Gadzooki

MacBook Pro – A Good Buy?

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macbook-pro.jpgNotebook computers are a very personal affair. It’s either you like a laptop or hate it. It’s not like a desktop computer where you can replace a part or peripheral if you get tired of the parts that come with it. For example, if you’re not comfortable with your desktop computer’s keyboard, then you can run off to your local computer store or order one online for a five bucks. If you hate your mouse, then you can do the same–you can spend anywhere from five bucks to a hundred for that top-quality wireless optical mouse with ten clickers and rollers.

But a laptop is just different. If you hate a single part, peripheral or design element, then you’d have to live with it. Say, you hate trackpoints–those rubber, eraser-like nubs present on all ThinkPads and other brands–then you should altogether avoid laptops that only use them. If you hate small keyboards, then you’d better go for laptops that are sized 14-inch and above. If you hate to lug around a large notebook, then you should go for a 12-incher or even a sub-notebook.

Same goes for the operating system. These days, it’s Windows versus Mac versus Linux (yes, for the few Linux geeks out there who would rather not pay for their OS, and who would rather tweak every aspect of their OS’s configuration.

The MacBook Pro

The Apple MacBook Pro–the successor to the popular (and expensive) PowerBook notebook line–has been in the market for four months. Hence you’d probably think that it’s mature enough for purchasing. The bugs and issues should have been resolved by this time. More so, its less-powerful (and smaller) sibling, the MacBook has also been released just a couple of months ago.

Also, being Intel-powered machines, you could now run Windows XP on the MacBook Pro (and other Intel-powered Macs) with BaseCamp, which is actually a software package from Apple itself. Pretty soon, with the next Mac OS X release, BaseCamp will be built-in. So here’s another reason to buy a MacBook Pro, isn’t it? You have the best of both worlds: Mac OS X and Windows!

As for the design, well, it’s a Mac. And Macs are known for excellent design inside out. From software to hardware, you would expect the MacBook Pro to be the epitome of laptop perfection. After all, it has those familiar cool PowerBook looks, and with a fast processor powering the familiar Mac OS X that Apple geeks just love.

You would therefore expect recent reviews of the MacBook Pro to be more favorable. However, we chanced upon several online reviews that were to the contrary.

We came across an interesting review of the MacBook Pro by OS News, which is in a dialogue-type format (via TUAW). It’s not that one-person point-of-view review you’d usually read. What’s good about a dialogue-type review is that you get opinions from two persons, and you can read about them arguing about several points. This is actually good from the consumer’s perspective because some aspects of a review are simply too subjective to be covered by one person only.

Thom: This is a mediocre laptop overall, and definitely not worth its hefty, hefty pricetag, especially now that the MacBook has arrived. It is astonishing to see that on three fronts, namely speakers, screen, and keyboard, a 2489E machine (my configuration) gets beaten on these important fronts by a 700USD Dell.

Adam: See, I would argue that this is the best laptop I’ve ever owned. While subsequent generations may leave impatient people like me with lacking 1st generation prototypes, I think it’s been worthwhile. The biggest competition the MBP has is Apple’s own Macbook, which is good enough for about 90% of potential Apple switchers. That said, if you run heavy apps and use a Mac for professional design, music, or video, the MBP is the only real portable for you.

See, two points of view are better than one. What’s great is you see both sides of the coin–there’s the good and the bad being reviewed. It’s definitely more objective than just having one person review the product.

As for the MacBook Pro, we would tend to agree that for those whose needs would mostly be Web surfing, word processing and email, the MacBook may be a better buy. Of course there’s the cool factor of owning a MacBook Pro with the metallic finish, large display, and all. However, the MacBook looks cool, too (especially the black ones, but hey, they’re not as reasonably-priced as the whites). And as many an enthusiast would tell you, it would be best to purchase something not while it’s just a few months in the market. Wait maybe six months to a year, when the glitches have been resolved, product lines updated, and prices possibly reduced. By then you’d have a solid, mature product you can rely on.

Still, if you need the speed, and if you desire that uber-cool form factor, the MacBook Pro looks like a good buy, especially at the ~ $2,000 price point (it’s priced similar to comparable ThinkPads, Vaios and LifeBooks). Hey it’s a Mac! For Apple enthusiasts, that, itself, is enough to warrant a purchase!

Picasa Web Albums: Flickr Killer?

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noalbumscollage.jpgFlickr is one of the poster-boys (or girls) of Web 2.0. There’s the community-driven content, the tagging, and yes, the weird-sounding name (flicker without the “e”). And of course, it helps that Flickr used to be this small startup that was acquired by one of the Internet’s giants, Yahoo!.

