If you’d have asked me, I’d say that you’re making something up when you mentioned “zombie cookies.” Turns out they’re real, they’re irremovable, and they often come from Microsoft.

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Just about everyone knows how to “Google” something, and indeed the word Google has become synonymous with “search.” Even so, apparently too few people know that there is a common command Ctrl+F that can be used to find something in a document or on a page. How few? Try 90 percent of them.

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Wow. Microsoft is going all tablet-y with their user interface on Windows 8. Prepared to be confused!

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This one is from IBM itself, where they say that the PC is definitely dead, dead, dead. That’s because the guy who used to work at the PC division at IBM now loves his iPad.

Obviously IBM is continuing it’s age-old tradition of promoting the best and brightest.

Until you can write all the code for an iPad on an iPad, I seriously doubt the PC is dead.

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This November 5, which is Guy Fawkes day, the hacker group Anonymous is going to target social networking giant Facebook for certain death. The group has its grievances, listed in the article linked to below. Can they do it? Does it matter? What if Facebook just randomly decides to crash that day? How would we know?

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This is creepy. The web site linked to below shows a “pudding face.” That’ some poor actor whose face is animated depending on the mood of various tweets. You see the tweets posted live on the site, and the face is animated accordingly. Worth a gawk.

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It happens to all successful companies. There’s the crazy start-up phase, there’s the insane growth phase, there’s the unbeatable market-killer phase. Then there’s the bloated, bureaucratic phase.

Microsoft has been there for about 15 years. IBM for 75. Google? Just arrived!

(And Facebook should be measuring the curtains.)

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Take a trip down memory-mapped lane in this interview (link below). Matthew Reed runs TRS-80.org, a web site devoted to the very first line of computers I was into. Turns out I was kind of a wee, itty-bitty part of TRS-80 history.

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You know, when you think about it, the CD really is old technology. I mean, it’s 1980s tech. Not exactly cutting edge. Sure, it took ten years before having a CD player in your computer was common, but still the CD is old school.
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I’ve long said it: Apple is a software company. They also make hardware customized to run their software.

In the article (linked below), it’s predicted that iOS and Apple OS X will eventually merge. Apple hardware will eventually change so that your iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers will all run the same operating system. I’m not happy with that.

There is a philosophical difference between a computer and a mobile device. The first creates information, the second consumes it. If it’s Apple’s intent to turn all their hardware into information consuming devices, then Apple has lost me as a customer.

I enjoy using Apple hardware, mostly because it’s Unix but Apple makes good hardware. If Apple turns my powerful desktop workstation (currently a Core 7 iMac) into a large iPad, then I’m done. I’ll set up a Linux or FreeBSD box to sate my Unix lusts, but otherwise I’ll have to surrender to Microsoft and Windows if I want to continue to use a real computer.

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