Video: Chris Pirillo explains why he’s upgrading from Vista to XP

 If you’ve never seen Chris Pirillo on video — or you just love Wayne’s World — here you go.

Overheard: Dual-boot XP and Vista

The question I am asked most often is “How do I install a dual-boot with Windows XP on my new Windows Vista computer?” The answer is that it’s not that difficult, it’s just very time consuming, and you need to own a copy of Windows XP. The How-To Geek, Install Windows XP on Your Pre-Installed Windows Vista Computer

Home users are pretty much stuck with Vista unless they want go to someone like The How-To Geek for help, but vendors have found a better way to continue giving enterprise customers XP. Apparently there’s a loop-hole called Downgrade Rights in Vista Ultimate and Vista Business licenses that allows the vendor to downgrade the operating system if that’s what the customer wants.

Rumors that Microsoft had confirmed a release date for Windows 7 in two years got a lot of people excited last month, but according to Ken Fisher over at Ars Technica, it was just spin.

Overheard: New Internet on its way — thanks again to CERN

“We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.” Tony Doyle as quoted in Coming soon: superfast internet

Yes, that’s right folks. The Internet could soon be made obsolete by a new “grid” system that’s going to transfer data 10,000 times faster than our current broadband Internet connections. Think of it — 10,000 times faster!!!

The Grid’s main purpose is to track the data associated with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider “big bang project” — although the Grid will also be made available to some researchers. Current thinking is that CERN is reinventing the Internet and no matter what you think about CERN messing with sub-atomic particles, the idea of a new Internet is intriguing — especially with recent predictions of our “using up” the Internet we have by 2010.

The new Grid has routing centers, dedicated fiber optic cables and over 50,000 servers — and the potential to offer everything from HD video telephony to the transmission of holographic images.

Video: CERN and the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is supposed to be turned on sometime this May. (The turn-on date has been delayed many times.)

Video: CERN - from the WWW to the origins of life

Cern in 3 minutes — virtual tour

Overheard: Memristor is ultimate unifying storage technology

The Memristor is the [so called] fourth basic circuit device after the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor. Like the capacitor, the Memristor has a memory; it remembers the amount of charge that goes through it and will change its resistance according to the amount of charge that flowed through it… Desire Athow, HP boffins design Memristor device; could replace DRAM technology one day

The technology called Memory Resistor or Memristor could bring forth a new generation of computer which would power-on instantly [no boot required] and could be used to process information in a similar fashion as the human brain. More importantly, it could mean that HP has discovered the ultimate, “unifying” storage technology, which combines DRAM and Magnetic storage properties.

Overheard: Dave Winer is the Microsoft of XML?

My point here is that OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) takes a very, very simply nested list definition and then adds random hacks that Dave Winer wanted to use in his applications without thinking of a generic way to define them so that other developers can do something with the format. In other words, Dave Winer is the Microsoft of XML. Elliot C. Back, The OPML Embroglio: What is OPML?

This is an old blog post and I’m late to the party, but it still made me laugh out loud.

Overheard: Linux desktop flunks the parent test

The day where I can recommend that my father use Linux (without the fear of him calling me on a daily basis to fix things) is the day I’ll proclaim the “year of the Linux desktop” has arrived. Wayne Richardson, Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 Release Notes Rewritten in Plain English

You could have said the same thing about Windows ten years ago.  Remember drivers and .DLL files?  I think the learning curve is going to be the same no matter what operating system you start with. It’s no different for Linux on the desktop. The navigation, jargon and acronyms are always going to be confusing the first time you jump into a new OS.

Overheard: Hardy Heron flunks the girlfriend test

Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do. Content Consumer, The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment

The Linux on the Desktop debate continues. Lots of buzz this week about this guy who had his girlfriend try out Ubuntu’s latest release, Hardy Heron. (Love the codenames!)

It seems the guy (Content Consumer) had his girlfriend perform 12 tasks — ordinary things like watching a video on YouTube or changing the mouse speed. Nothing fancy.

And guess what? She had trouble. His conclusion?

Conclusion
The main issue with the desktop experience is that the geeky programmers and designers assume too much from the average user. They assume the user knows about the way in which programs are installed, or how the file system is set out. The average user will not go out of their way to google for help or even read the associated documentation that comes with Ubuntu and its default software. The little information pop-ups and guided wizards are critical to explaining how the user can accomplish the basic tasks they most probably are trying to do.

For those of you who’ve never even seen Linux on a desktop, Shawn Powers from Linux Journal gives you a high-level look-see. And here are the release notes from Wayne Richardson in plain English.

Overheard: Goodbye GoLive

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Web graphics formats are all public, open standards. It just doesn’t seem right that the primary tool for professional Web site creation should be an expensive, proprietary software package. Where are the low-cost or open source competitors? Neil McAllister, GoLive Goes Dead as Adobe Consolidates

Adobe should just have cleaned up GoLive and made it free. It’s still a useful app and would go a long way to soothe all the people who are still angry about how Adobe promised something useful with Photoshop Express but didn’t deliver.