I am not one to be excited about the new version of office, but having converted to MacOSX last September, it has been painful to open Classic mode just to see a word file. Microsoft recently announced that they will be shipping their Office for X suite this November. I have tried a beta, and it is very nice, and looks nothing like the old Mac or Windows versions. What I find interesting is that EVERY macosx user will need this software (sure… I know about StarOffice and AppleWorks). So for every copy of OSX that apple sells ($129) Microsoft makes ($250-450). It should really be a big revenue driver for Microsoft.

IBM believes that CPU cycles are like energy and should be used like power is today. That’s why they are building a CPU powerplant to get ready for the future. I like the idea of renting CPU cycles, and having a big farm of clustered servers is cool, but how does my computer marshall commands to a remote computer? Is anyone working on this? SETI@home is NOT a good example of this since it is only usefull for non interactive/dependent processes that can be split into chunks. This doesn’t speed up Quake at all.

Apple is 11 days from launching their impressive new operating system OS X and there seems to be a lack of application announcements. I found this announcement about a dental application, and new to their web-site are a screen saver and a card game. Yikes!

This is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. This company wants to create a DNS system that translates phone numbers into IP addresses, claiming that it is easier to remember phone numbers than domain names. Have these guys ever seen a Palm Pilot? That is the only way I can remember anyones phone number.

Scientists believe that a 200ft in diameter body of mass that is headed towards earth may be an Apollo era booster rocket. An interesting occurrance if it is true, since it proves that karma does exist in a vaccuum. This may support the long standing theory that karma exists in computer operating systems.

I just received 255 messages in my Yahoo Mail account (oops make that 277 and counting) from Yahoo advertizing Beauty.com. I bet this is not Yahoo… perhaps a new virus? If Yahoo does not stop this thing, it may overload their disk storage. I better buy some more Network Applicance stock!

There are some new pictures of the next generation Nintnedo Gaming system up… it is rumored to be released in Japan next July. They also announced a 32bit Gameboy, cool! Now if it only had an organizer, contact book, and pen recognition I could throw my Pilot in the trash.

Digiscents appears to be delivering on the long talked about smell-o-meter peripheral device. (you know… it uses the 4 basic smells… pizza, body odor, beef-jerkey, and blue-cheese to generate any other smell) They have a web site, and claim to be partering with Real Networks to distribute their software to millions of people. Too bad none of us have the device.

Yahoo has a media player? Come on. I think Yahoo’s engineering department must be bored… or have run out of web-sites to rip-off.

Microsoft showed off its phone based CE version (code named “stinger”). It looks big and klunky. Shouldn’t they use the PDA screen to dial?

Oh well… they will get it right by the third version… and after they have given them away for free to every person in world.