What differentiates Flickr from the multitude of the Web’s other photo-sharing and storing services is the community nature. Flickr users are generally connected individuals, who can link to contacts, form groups, and create meaningful discussions. This is probably why it’s the most popular photo-sharing outfit out there.

But of course, there’s Google. And we know that whatever service is already available online, Google will have something to challenge that, and usually succeed at it. Take Gmail, for example. It came late in the webmail game, but it’s hot, and it gave features and functionalities that other webmail service providers could only dream of (2.5 Gigs of space? Wow!).

So talking about Flickr, Google has recently launched its web application for its not-as-popular-as-Flickr Picasa photo album software, dubbed Picasa Web Albums. As usual, it’s in “beta” and for now only by-invitation.

Here are initial looks.

From ForeverGeek:

A few things I have seen that I am not fond of. First of all, it appears that it will only support JPEG formatted images. I tried uploading GIF and PNG images, and was given a warning that the image was not a valid JPEG. With Flickr, I can upload PNG, GIF and JPEG, which is nice since my screenshots are saved as PNG.
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Aside from those minor issues, it was pretty easy to set up the album and upload the photos. It has a pretty good interface, showing your storage capacity used and available. It will let you rotate images to correctly display their orientation, resize the thumbnails and rearrange the order the photos appear in the album.

You can send invitations via e-mail to those you want to share your album with. For a visitor looking at the gallery, they can view the images in a full-browser slideshow, zoom in on them, and subscribe to an RSS feed for the entire gallery or for specific albums.

CNet reviewed the service, too, and was quite disappointed of the loose integration between Picasa and Piasa Web.

There’s a bigger issue I have with this service: It’s one-way. Once you upload photos from Picasa to Picasa Web Albums, there’s no link between them. If you write a caption or delete a photo on your PC, nothing changes on your online album (or vice versa). I’m spoiled by the technology of Sharpcast and Phanfare, both of which feature live synchronization between media files on your PCs and your online albums. I think synchronization is the only way to go if you’re going to have the same images online and on your PC. I’m disappointed that Google did not more tightly integrate their Picasa software and Web service.

Here are several big gripes, as echoed by this short review at Pinoytechblog:

Google’s Picasa Web does not bring anything new to the table. And 250MB of space? Flickr provides unlimited space and Photobucket provides 1GB of space. Plus no tagging.

We’re quite disappointed with Google. 250MB of space? No tags? This will not even be enough for the casual album users, especially at today’s camera resolutions. Flickr’s free accounts may have limited uploads per month, but the storage space is unlimited (it’s storage versus bandwidth, and I’d go for storage in this case!). And tagging is great for those searches and for connecting with people with the same interests in terms of subject and photos.

It’s a thumbs down for Google on this one. They could’ve made Picasa Web Albums a good contender against Flickr. It’s like a 900-pound gorilla against another 900-pound gorilla–but in this case, one has got more bananas in its arsenal!

Anything But Ipod

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creative-zen-v-plus.jpgMove over, iPod afficionadoes. Whether it’s cheapo MP3 players or the next super high tech media player from Archos, this site on anything but iPod has it.

Perhaps you’ve been wondering about the dominance of the iPod as the digital music player of choice. Why exactly is the iPod popular over other brands, say Creative, Archos, iRiver, and others? Is it the interface? Is it the cool Apple brand? Is it because they’re more expensive (there is such a concept in economics where the demand for some goods simply rises along with the price) and are hence more ideal to own than other brands?

So what’s the benefit you get from the premium you pay for an iPod? Most would say it’s the interface. Apple is known to design very usable and practical interfaces. Here’s where Mac OS beats Windows anytime. For many it would be the design. I mean, get an iPod Nano and set it alongside, say, a Creative Muvo, and you would be blown away by the elegance of the Nano. Never mind that the iPod doesn’t tune in to FM, nor can it record your voice.

So what does Anything but iPod have to say about the iPod?

Apple makes a half decent mp3 player. I own or have owned several different Apple MP3 players. However, I feel that there are better choices available. There are other MP3 players out there that are easier to use, that give you more for your money and still have style and class. The problem is many people do not know what else is available. I talk to many people that think an iPod is their only choice. This is why this web site was started, to show people their alternatives and to educate them so they are able to make their own informed decisions.

So there are alternatives after all, and these alternatives give us, consumers, a better choice for the simple reason that iPods will only work with iTunes, and vice-versa. You cannot sync with music from another music store (unless the tracks are in raw MP3 format). And you cannot use iTunes with a music player aside from an iPod. Talk about monopolies–they’re even better at it than Microsoft!

