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Update – 10/30/2008: Looks like I’m going to have to eat my words on the biggest point of this post … HP apparently will be releasing a Linux-based (specifically, Ubuntu-based) alternative OS for the new Mini 1000 in January. Hat tip: Geek.com

A $20 savings isn’t all that impressive, but my point revolves less around money than it does choice. At least there’s some OS choice in the works – now if only my display choice made a difference to anything except the size of the plastic frame!

Our friends Hewlett and Packard may be a little late to the party, but they’ve finally come out with another perhaps-more-serious entry in the “netbook” computer category. Light on horsepower but heavy on weight-savings, the netbook niche has been emerging as an entire class of scaled-down notebook computers that put portability on the top of the trade-off heap. They’re typically heavily network-oriented, intended for web surfing, e-mail, light document work and the like.

So how did HP do with their new Mini 1000 series? In this author’s opinion, not terribly well.

There are a few things that irk me about the Mini 1000 when you set it aside entries in the segment from Dell, Acer, Asus (makers of the now-iconic EeePC, a copy of which is my lovely wife’s daily driver) and others. To start, the entry-level price is a touch high for a netbook; we paid $50 less for Kelly’s windows-powered EeePC, and you can get versions (more on that in a sec) of the machine for under 300 clams. Ready to go. At BJ’s wholesale club.

Aside from the price, the screen is my next bone of contention. HP has seen fit to offer two different screen sizes: 8.9″ or 10.2″ – but, inexplicably, they both offer the exact same resolution: 1280×600. Why would I want to pay fifty bones extra for a screen that’s essentially just a magnified version of its little brother? I want to actually fit more on the screen. I can see offering a same-resolution larger-size screen for those whose vision may be compromised, but given the target market for netbooks – tech-savvy people who probably work on more-normal-sized PCs all day long – I don’t think throwing in a few extra DPI on the pricier display option is really going to anger too many people.

But the biggest problem with the new Mini 1000 from HP? No OS choice. You get Windows XP with Service Pack 3, and you’d better like it. While HP seems very adept at following other manufacturers into the netbook form factor, they’ve done a dismally poor job of following the industry into offering a Linux-based netbook OS. Instead, buyers of the Mini 1000 can’t even opt-out of the Windows offering to install their own OS – they’re stuck paying the $50 (or whatever it is these days) for a copy of Windows they don’t want or need.

The bottom line: HP could have done a lot better. They’ve got a sexy-looking little netbook for us, but they’ve burdened it with a bloated, insecure OS – the computing analogue of towing a boat with your Ferrari. Sure, you can weld a trailer hitch to it, but all the reasons you bought that nimble, perfectly-balanced piece of hardware in the first place are going to go right out the window. Meanwhile, the screen falls squarely into the “nothing special” category, and the price hit the market already-beat.

I’d say better luck next time, but HP can still turn this one around. Get your engineers on it, and in a few months we’ll check back and see if you’re offering us any real choice.

If you’ve seen much of the tech press in the last few months, then you’ve probably heard about how great “cloud computing” is, and how it’s going to revolutionize computing by letting people do more stuff with fewer local resources (i.e. slower computers, smaller hard drives, etc).

What is really means is that you’re using resources – hard drive space, processing power, and the like – that are out on some server somewhere. The fact that you’ve got a high speed Internet connection between you and the server is the enabler, and suddenly you’re able to do all sorts of amazing new stuff. That’s all well and good.

Until something like this happens.

Apart from the inherent inefficiency of cloud computing, and the obvious and blatant privacy concerns, this is the primary reason you’ll never see me depending on “the cloud” for anything even remotely important: sometimes clouds go away. In this case, anyone who depended on the online photo storage site “Digital Railroad” has about 24 hours to pull their work offline before it disappears.

It’s sad that the company – someone’s hard work, investment and dream – has gone under. I’ve been there too, and it’s inevitably a dark time in one’s life. Hopefully, the photographers using Digital Railroad weren’t depending on it as primary storage – because in a matter of days, the server hard drives holding their photos will most likely be up for auction.

Think about that the next time someone tries to sell you on the virtues of cloud computing!

…that the ‘new’ seasons of Family Guy are nowhere near as good as the old stuff?

Just curious…

Um…

LONDON (Reuters) – Doctors baffled by an unexplained rash on people’s ears or cheeks should be on alert for a skin allergy caused by too much mobile phone use, the British Association of Dermatologists said on Thursday.

Citing published studies, the group said a red or itchy rash, known as “mobile phone dermatitis,” affects people who develop an allergic reaction to the nickel surface on mobile phones after spending long periods of time on the devices.

…”In mobile phone dermatitis, the rash would typically occur on the cheek or ear, depending on where the metal part of the phone comes into contact with the skin,” the group said in a statement.

