I think I will declare today (April 23rd, 2008) as the day of SUCKERS….hehehe. This is fantastic and continues to show how damaging proprietory technologies are to your life. If the Sony ATRAC debacle didn’t serve as a warning there’s always this: Microsoft just announced that it will no longer supply authorization keys for songs purchased from the defunct MSN Music service. According to the News Desk over at Ars Technica:

Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft’s now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it’s done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music license servers by the end of this summer.

MSN Entertainment and Video Services general manager Rob Bennett sent out an e-mail this afternoon to customers, advising them to make any and all authorizations or deauthorizations before August 31. “As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers,” reads the e-mail seen by Ars. “You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.”

Proprietary technologies suck, no matter how good/neat they sound at the time. Case in point is the Microsoft SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) technology. At a sneak preview of the watches given by Microsoft at COMDEX 2003, Microsoft began referring to the SPOT watches as “Smart Watches with MSN Direct.” The purpose of MSN Direct, a new Microsoft service to be offered through a monthly or annual subscription, was to use FM radio subcarriers to feed data to the watches, such as weather, traffic, and other information. Watch owners could choose between two subscription plans: $9.95 a month with the first month at no charge; or $59 for a full year.

I still remember sitting in my chair at the 2003 comdex keynote and asking myself why? I mean Bill kept saying that this was the future…..yeah right!!! Well I hope you don’t have one of these watches, or if you got suckered in, lets hope you didn’t pay for a full year of service. Remember kids, Proprietory SUCKS BIG. I wonder what Bill is wearing on his wrist these days

Gotta love Steve Ballmer, he’s so clueless, he doesn’t even realize it. This is the same guy who for the longest time slammed Linux and Web technologies, promoted his companies sub par OS as the latest greatest and told us that Web-based apps and the whole web2.0 thing was just a fad. I got 5 words for him…..Dude you missed the boat…..AGAIN.

Here is his latest rant……”Web Developers, Web Developers, Web Developers…”. This is pretty sad.

Hot on the heels of AJA video’s NAB announcement of their IO HD box, MOTU has just announced their version of Portable Studio in a box, the MOTU V3HD. According to MOTU’s website “With one simple plug-and-play FireWire connection, the V3HD turns your Mac or PC desktop or laptop computer into a powerful HD/SD video production workstation equipped with all the video and audio I/O you need.” Both boxes seem — at first glance — to be very similar. AJA’s box works with Apple’s ProPres 422 (hardware), while V3HD seems to be hardwired for DVCPro HD (hardware). V3HD works with FinalCut Pro on Mac platform and supports Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows. All you need is a Workstation/Laptop with Firewire 400/800 connections. So go ahead and build that portable HD/SD studio you always wanted…..it’s easy.

In the continuing saga of starship “G” vs. the evil empire, here is a story that I almost missed. Gmail has introduced a slide show function that just happens to work with power point files as well. So now you can email that ppt file to your gmail account, go to your presentation, login to gmail and do a web slide show….all through the magic of AJAX. Now, you can’t edit power point files yet, but this feature will be added soon. This is thanks to google acquiring Tonic System. You can find the announcement here.

Google already supports web previews for Word documents and Excel sheets as part of their Google Docs & Spreadsheets program. You can see the pattern here – with every new instant preview, users have less reason to actually buy Microsoft Office. So go signup for a gmail account and choose your side in the coming galactic desktop battle.

Itunes download package for windows just grew in size. You will now be force fed Safari as part of this download. I have absolutely no idea why the hell apple would want to do this….or for that matter, why would I want to run Safari under windows. I thought the Mac guy was supposed to be lean and mean, not like the bloated PC guy who can’t even move his butt around because of all the “included” software.

Head over to rixstep.com and have a peek at their list, detailing a ton of keyboard shortcuts for OS X (and also ones for Windows XP). The list has your standard shortcuts and some “super secret” ones that the author has collected overtime. Did you know you can hold down the “shift” key after login to prevent startup items from opening?

In and of itself this might not be big news, but I think it is the trickle that will eventually turn into a flood, so put on your life jackets…..I warned you.

As a follow up on my earlier story on how google will use gears to move in on Microsoft’s domination of the desktop, here is the story of the first non-google app to use gears. Remember the Milk is a popular online todo list that until yesterday needed a network connection to it’s backend to work properly, but that’s not true anymore.

They have paired up with google to provide a seamless online/offline experience for their users. The offline experience will allow you to view your todo lists, add tasks, edit tasks, search your tasks, create Smart Lists, and do the zillion other things you normally do with RTM. Once connected to the net, you switch from offline to online mode, and RTM will sync all the offline data with the online data. My hats off to RTM, fantastic job.

Well, here is my prediction after digesting most of the content that came out of G-Day. Google Gears will soon make MS Office (and for that matter most “installed” applications) obsolete. Google’s Gears homepage explains that Gears is …

<<... an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

– Store and serve application resources locally
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness>>

Google in a press release states that Gears “marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there’s no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable.” They go on to say that making the browser environment more powerful is increasingly important (Google snatched up a couple of Firefox developers – this makes even more sense in the light of this announcement).

Well I guess at this point we can just wait and see. Let’s just hope google doesn’t turn into the next MS when they get to the top.