SteveX Compiled

Odd that there isn’t one in Ottawa.

I’ve been thinking about platforms, and about monopolies recently. I was one of the few who didn’t think Microsoft was a monopoly.  The Canadian government defines monopoly this way:  “A monopoly occurs when there is only one seller of provides a commodity or service for which there is no close substitute.”.  Is the Macintosh a [...]

Cisco is purchasing Scientific-Atlanta for $6.9 billion dollars. This significant because Scientific Atlanta makes the set-top boxes that many cable providers use (including my local one, Rogers).  The battle for the living room is raging, and having an “in” like that is a serious advantage. If Microsoft or Sony or Apple or anyone else are [...]

Here’s another misleading XBox 360 auction on eBay.  I’d feel guilty selling an email address for that much cash.  

It took a few days for Google Analytics to start giving me meaningful reports for my sites, but now that it’s working, I wanted to write up a short post on it. Google Analytics has a ton of features.  I’ve got it set up to track some of the sites I host, and the results [...]

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to with the XBox 360 is a quieter console. Looks like that’s not the casenot the case. Oh well… at least with the wireless controller I can stash it away somewhere… in the new house I’m planning to have a shelf in the next room for gear [...]

I want an XBox 360. I asked my local Electronics Boutique, and they’re saying if I preorder now I might get one in January. I’ve mentioned before that I think it’s generally a bad idea to preorder and I’m thinking that’s true in this case as well. Wal-Mart will be open at 8am on November [...]

Anyone remember the war between Microsoft and IBM over aggregation versus inheritance? It was basically the COM vs CORBA war. The Workplace Shell in OS/2 was based on inheritance – if you wanted to extend the shell, you subclassed one of the shell objects and overrode functions. Explorer, in Windows, being based on COM, went [...]

Rick Borstein posts about flavours of PDF.  Now that I work for Adobe, I can tell you there’s a lot more to PDF than I thought there was before starting at Adobe.  Jim King, the architect of PDF, has some great and very readable presentations on his website.  His Annotated PDF presentation is an excellent introduction [...]

Just read on Dare’s blog that Microsoft is getting into the domain hosting business.  This is a little surprising but seems like a reasonable move for them.  It does grant Microsoft a bit of an ‘in’ when it comes to services I might want to add to my website – if my mail is hosted by [...]