So what info do we get from this nifty site? We have reviews and news about non-Apple branded music players. Here’s one of the latest, on the Creative Zen V and V Plus.

Creative will be releasing two different models the V and the V Plus. The Plus will add FM radio and video. Both of them will feature all the features familiar to the Zen line and will add line-in recording.

Creative once again complicates their Zen product line. They have a great brand but they are slowly destroying it by spreading it too thin. Regardless, it will probably turn out to be a pretty good MP3 player.

Pretty straightforward, if you ask us. The point is, there are indeed other alternatives to iPods. We do have a choice. However, due to design issues and possibly peer pressure, the iPod is still the player of choice for most. After all, an Apple is an Apple is an Apple!

Do More with Web Video with Keepvid and Peekvid

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Web-based videos can be frustrating. For one, they can be downright ugly, at horrible resolutions and inaudible sound levels. We’re not even mentioning content–some “original” videos can be utterly useless and with an artistic value of zero.

Add to this the difficulty in managing videos, and you’re in for a headache. It’s great to watch videos online on the web, but it’s even better if you could save them onto your hard disc. However, most online video-streaming services are just that. They would just let you stream the content, and not save it on your own computer (with Google Video being the exception). This tends to delay one’s enjoyment, and slow down progress, as you’d have to re-download a video clip everytime you want to watch it.

Not anymore, with Peekvid and Keepvid, sister-services designed to aggregate and index YouTube content (Peekvid), and which allows users to rip these into their own computers (Keepvid).

[Read more…]

Bill Gates Riding Off Into the Sunset

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billg.jpgAfter founding what has become one of the world’s most successful (and dominant) software companies, Bill Gates will be riding off into the sunset–gradually leaving his position at the helm of the company, that is. First he stepped down as Chief Executive Officer (replaced by Steve Ballmer) and took on the hat of being the “Chief Software Architect.” Now he’s moving out of his daily role as CSA to devote more time to projects that are perhaps closer to his heart. The software architect role has been taken on by Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Technical Officer.

From Microsoft PressPass,

… effective July 2008 Bill Gates, chairman, will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company to spend more time on his global health and education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company announced a two-year transition process to ensure that there is a smooth and orderly transfer of Gates’ daily responsibilities, and said that after July 2008 Gates would continue to serve as the company’s chairman and an advisor on key development projects.

This news notwithstanding, we still expect will to have great influence over software design and business at Microsoft. Gates has been Microsoft’s public face, and the person people loved to hate (or love, as in some cases) even though he had already ceded control of business decisions to CEO Steve Ballmer. As such, we think Bill Gates will still be much-attributed to Microsoft.

Gates is one of the most well-known entrepreneurs of our time, having founded Microsoft in 1975 with friend Paul Allen. The company rose from obscurity to dominance over the next couple of decades, and to date dominates the desktop computing market, with majority of the world’s computers running on a flavor of Microsoft Windows and also the Microsoft Office suite of applications. It is because of this dominance and the allegation that Microsoft has been engaging in unfair business practices that the company has been in and out of legal battles. In 2000, Gates, with his wife started the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, which funded scholarships and health research. Gates and Melinda (along with U2’s Bono) were Time Magazine’s 2005 people of the year.

Gates will continue his role as Chairman of Microsoft and adviser on key issues. He will be devoting more of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Just a Sec …

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250px-Four_AA_batteries.jpgOne severely limiting factor to the mobility of any mobile device is battery life. Or rather, this is probably the single most limiting factor, more than the size of the gadget, or processing power, storage size, or connectivity options.

Take your laptop, for instance. Three hours of mobility and then you suddenly run out of power, and have to plug in. So much for untethered mobility. What about your digital camera? Several hundred shots (memory card space permitting) and you’re flat. You’re lucky if you use AA cells, since you can always just change batteries or shift to alkalines when you run out of rechargable juice. Or perhaps you’re not so lucky, after all, as you would still have to spend on buying those alkaline AAs. What about your mobile phone? I couldn’t last a few minutes without knowing I’m always connected to the network. You never know when an important call or text message will come–and it’s really bad if you suddenly run out of juice in the middle of an important call (not to mention during emergencies).

Of course Murphy’s Law would tell you that you will always run out of batteries just when you really, really, really need your gadget powered up and running.

You will only be as mobile as you are powered up. And for as long as battery life is limited, and charging time takes long, you don’t have very long to go before your next charge.

Our current rechargable battery chemistries, whether Nickel-based (i.e., the older NiMH cells prevalent in rechargable AAs for cameras and other gadgets or the newer Lithium-based batteries used in mobile phones and laptops) have one problem. They take too long to charge. Never mind if you have those rapid, one-hour AA battery chargers, or even those thirty-minute rapid chargers. Everything just takes too long!

