefit could however allow consumers to download and burn movies.  They could even go to retailers with access to vast libraries of out of print TV shows and movie titles where a show or movie could be burnt on demand within 10-15 minutes.

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