The challenge to get WinXP to boot on a Mac is finally over. The solution was confirmed and posted today, days after the winner of the challenge posted a video of his iMac booting up Windows which many thought was a hoax.
This means good things for Apple, which will probably see an increase in sales from people holding off their purchases until it was actually possible to dual-boot. Although the purchases may be held off until the Rev. B machines come out, probably with good reason.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iMac, MacBook Pro, dual boot, Windows, Windows XP, Intel, MacIntel, Microsoft, melting, power adaptor, MagSafe
One of my biggest problems with my Wharton education is that a lot fo the stuff we're being taught is outdated. Our Marketing 101 and Management 101 classes are being taught based on models and frameworks developed 30+ years ago.
In either class, I have yet to hear the word "blog", yet blogging has been around for at least five years and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Blogging has changed the way businesses should be run, yet the leaders of my generation will be running businesses the way we learned to in school and the way its been done for the past few years. You know that boss that'll fire you in 10 years for blogging? They're sitting next to me taking pages and pages of notes on the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model and learning how to do "business as usual."
So do we get it or not? Dean Harker does, but its not apparent from the "front lines". As the leading undergraduate business school (and one of the top graduate B-schools), I'd have hoped we could do something a bit more cutting-edge than the usual research/paper/presentation deal we have been required to do in many of the core classes. For example, in Management 101, we are to research a company "with a problem", analyze it in the context of the frameworks of the class, and offer our recommendations. Imagine instead, we assembled a class-wide World of Warcraft guild (or for the less war-mongering among us, perhaps set up a Second Life business) and built our characters over the course of the semester. Over the course of the semester, we would have to do small writeups defending the contributions we made to our guild. Which one would teach us more about being leaders and managers in the real world? I can tell you that the former probably won't and Joi Ito can tell you that the latter probably is.
Technorati Tags: Wharton, Penn, UPenn, MMOGs, World of Warcraft, Joi Ito, Dean Harker, Management, Marketing, Web 2.0, leadership, gaming, Second Life, business school, MBA
I got a 40/43 on the Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz, which means that I'm three points below being Mike Arrington, writer for TechCrunch. I gotta say though, the way I did it was by recognizing the ones that were Star Wars characters and marking the rest "Web 2.0".
(The purpose of this post was mainly to try out the Performancing Firefox extension)
Technorati Tags: Web 2.0, Star Wars, Quiz, TechCrunch, Mike Arrington, science fiction, Performancing, Firefox, extensions
A SXSW panel entitled "Design Eye for the List Guy" redesigned Craig's List yesterday. The "Design Eye for the _____ Guy" is actually a series of "experiments" (this one is number three) put on by a group of web designers calling themselves the Design Fab Seven. The mockup looks great, I hope that Craig's List actually implements it. The blue/grey/white theme works great for del.icio.us, but IMO there's too much going on on the Craig's List homepage to have it be so sparse.
Andy Rutledge redesigned Google about a month ago. I recently discovered a Greasemonkey script that will replace the Google homepage with the redesigned one. Some comments I saw complained about how Google's simple page was part of their branding and that it'll never change. I rarely use the Google homepage, but on the off chance that I do, at least it'll look pretty.
Technorati Tags: design, Google, Craig's List, SXSW, South By Southwest, Design Eye, Greasemonkey, Firefox, redesign
Remember that iPod packaging designed by Microsoft video that was going around a few weeks ago? The iPod Observer reports that the video actually came from inside the company. The video was made to point out the challenges Microsoft faces regarding their packaging and design aesthetic.
We all know the first step to recovery is knowing you have a problem. Good for Microsoft. I wonder if we'll see simpler, more refined Vista packaging or if they'll play it safe and boring again.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, packaging, Apple, iPod, funny, humor, video, marketing, design
I realized my grandmother is an old-school, real-world blogger. She came over today with several newspaper articles for me to read, offering her input on them and expecting my comments in return. In blogosphere-speak, she posted a link to a news item, offered her input and left comments open. If I was her age and used to that form of communication, I'd have passed the clipping on to another friend of mine offering and expecting the same thing.
Old people have a desire to share opinions and information, and they have had this desire before email was around, much less blogs. The old-school way and the Web 2.0 way are analogous, with both the old school and the new school grabbing ahold of whatever technology they feel comfortable with in order to fulfill this desire. The difference lies in that the advent of blogging has made it become possible to do share with a much larger group of people all over the world in a quick, easy and cheap fashion. This is why blogging is that much more powerful than anything we've ever seen before.
Imagine 6 generations down the line when our grandkids' grandkids scoff at their grandparents for sending them a link to a post on our crusty old blogs about something they find interesting. "Get with the program, grandpa. I don't want to read a stupid old webpage; why don't you just send me the page straight to my brain on the worldwide neural net that's been around for 50 years?"
Technorati Tags: blogging, newspaper, media, sharing, information, future, communication
Starting over has its merits. You've been working so hard paving the road that you haven't had a chance to take in the view. Take the opportunity to go back to the beginning and appreciate the view for what it is. The groundwork has been done already, it shouldn't be a difficult journey. At the very least you'll appreciate how much you've already done and reinvigorate yourself into finishing the path you've started.
I got the Pragmatic Programmers' Agile Web Development with Rails book yesterday from Amazon and I'm starting over with Ruby on Rails. I've started on page 1 and have done everything in the book up until the 2nd iteration of the Depot application. I should be done in a few days, but until then I'm not going to touch any other Rails code.
As I was checking out from Amazon, I was notified that I won a free 3-month trial to Amazon Prime, giving me $3.99 overnight shipping and free 2-day shipping. My greatest complaint about Amazon is the exorbitant shipping costs or times available. On many occasions, I have been gotten all the way to checkout only to cancel the order because I didn't want to pay 30% of my order total in shipping or wait 2+ weeks for my stuff. For the next three months, however, the impulse buy threshold has dropped significantly now that I know what to expect in terms of shipping.
Does that mean I'm going to subscribe to Amazon Prime once the trial lapses? Probably not. I don't make nearly enough purchases on Amazon (first-party at least) to warrant the $80/year. If I can get a couple of friends to share it with, though, then I'm sold.
Since I can share these benefits with up to four people simultaneously, if anyone needs something from Amazon right away and doesn't want to get killed with shipping, let me know and I'll hook you up.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon Prime, shipping, Ruby on Rails, Pragmatic Programmer, books, development, programming
I noticed a bunch of referrer links coming in from several Personal Megite pages, no doubt due to my comment on Scoble's latest Origami post.
While I do appreciate the page hits, and I probably shouldn't complain, I have yet to post the word "origami" anywhere on this site and so that means Megite is broken. From what I can tell from Megite's confusing font-size-based hierarchical layout, only about half the links under "Related Items" are actually about Origami and the rest are simply links to the blogs people "claimed" on Robert's post's comments. There's even a link to Myspace in there. It seems even Rupert Murdoch is trying to figure out what lies and what doesn't lie in Origami's path of death and destruction.
Of course if that didn't get me on Megite for Origami, ranting about a link on Megite relating to Origami sure will.
Technorati Tags: Megite, memetracker, meme, Origami, Microsoft, Robert Scoble, blogging, conversation, comments, hype
Pantsland has discovered some similarities between the XBox 360 and Dell's old GX PCs. Both have that "inhaling" case design and they both have the circular power about 3/4 of the way down.
Other than that, I don't know. I'll leave that up to you to read too much into :)
Technorati Tags: XBox, XBox 360, Microsoft, Dell, PC, design, industrial design
