Vista Appears on the Horizon

Now that Microsoft has announced the release date for the consumer version of Vista as January 30, 2007, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Yes, Virginia, the OS does exist, you're just not going to get it for Christmas. Of course this means that there won't be a huge push for PC purchases this holiday season, at least not bigger than a typical year, but leave it to the games consoles to pick up the slack in your credit card charges with anticipated sales of the Nintendo Wii, which some reviewers are calling a kids gaming platform, and the Sony PS3, which I'm told is very hot--literally due to the new IBM Cell CPU. Should be nice to warm your toes with on those cold winter evenings. Ho ho ho!

YouTube, ITube, WeAllTube

Daily Tech is reporting that YouTube--everyone's favorite video blogging site that has brought us such wonders as the Diet Coke and Mentos experiment and its numerous derivatives, the Steve Colbert Green Screen Contest entries and CatHead Theater--is one of Time magazine's inventions of the year. They credit the success of the site, which has grown to host 100 million videos, to the intersection of 3 phenomena: 1) the enablement of fast, cheap video development, 2) the emergence of social networking, ala Web 2.0, and 3) the consumer's impatience with mainstream news. I'd add to that list a fourth: the tremendous dearth of good TV entertainment.
Via Time Magazine.

Tech-nocracy In-Action

It’s not clear to me how in today’s technologically advanced world, that computerized voting presents us with such a challenge. Rather then streamlining the voting process, all kinds of problems arose in various polling places yesterday, including power outages, card mixups, suspected tampering and system performance problems, leading to long delays in voting. I anticipated some troubles and signed up for permanent absentee status long ago, which means I get to fill in my vote with ink on paper, something similar to the old scantron sheets they used to pass out in school on test day. No smart cards, no hanging chads. Ah, the good old days.