CNET News has photos of the Clever, a new three-wheel sub-compact vehicle released in Europe. It gets the equivalent of 108 mpg and it looks great, too! Where can I get one? (Photo courtesy of CNET News and The Clever Group)
Major Canadian musicians say the recording industry doesn't represent them
Techdirt has a great post on this, as well as Dr. Michael Geist. Apparently Canadian musicians like the Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan have stood up and said they do not agree with the record industry, and that they don’t want to sue their fans, nor impose DRM schemes on them. This is wonderful, and I applaud them! I think more artists ought to stand up and say what the RIAA is doing is unethical and just plain wrong.
Cliff Sterrett's "Polly And Her Pals"
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.
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?
Raoul Pop 