Does Microsoft's Vista suffer from bloatware?

BusinessWeek Online: Vista's Many Turnoffs. Microsoft's new OS has a surprising answer to the question, How many geeks does it take to shut down a computer?

How many ways should you be able to shut off a laptop? How about nine? Microsoft's long-awaited Vista operating system, launched for business customers on Nov. 30, includes that many options, according to programmers familiar with the software. That's two shortcut icons and a shut-down menu with a full seven options.

The number of choices has some techies chortling at what they see as the sheer absurdity of it all—and others astounded that the software giant could come out with something so unwieldy after years of development. Critics say that Vista, for all its capabilities, could end up being too complex for the average consumer. After all, how many features do you need for the computer equivalent of a light switch? "I'm sure there's a whole team of [user interface] designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista," writes Joel Spolsky, a New York software developer, on his blog, "but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?" ...

'Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X'

From Adam Engst at TidBITS Electronic Publishing and Take Control Books:

Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X by Joe Kissell 
PDF format, 96 pages, free 22-page sample available
Publication date: October 30, 2006
Price: $10

It's easy to keep track of a few passwords, but for any Macintosh user feeling overwhelmed by all the passwords asked for by the Mac and by many Web sites, help is now at hand in the form of a new ebook - "Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X."

Readers will learn to assess risk factors and devise a personal plan for generating different types of passwords, using a special system for creating strong passwords that are easy to remember but virtually impossible to crack. Once that's done, the ebook explains how to set appropriate passwords for the Mac (account login, master, root, firmware, email, AirPort, keychains), and how to use Apple's built-in password manager Keychain Access.

New email address

A psychopath former moderator of Ourmedia has subscribed me to a horde of spam lists, so I'm phasing out my current Gmail account. I can still be reached at my old email addresses for a while.

Two Firefox bugs

I'm a loyal, devoted Firefox user, but there are two recurring glitches that have been bothersome for some time:

- the browser windows just disappear sometimes. I click away to another app, and when I want to return to the one, two, three or four windows' worth of Firefox windows, they're no longer in the task bar (or whatever it's called) at the bottom of my PC.

- even though Ikeep updating Firefox to the latest release, it still crashes or freezes -- or the browser window goes blank -- every time I try to open a PDF document. Given that not all publishers warn you that it's a PDF, this is a huge point of frustration. Instead, I have to summon up IE.

Love ya, Firefox. Would love ya more if you fixed these bugs. I use Windows XP Professional on a spanking new Vaio desktop PC.

New at Apple: Smaller iPods, bigger ideas

David Pogue in Thursday's NY Times: New at Apple: Smaller iPods, Bigger Ideas.

New at the Learning Center

New at Ourmedia's Personal Media Learning Center:

Introduction to digital storytelling

Seven blogging tools reviewed

Blog search: Keeping track of conversations in the blogosphere

Building an audience for your blog or podcast

How can I capture great travel photos?

A guide to making and distributing digital movies

How to record Internet radio

How can I discover new music by bands I might like?

How to capture a screenshot of a video

Podcasting music: what it will cost you to stay on the safe side of the law

RSS tutorial

Color light on the cheap

Build your own lightbox

A terabyte hard drive for $700

Simson Garfinkel in the new issue of Technology Review: The Terabyte Zone. A review of an external drive that can hold one trillion bytes of data -- and how it might change the way we deal with our personal information. The street price for Maxtor's new OneTouch III Turbo Edition Hard Drive is $700.

Image is everything: Software can trip you out

San Jose Mercury News: Image is everything: Software can trip you out. A look a Framefree, a company we'll no doubt be hearing more from.

FrameFree Technologies, creates software that turns digital still photos into video, can make subjects appear to be under water when they are not or just in general trip you out.

The San Francisco company makes -- get your tech dictionaries out -- image interpolation and pixel-matching software.

Windows only at this point. Looks fascinating.

Free Web apps to do desktop work

Saturday's NY Times takes a look at Web 2.0 services in Now, Free Ways to Do Desktop Work on the Web.

A number of smart programmers have developed word processing, spreadsheet, calendar and other software that you operate while in a Web browser.

No one is saying they are a direct substitute for Word or Excel, but they do have a distinct advantage. The programs can be used by several people at different computers to collaborate on a document.

Among the software apps cited:

• Writely, software for word processing from Upstartle.

• Google Spreadsheets

• Jotspot, with collaborative wiki software aimed at business users.

• Zoho Writer, a Microsoft Word competitor.

• Writeboard, another word app, as is Ajax Write, which lacks the spell checking and word count functions that Word has taught us to rely upon.

• 30Boxes, an application for coordinating calendars among colleagues.

• Clipmarks, an alternative to bookmarks.

Lockdown in sector 4!

This is one of the most bizarre things I've encountered in 13 years on the Web:

Gmail Lockdown in sector 4!

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Gmail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us using this form to report this problem.

The only "unusual" activity is that Gmail has been unusually sluggish of late. I get hundreds of emails a day, and it's beginning to take its toll in terms of Gmail's responsiveness. After using Gmail for daily for more than a year, this is a pretty personal affront when I have dozens of business emails I need to attend to.