“In theory it could even occur on the fingers if you spend a lot of time texting on metal menu buttons.”

Maybe it’s time to invest in a headset, people?

OK, maybe this one is just too obvious, ripe for dismissal on the grounds that it just makes too much sense to actually consider…

Over the last couple of days (weeks? months?) a political group called ACORN has come under the microscopes of various election officials as well as the major media. Apparently, in their efforts to register oodles and oddles of voters in time for the presidential election (only 22 days until it’s over! Yay!), they’ve managed to submit quite a few fraudulent registrations. Sometimes it’s convicted felons registering to vote. Sometimes it’s little kids who somehow manage to drop a “2″ or “3″ in front of their single-digit ages. Sometimes people register from the grave.

I won’t bother repeating all the gory details here … it’s much more fun to go read Michelle Malkin’s impressively-neutral take on the matter.

ACORN “blamed inefficiency and lack of resources for problems such as being unable to spot duplicate voter-registration cards” – so let’s run it against my super-obvious, way-too-easy litmus test: If ACORN’s intentions are noble – sign people up to vote, no matter what – then why is the fraud only happening in swing states? You’d think it would be happening all over the place, because homeless and low-income folks (ACORN’s target audience) in all 50 states should be getting out to the polls, right? Isn’t this about helping people to exercise their rights?

Maybe the TV talking heads have already talked the “only happening in swing states” idea to death; I don’t have cable and don’t watch much TV anyway. I’m sure someone out there in the blogosphere must have hit on it, but I’ve got more important blogs to watch than the political ones. Besides, the coffee I drink does enough to get me worked up – I don’t need other people’s political rants to push me into stomach ulcer territory!

I only mention this here because it ties in with something I’m going to be writing about soon: simplicity. It’s a simple, easy test – and it would seem to speak volumes about the nobility of ACORN’s intentions. Are they really altruistically trying to “get out the vote” among the underprivileged and undereducated? We’ve got plenty of them here in New York, but you don’t see (or, at least my Google searching doesn’t see) any fraudulent activities here. But The Empire State is solidly in the blue – no need to falsify records to achieve the desired result here. But the so-termed “battleground” states? They’re covered.

If ACORN cared a whit for the people they’ve been “trying” to “help”, there’d be news from more than just swing states. They blame the appearance of – not just a few, not hundreds – thousands of fraudulent voter registrations on inefficiencies and a lack of resources. Wouldn’t it be even worse, then, in states where they commit almost no resources at all? The stories don’t add up, and that usually means someone just failed the litmus test.

Lacking anything more suitable about which to post, I thought I’d mention two rather trite and marginally-useful observations I’ve recently made:

First, as if people didn’t already have enough trouble with “their”, “there” and “they’re”, have you ever noticed that there are three meanings for the word “now”? You’ve got now “the present” – as in, “it’s happening right now.” And then you’ve got now “the past” – as in, “just now, I heard that…” And then you’ve got now “the future” – as in, “now, we’ll have bigger problems on our hands”. Thankfully, they’re all spelled the same so people can misuse them most times without making my grammar nerve twitch.

Second, have you ever noticed that Attorneys (Attornies? Spellcheck sez ‘No’…) are pretty much only ever “Attorneys at Law”? Have you ever heard of someone being an attorney at … anything else? Perhaps an “Attorney at Cheesemaking”? Or “Attorney at Mayhem”?

Hey…could I be an “Attorney at Blogging”? Would that require an honorary degree? Or a fellowship of some sort?

Is it just me, or are rabbit-centered dishes breeding faster these days than their main ingredient?

A few months ago, Garrett McCord – aboard his most-excellent foodblog, Vanilla Garlic – wrote about his Rockstar Ingredient Theory. In 2007, it was “all about tea being used in food.” His theory for 2008? Rhubarb. You might even argue that the same phenomenon is behind cupcakes giving way to yogurt as a fad.

It’s with this frame of reference that I’ve been dabbling in trendwatching lately, and the trend I’m seeing: Rabbit. It started a couple of weeks ago, when Kelly arrived home from work and asked me, “Have you ever eaten rabbit before?” She proceeded to share a story about a co-worker who’d raved about it earlier in the day.

A few days later, as Kelly and I trolled Park Avenue in search of a dinner venue, we noticed a rabbit-themed special on one restaurant’s sidewalk chalkboard. And just this week, I’ve seen rabbit recipes among the headlines at The Food Network‘s web site, and appearing in favorite food blogs!

Maybe rabbit-centered dishes have always swirled around me, and simply escaped my attention. Maybe the concept of “rabbit stew” seems so much like the provincial stuff of Peter Cottontail – among my favorite children’s books as a young’un – that the idea always just bounced off me as fictional. Or maybe, perhaps, the Fall food fashion fad for 2008 is indeed turning out to be rabbit! In any case, it might be high time to give it a try…