Just in time for the holidays, Amazon has launched their OLPC Program today enabling the world to get an XO if they Give One.These are actually pretty sweet little lappys if you are in the mood to shell out $400 bucks to get your $200 laptop. I've seen a couple in action, and they seem to work pretty well, and they are small and very portable.

For the longest time I thought getting one of these would be cool, but with the influx of inexpensive 8" and 9" laptops lately, it hardly makes sense if you take away the donating factor. But since the XO is being switched to accommodate Windows XP, I would rather wait, or just get something else and donate money to funds directly. You can even get a little Acer Aspire One at Walmart, Staples and of course Amazon for as little as $395.00, not to mention all of the other little guys out the from ASUS and Sony. Although the Sony lappys are insanely expensive.

I still think about getting an OLPC see though whenever I see ads for programs and articles for it. It would be a fun little gadget to have, just because of what it is.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6amk3P-hY

Number two doesn't make any farther out of the Twilight Zone either.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw

I like it when ad campaigns come out like this. These are very reminiscient of the Mac ads when they first hit the boob-tube. The biggest difference is that there isn't any cross-platform bashing going on here; and I'm fine with that. The tone of the Mac ads was fuinny early on, and they are still pretty clever to a point, but they are getting a bit old. Yeah we know everyone hates Vista, but mostly I think everyone hates Vista because it's cool to hate Vista. The whole Vista sucks scenario has been more than officially played out and I'm sorta getting tired of hearing about it; especially from Apple.

Besides Apple isn't all that and a bag o' chips either. I run both, and don't get me wrong I love my MacBook, but Apple's PC development sucks honkin' huge hwang. They need to figure out how to test their crap, because every time they have a major upgrade to iTunes it jacks my machine up. Safari for Windows is still a dog, and now with iTunes 8 installed Quicktime took a crap so I have to reinstall that again too.

blah blah blah……

Anyway, enjoy the ads, and I am left wondering what's next.

On the docket to appear at Siggraph this year, Finding Paths Through the World's Photos is sure to make a lot of people stand up and cheer. This joint venture from the University of Washington and Microsoft analyzes and compares against one another, photographs within a specific collection (like the Pantheon used in the example video), orbits are discovered from the viewpoints of the photos within the collection. From this point, paths can be created to allow 3D movement around the subject creating a virtual world unique unto itself. What has been created here is really quite amazing, and something I would love to see put into action; a great idea for using the Flickr API.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLLzV5qeKyk

This would be really interesting if it were placed on a big multi-touch device, say… like Surface. I could really get into exploring buildings and locations using a multi-touch interface and a 3 foot square surface to view and navigate with. That would be something to behold. Museums could utilize this to allow visitors to view historical places in far greater detail with an amazing level of interactivity. I think I'm drooling…. It doesn't end here either. they are also using photographs to enhance video footage, the results here are equally as amazing. The CS department at the UW are working overtime on this stuff, and I have to say that I am definitely jealous of what they are working on compared to what was going on digitally when I was in college. Okay, that and this is a far bigger school than the little Art School I went to…..

Check out more information on this and other projects:

• Project Site
• Project Paper
• Photo Tourism
• Community Photo Collections
  

* based on statistics from 3 years ago and very loosely extrapolated.

I rebooted XP to be greeted by a win32 failure, quickly followed by a host of others things and apps dying which ultimately crippled XP, so I had to reboot. After about 7 or so reboots, a BSOD with only 1 line of text, and numerous other weirdo things I was finally able to get back in to a stable enough point to copy the important stuff to my backup drive and rebuild. My machine was acting kinda weird for a few months, some service would fail every now and again and I would have to reboot – but nothing too major; certainly nothing I had never seen before in XP.

Since I have been having good luck with Vista, I decided to go that route, but figure I would do a clean install and wipe all the drives and start clean with 1 OS, rather than an XP/Vista dual-boot.

Note: If you are planning on buying Vista, don't buy an upgrade. Get a full version – you can't perform a clean install and rebuild partitions from an upgrade.

I found out after I restarted and went to the setup disk that you have to install Vista from the OS you intend to upgrade if that's the disc you have – no clean build for me. But yet… I did figure out that you don't have to enter a product key, and then you select the version of Vista you have and it will let you at all the good stuff on the disc; which could let you perform a clean install. I found an article stating this works fine and all you have to do then is upgrade your system from within Vista and enter your key there, but my install would error out (with 0×80070241 – which seemed to be related only to the beta and a corrupt install ISO) after 9% every time. So I had to install XP just to upgrade to Vista. This is the most annoying, ignorant decision Microsoft has ever made in the history… okay maybe not, but WTF!? This isn't going to prevent piracy, since people don't ever hack upgrades anyway – so the only thing they accomplish by this stunt is to make it harder on people who have to rebuild their machines after Microsoft's crappy software poops out its brain.

I didn't get my machine back until 10pm on Thursday night. If I had just wanted to go back to XP it would have taken less than an hour, which asks for my 98 disc since it was an upgrade too; which is how it should be.

