Yesterday I noticed that Principled Technologies had released updated reports that examined the overall responsiveness of Windows Vista SP1 to Windows XP SP 2 for common business and home tasks.  Given that I’ve examined the effect of SP1 on Vista in great detail, I feel that I should comment on the findings. Principled Technologies drew two sets of conclusions from the tests.  Here are the conclusions when comparing business scenarios: Overall, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP performed comparably on most test operations. Performance differences between the two operating systems were typically less than a half second. Significant differences of over a second occurred on only nine of 128 measures; Windows Vista SP1 led on eight of those. Windows Vista…

Earlier in the week my cohort here at The Apple Core, David Morgenstern, wrote about living a bare drive lifestyle where “professional Mac users often use hard disk mechanisms like floppies.” Count me in that group. I keep a lot of (non-traveling) hard drives in my office, most in silver anti-static bags, and swap them in and out of use with great frequency. I also change notebook hard drives more often than some people change their underwear, but I digress. If you only have one or two external drives, then keeping them in an enclosure is best. It keeps the hard drive mechanism out of harms way and (sometimes) cools it with a fan. Hard drives also stand a better…

Funny how the mind works. Sometimes it just makes associations whether you want it to or not. And now that I’ve read the feature article on Google’s Marissa Mayer in San Francisco magazine, the images from that profile are etched into my mind whenever I think of Google, or even go to Google’s gaggle of sites, services, and features. There is now continuity between Marissa, Google and me. These are actually quite pleasant, floating images of a lower Market Street aerie, with purple walls and the home-spun smell of vanilla-laced cupcakes (supported lovingly by pleated paper). There’s laughter, intense intelligence, privilege with a purpose, a subdued sensuality, a hammer-hold on the zeitgeist. Here’s a gal with the whole package to…

The launch of Google Sites has brought an interesting divergence of opinion to ZDNet. Our Microsoft lady says it’s a threat to Sharepoint. Our Google guy says it’s not. Our usability guy says it stinks. And the boss says, well, it’s really beta-ware. What it is, mostly is Software as a Service (SaaS). In this case the software is a shared Web site editor. Sure, you can pour your other Google apps into it, and pretty sure you’ve got teams sharing your Google data, but that’s not Sharepoint. Sharepoint, as our own Matt Asay has warned us with all the subtlety of a Republican operative using Barack Obama’s middle name, is a glue aimed at tieing you to a Microsoft file format…

eCost has the refurbished HP A716 portable photo printer on sale for $45.99 plus shipping. The printer includes 4GB of internal storage for photo safekeeping.

Bain Capital and Huawei will resubmit its bid for 3Com to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. in hopes of closing a deal. A $2.2 billion buyout of 3Com has been hung up over concerns that China’s Huawei would have access to critical U.S. security and defense architecture. According to The Wall Street Journal the latest version of the 3Com deal would give Huawei 16.5 percent of the company with Bain getting the rest. However, the deal would limit Huawei’s access to U.S. networking technologies. On Feb. 20, 3Com, Bain and Huawei pulled their filing with regulators. The deal has raised Congressional hackles because 3Com has defense contracts and also owns TippingPoint, a security software firm. Separately, 3Com…

A new think tank study dismisses a proposal from Iowa Republican Charles Grassley to require disclosure of medical device pricing. (Picture from the PiperReport.) The hit piece was commissioned by AdvaMed, the device industry trade group, and claimed that there is little market competition, that search costs are high, and so the plan just wouldn’t work. Maybe not. Not at first. But the key to the plan is in the bill’s title. It’s the Transparency in Medical Device Pricing Act. I emphasized this key point so the study’s authors can read it without their spectacles. Transparency is abhorrent to the entire medical industry, and folks across the political spectrum are growing weary of it. While driving back from HIMSS yesterday, for…

A new website entitled End Software Patents is attempting to galvanize public support to accomplish that goal. Here’s the core of their argument: Patents differ from copyright in one key manner: independent invention is a valid defense against claims of copyright infringement. That means that if you happen to write something that looks like the writing of somebody else, then you can’t be sued, unless the other author can prove that you directly copied his or her work. Conversely, a patent holder can sue anybody who has written a composition similar to a patented composition. The holder of a software patent need only spend a few minutes with an Internet search engine to find somebody to sue—which is why…

Cisco, Dell and others have seen lumpy customer demand, but the folks that are producing those volatile sales patterns–CIOs–are moderately optimistic and expect solid technology spending in 2008, according to a survey by UBS. In its survey, UBS noted that: Our CIO survey–completed in February–points toward surprisingly solid IT spending growth in ‘08. While we remain cautious on IT spending, the survey suggests that the spending environment may not be as dire as many think, and supports the optimistic outlooks of HP, EMC, Sun & IBM. In other words, technology spending may not be so doom or gloom after all. Among the high-level takeaways: Among the 100 CIOs surveyed by UBS, 45 percent of respondents expected their IT spending to…

And once again we come to a post on co-author Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. This Wikinomics series has just two posts to go; savor it while you can. Don Tapscott’s thesis in this chapter is that we’re in an era of what I choose to call “mass platforms”–where a platform is defined as a collection of data/functions provided cheap/free to programmers who want to create new, possibly unexpected applications on top of it. For example: Housingmaps, created by Paul Rademacher in 2005, combined map data from Google with housing data from craigslist. Using his website, you could see at a glance which houses were for sale in your chosen neighborhood and what the asking prices were….