A-HAA! has a post about Cliff Sterrett, who was once dubbed “the finest cartoonist of them all”. His comic strip, called “Polly and Her Pals”, is shown there. Here’s the link.
Category Archives: Reviews
Reviews of products and services.
Badgered
Cartoon Brew has a link to Sharon Colman’s short film, “BADGERED”, which was nominated for an Oscar this year. Here’s the link to their post, and the direct link to the movie. Just saw it, love it!
New Hotmail shows Microsoft still playing catchup
I’ve been a user of Hotmail for several years, probably since 1998. I can’t remember the date very well, but it’s been a long time. The point is, I had a Hotmail account long before Gmail came out. Why do I say this? Because I stuck with Hotmail through the years. That’s not to say I wasn’t fed up with the service before – I had it up to my neck with the never-ending ads that overwhelmed the page.
What the Hotmail folks did recently is to move the service to the Live platform without regard for the users. While Hotmail worked fine on different browsers before, now it just doesn’t. Unless I use IE and only IE, the site doesn’t work properly. The functionality is stunted. I can choose between two modes, Classic and Live, and no matter which one I choose, unless I use IE, it just won’t work right. Just a few examples of the shortcomings: I can’t select multiple emails to designate them as Spam, I can’t empty my Junk Mail folder with one click, the site looks weird… The Live portal seems to do okay, but not Hotmail.
And while the Microsoft folks made a big deal about doing away with one of the ads on the page inside Hotmail, I still see two, and it’s still very annoying.
What’s worse, I can’t help playing the comparison game with Gmail. I love my Gmail account. I get barely any spam, and when I do, it’s sorted nicely in my Spam folder. Once in a while, a random message makes it to my inbox, only to be dispatched to its cyberspace grave. In Hotmail, unless I set my Spam filter to exclusive, spammers make it to my Inbox most every day. And if the filter’s set to exclusive, I run the risk of having legitimate emails end up in the Junk Email folder. I have to constantly check it and be barraged with ads for erectile dysfunction or penile enlargement and other such things. And the volume of spam that makes it to my Hotmail account is… voluminous, whereas at Gmail, it’s just a few every day. Hotmail obviously doesn’t have a very good spam filtering system, no matter what Bill Gates may say.
I also can’t help looking at my Gmail account’s size limit (now over 2GB), and Hotmail is still at 250MB. Let’s not forget that before Gmail came out, Hotmail was at 2MB. Not 20MB, not even 10MB, but 2MB! Pathetic… I had to constantly delete emails from my Inbox. If I hadn’t been able to POP into my Hotmail account with Outlook Express and download my messages, I’d have had to delete years’ worth of emails. That just wasn’t right.
While I’m on the subject, let me not forget that Gmail has worked cross-browser from the start. That includes IE, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, Safari, and I believe Konqueror. With Hotmail, and now with Live Mail, it’s IE or you’re guaranteed a less than full functionality experience. You’d think Microsoft, with all of its talent, could come up with something better, but no, they can’t… or won’t.
So, let’s see, Vista disappointed, Hotmail disappoints… Is there any other conclusion to draw, other than Microsoft is still playing catchup?
Robot runs over water
Assistant professor Metin Sitti at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh developed a little robot that can run over water. The professor looked to nature for his inspiration, in particular to the basilisk lizard, which creates little air pockets as it slaps the water with its feet. He created both two-legged and four-legged robotic lizards that can scurry across the water surface at .8 m/sec (that’s almost 3 feet per second). Pretty cool! Here’s the link to the Discovery News article.
m.Lee Prints
Today’s Blog of Note from Blogger is m.Lee Prints. Marissa – that’s the artist’s name – focuses almost exclusively on woodcut printmaking, and the results are beautiful! Have a look at her site, you’ll like it!
Raoul Pop 