Laptops charge for almost as long as their batteries should carry charge when turned on (and about half or a third of that when turned off). But what if youre flat and you suddenly have to go somewhere (and that somewhere doesn’t have power outlets, but you do need to use your laptop)?

Fortunately, researchers have found a solution to this problem from a 300-year-old invention, the capacitor. The amount of charge or power that a capacitor can keep is limited to its surface area, and it would require a really really large capacitor to hold enough charge to power a device. You’d probably need a capacitor as large as a car to power your laptop for a couple of hours.

The problem with capacitors is their size. The storage capacity is relative to the surface area of the capacitor’s electrodes, which makes current capacitors 25 times less capable than similarly sized current batteries.

300 years later, the M.I.T researchers of today finally solved this problem by employing nanotechnology. By covering the electrodes with nanotubes that are 30,000 times thinner than human hair, the capacitor can now store many times more energy.

Nanotechnology has changed all that, though, with nanotubes. We might soon have high-capacity batteries that charge in just a few seconds, and that can keep us happy (what gadget geek isn’t happy with his or her mobile devices?) for hours on end. Run out of juice? No problem. Just plug in and you’re all set to go in a jiffy!

“It could be recharged many, many times perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, and … it could be recharged very quickly, just in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of hours,” says Joel Schindall, a member of the M.I.T research team.

Google Spreadsheets: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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If you’re a geek like myself, you would love almost anything that Google puts out into public use as beta or even alpha-stage software. You get to experience using something bleeding edge, and even if there are the usual quirks associated with the use of something that’s not yet production-release level, the “wow” factor and the coolness would certainly be reason enough to try stuff out.

Google recently announced public beta testing of Google Spreadsheets, as we earlier wrote on. And so far, people are happy with the service and what it could do for something completely worked over the Web. We took this new baby for a spin and we had mixed feelings. But we thought having an over-the-Web spreadsheet was in itself a good development, in general.

Sure, it couldn’t compete with desktop spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel in the bells-and-whistles department. It couldn’t do pivot tables, nor does it have charting functionality. But you do get a barebones spreadsheet app that can crunch the numbers all online. You do get a spreadsheet application where you can import and import from local files residing on your computer (compatible ones are MS Excel and .CSV formats).

Here’s what’s best, Google Spreadsheets knows how to share!

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You can share your spreadsheets with your contacts (who have Google accounts, such as Gmail) for viewing-only or even for collaborating (meaning they can also edit your document). This is good for setting up shared tables for groups working remotely, for instance. This is also good for tracking schedules and events for large groups of people.

Once you are in collaboration mode, you can even see chat windows popping up within your browser window, so you can converse with your contacts while you work on your spreadsheet.

As for the disadvantages, though, Google Spreadsheets does specify a limit for your file and spreadsheet sizes. You cannot exceed 100 tables, which can have up to 20 worksheets each. For each sheet, you cannot exceed 256 columns or 10,000 rows. Your file sizes (for XLS and CSV) should likewise not exceed 400kb.

So I wouldn’t count on being able to do very high-end spreadsheet numbercrunching. Also, I wouldn’t count on being able to use Google Spreadsheets much over dial-up connections.

As for the Ugly, the only thing I can think of is that while Google lets your spreadsheets be shared with other people, the Web-based office apps that it has been releasing couldn’t talk to one another. They’re all islands of information. Wouldn’t it be good if Google Spreadsheets could import information or text from a Writely document (also owned by Google), or some text from Google Notepad. Maybe then, Google would have a formidable challenge to the dominance of desktop-based office suites. Until then, I’ll stick to MS Office for more power-intensive document processing.

Happy Birthday, Cartoon Network

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ForeverGeek has an interesting writeup on Cartoon Network’s 15th (yes it’s been that long) anniversary. With quality issues in terms of creativity in shows and business acumen of the operators (outsourcing of animation and dubbing), Cartoon Network might be going the way of good TV gone bad (do I hear TechTV here?).

This October will be Cartoon Network’s 15th anniversary, and it is rather alarming the shape “Cartoon” Network is in. In only five years the network has disintegrated into everything that made MTV a laughing stock among music fans. Even more recent innovations in the network’s programming (Adult Swim) have deteriorated at light-speed thanks to lazy programming (12oz Mouse, Tom goes to the Mayor). Perhaps by Cartoon Network’s 20th anniversary, they will resemble the television powerhouse dedicated to preserving iconic animation they once were. However, if they’re anything like MTV, things are only going to get worse.