This last experience with MS is basically the straw that broke the camel's back; I'm done. Gates and Ballmer can take Windows 7 and jam in their collective arse for all I care – I won't buy it. In fact, I'm not spending another dime on anything from Microsoft. My next desktop will be a Mac. In the last year that I have had my MacBook Pro, I have had to rebuild my desktop 2 times, and that's not including the 4 times it took me to install Vista initially on my second drive. I have never had a problem with my laptop. Ever. If the Apple store hadn't been 2 hours away, I would have very likely just gone and bought a new machine.

Well, I'm back up and almost 60% reinstalled now, so I'm good for a little while – now I just need to find a way to skin the bots in Quake III to look like Microsoft execs, and I will be happily on a frag fest….

Where it works

I particularly enjoy how it handles the various sounds emanating from my machine. Having the ability to control audio levels from every device connected to it, as well as individual applications is a bonus. This keeps me from being blasted out of my chair while wearing headphones when someone logs in on Google Talk or Messenger.

I would say it is just as fast as my XP desktop too. With a 4 gb thumbdrive installed as RAM Boost, the machine sails right through large Photoshop files and plays all of my favorite games (except one, Halo 2). If the rumors about SP 1 having a performance and memory management gain, Vista will be quite fast. All of the built-in tools I have used perform well, and there seems to be genuine improvements within the operating system itself. I have run into many fewer inherent glitches within the OS; in fact I can’t really think of any. All of my USB devices hook right up and are easily accessible, save one – my Western Digital 500 gb drive. Every now and again it falls off the world and I have to unplug it and turn it off to get it back; something it has never done on XP.

The majority of the applications I use work just fine under Vista as well. WS-FTP hates Vista, and will not run. I initially had trouble with the entire Adobe CS3 suite on an install of Vista Business Ultimate, as well as Flex Builder 2 not working. Those are the only ones I have had trouble with though.

Where it fails

Driver compatibility. Probably 80% or more of the trouble, headaches, and unplanned rebuilds have been due to drivers that flat-out do not work in Vista. I recently made the rookie mistake of updating my audio device drivers through Windows Update – boy that was just dumb. Even though device manager said the device was "working properly", I had no sound. So I rolled back the drivers, and then had to unplug the plugs and rearrange them to get the 5.1 surround to function again. I had to do this originally too, when I first installed it so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise….

I still have no RAID support, but that’s more on ASUS than Microsoft.

Then we come to Halo 2. WTF!? Microsoft sells this game under their own moniker and it hardly works right. Half the time I would get an error message that some Halo app was running and the game would need to be reinstalled; and the other half would work fine 80% of the time or just randomly quit. The I tried to use a LIVE account and hehehe… yeah right. What a joke. Halo dies every time I try and login in to any real or fictional account. After installing the latest patch, the game doesn’t run at all. Way to go guys!

The biggest disappointment is how many incompatibilities in general there are, and when it comes right down to it there is enough blame to go around. It’ snot completely fair to blame Microsoft because every Tom, Dick and Harry is incapable of writing solid drivers for their new OS. Especially an OS so plagued with set-backs and postponed releases; it’s hard to believe that all of these other guys didn’t have adequate time and resources to get their code solid before release time. What lands squarely in their lap is when their own products don’t act right, and fail. Halo is one example, Office 2007 is another. I have fought with Office 2007 and Visual Studio in particular throughout my recent life as a developer. Both products are top notch unless you have trouble. My advice? Clean install. Period. Don’t ever upgrade anything.

All of this garbage combined has led me down the path of deciding if I really want to switch to the Mac platform entirely. I so very seldom have problems on my laptop it’s almost non-existent. The stopping point is the price, but what I guess I have to decide is Microsoft and Windows worth the trouble?

:: side note ::
Maybe your Vista woes are actually nVidia’s fault?

The latest is an assault on Apple for adding Safari to the iTunes update application. In efforts to get more folks to try and hopefully like the new Windows version of Safari, Apple has decided to add it to the iTunes updater application, and here’s the real kicker; they selected it for you by default! HOW DARE THEY! They are now acting like Microsoft, this shady underhanded manipulation of the trust of their loyal user base! How dare they make me, deselect a checkbox for a browser I do not want! Well, I never…..

I hope you’re catching my sarcasm here, because I’m laying it on pretty thick. This isn’t any different than Microsoft adding Live Writer, Family Safety, or Spaces to the last Messenger Update I downloaded. When I first started reading headlines about it, I thought for a minute that they were just installing by default in the background without permission – see; now that would be a bad decision. But instead what I found was that they were simply making people to commit to a positive opt out of the download. This is just one small example among hundreds – they’re easy to find.

This post on John’s Blog probably one of the most level-headed posts about it, and I would have to say I agree with what he finally concludes – but ultimately I don’t care enough to rant or rave about it. The real biting issue for me is how every post, article, or discussion has to always degrade to how it sucks, or how someone’s an idiot (or worse) with the consensus finally ending in a string of comments that you wouldn’t really want your kids to read.

An intelligent argument doesn’t always have to degrade into a WWE Cage Match.