Become an organ doner today

Follow this link. It'll only take a few minutes to register, and you'll be doing a lot of good for people a lot worse off than you.

You'll be dead anyway so it's no big deal.

A piece of history consigned to the history books

Walking into uni last week I noticed that the old Woolworths store on Byres Road was receiving some attention from some professional tea drinkers. Nothing out of the order really, I assumed someone had finally picked up the lease on the site and was remaking the interior in their own image. What did catch my eye though was that the sign had been taken down, revealing an older Woolworths sign beneath which revealed just how long the store's been there.

I wonder how the high street's going to look in ten years times? I'm personally hoping for lots of independent stores and coffee shops/restaurants.

Zune phone in September? Not likely

The smartphone space is big money for a company that knows how to tap it effectively, and Microsoft are slowly starting to come round to the idea that consumers might actually want a phone that is pleasant to use. Rumoured to be introducing support for capacitive touch screen technology in Windows Mobile 6.6, they're making the first, albeit baby, steps in the direction of stylus free handsets.

The latest rumour comes from Digitimes, a Taiwanese news publication not usually known for the veracity of its Microsoft rumours. It is after all very far away from the US and so probably doesn't have any connections inside Microsoft. What it is likely to have connections with is the far eastern manufacturing empire.

It reports that "sources familiar to Microsoft's roadmap" have told it of a planned announcement of Windows Mobile 7, Microsofts entry into the modern smartphone OS market, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in February with a planned September release. What WinMo 7 will contain is still up for debate, but the Digitimes report states that the upcoming handsets will have "Zune support", which leads speculators down the one way road to Project Pink and the Zune Phone.

Microsoft are currently nowhere near challenging their competitors, namely Apple, in either the smartphone or PMP spaces, the former because they have nothing to challenge them with, and the latter because their product isn't available outside the US, so it's interesting to hear that they thinking of combining both marketspaces and being joint runner up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for Microsoft modernising its products (I still remember Vista, and sometimes wake in the middle of the night screaming) but having seen what they did with Windows 7, I don't think they're going to be able to pull off a combination device that will challenge the iPhone.

Microsoft love their products, but the one thing they love more is a product with multiple versions. Both Windows Vista and Windows 7 have six different versions a piece, and although only three of them are made available to consumers, the splitting of resources and ideas that must take place in order to develop different product versions does not allowing for the flowering of a healthy ecosystem, and that's where Apple beat Microsoft every time.

Apple have but one version of each OS running on their devices, and that makes like so much easier for developers who don't have to rewrite their apps for two, or even three platforms (read Nokia), and if Microsoft insist on maintaining two different mobile operating systems, one for the consumer space and one for the enterprise market, then they're going to go right ahead and fracture their platform, because not every consumer wants to stick with the consumer only device and I'm pretty sure Microsoft will try to market their enterprise orientated handsets to consumers in the same way RIM markets the Blackberry to unsuspecting buyers. The result will be consumer confusion and more iPhone sales.

Another way in which Microsoft comes up short is cross platform interaction. Consumers want to be able to access content, the same content, from multiple devices and to have the content synchronise between them. iTunes and the iPod/iPhone offer such an experience, and it's a damn good one, but that's only because Apple controls the entire product development cycle with the iron fist of a dreadnought. Microsoft are too busy trying to keep their hardware partners happy in the face of Android coming to take their children in the middle of the night that they won't even consider designing their own phones, something that they have proven they are supremely capable of doing with the Xbox 360 and various computer peripherals.

The same Digitimes report says that LG and HTC are both working on handsets for WinMo 7, so we're probably not going to see a Zune phone any time soon, if ever, and that's a shame because the Zune HD is a pretty cool device.

WinMo 7 has been a long time coming, and it really couldn't get here fast enough because quite frankly Microsoft's mobile strategy is just one big embarrassing joke at this stage and with both Android 2.1 and iPhone OS 4 not too far away, Redmond have to do something to bring their mobile platform out of the late 90s, kicking and screaming if necessary, or else they risk becoming irrelevant in the mobile marketplace over the next five years.

Please let's refrain from hyping this up too much. There's only going to be disappointment at the end of it.

Thought for the day

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

--  Winston Churchill 

Review of someone elses 13inch MacBook Pro

I'm at a party right now and the host has a 13inch MacBook Pro, so here are my thought on it.

The 13inch MacBook Pro is the baseline model in Apple’s line of professional laptops. Characterized primarily by their distinctive aluminium chassis, the MacBook Pro sets a new standard in laptop design. Having the entire body of the computer drilled from a single block of aluminium, Apple has designed a laptop that is thinner than any other in its class without compromising on performance or functionality, while also being able to stand up to even the most abusive computer user.

When using the computer, the most noticeable departure from the status quo of laptop design is the new trackpad, specifically the absence of any buttons. Apple’s simplistic design philosophy shines brighter than ever before with this part of the computer, as the button normally found below the trackpad has disappeared entirely to allow Apple to turn the entire pad into one big button. Press down any part of the trackpad and you have a left-click. The keys are completely solid under finger and there is absolutely no stick when using them, and the keyboard has an overall feeling of quality compared to the cheap keyboard of the budget Samsung I usually use.

The computer contains a reasonably built battery, with the indicator telling me that 4 hours is sixty six percent, and I’m now being told that I need to get ready to get into a taxi, but I really want one of these so I’ll eventually post a more detailed review.