If you’re a lover of cartoons, you may agree or disagree with the author, as some comment-posters have. I know many geeks are likewise fond of Japanese animation, and would fight to the bone if any of their favourite Animes are regarded as poor substitute to American cartoons.

And for the fanboys (and girls) out there, here are some good reads suggested by the author, and some short comments.

  • Detective Comics #820: “Face the Face part 7” – Well, Batman’s first One Year Later arc is almost over (just one installment left). For the most part, this arc has just been a tour of Gotham City and the new Post-Crisis world Batman lives in. A few surprises in what villains survived, what villains didn’t and what aspects of Batman’s history were reintroduced.
  • 52 Week 5 – In this issue we get to see what happened to all those heroes who were stranded in space at the end of the Infinite Crisis. Most of the results were pretty gruesome, too. Think the “Amalgam” concept from the early 90’s only a little closer to the Megatron-Ratchet hybrid from Simon Furman’s Transformers comic.
  • The Punisher (Max) #34 – This volume of the Punisher has been nothing but a string of the most outrageously violent, vulgar and vicious acts of brutality any human being can possibly comprehend. And Ennis does it all with a disturbing sense of humor, too.

Google Spreadsheets Sneak Peek

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Is it time to throw the good ol’ Microsoft Office (or perhaps Open Office) away? Google has announced the test release of its latest addition to its over-the-web office lineup, Spreadshets.

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Why the lock-down? Can’t this be yet another user-invite service like Gmail was (or up to now is, in certain cases)? ForeverGeek probably has it right in saying Google doesn’t want to over-saturate the user base,

It is an invite-only service right now. I am guessing that Google learned from the past when they launched services like Pages and Analytics openly, only to have to lock them down after getting saturated with account requests.

I can’t wait to try out Google Spreadsheets. Interface would probably be similar to Google Notebook and even Gmail (i.e., AJAX and all that). However, one drawback I’m seeing is that load times would be slow on dialup. But then again, who uses dialup these days?

What I’m wondering about, though, is why Google didn’t launch a word processing Web application first. They’ve acquired Writely, after all. Or is Google in the process of assimilating Writely into its existing services? Maybe they went for the spreadsheets first, because of an existing platform on which work could be done, such as Google Base and other apps that allow spreadsheet uploading. What’s great is the collaborative aspect of all this. You can actually share your spreadsheet to your Gmail or other Google contacts.

Kudos to Google for yet another app that we’ll all end up wanting! When will the office suite be launched?

The Problem With Splogs

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There’s Spam, then there’s Spam. Lately it’s been the spam blogs that have earned the ire of the legitimate bloggers around, whether pro or in it for the love of the medium. In essence, spam blogs or splogs are blogs set up to cater to a specific niche, theme or topic, and usually splattered with contextual ads. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? Well, if the content is lifted or plagiarized from others’ original work (usually without any attribution), then there’s definitely something to be angry about. We recently came across two such striking commentaries on splogs, or what are sometimes now called made-for-AdSense sites.

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Elliott Back recently discovered that some of his content was being scraped by a game blog.

First, the copyright holder doesn’t have to publish excerpt feeds to prevent others from reproducing the work on their sites. Your feed is for your readers, not for content thieves. And, making a full feed as opposed to an excerpted one doesn’t give some kind of tacit approval of illegal copying.

Second, the commerciality of Gamecentro doesn’t affect the potential loss of revenue due to duplication, and thus the violation of the copyright of the copyright holder. I am making money from this content–without uniqueness, I’ll make less money. Since copyrights exist to protect commercial interests, and duplicate content results in less revenue, the copyright is clearly being violated.

Third, Gamecentro is not in accordance with Fair Use doctrine. While they do provide attribution, they are also copying the whole article and surrounding code. I would also argue that the following attempts at advertising make it a commercial site, as well as the “Ads by Google” ribbon.

Elliott decided to take action, and his content had been taken down by the host. Now he’s all for taking down such sites, which he considers “slightly more sophisticated garden variety spam.”

The next would be from Chris Pearson (who designed the Gadzooki theme, by the way), who has this to say on made-for-AdSense sites:

I’m opening up a philosophical can of worms here, but unidirectional money flows without informational or product reciprocation are unethical. Made-for-AdSense splogs don’t help anybody but the ArSE-O, and it’s this “every man for himself” mentality that is bloating out the web and rendering search results shady at best.

Extracting money from a particular economy without providing anything useful in return is wrong.

We couldn’t have said it better, Chris. Stealing content and earning from others’ work without authorization (and without giving back) is just wrong.