Christmas all over again! (Macworld Expo)

Forget, the CES, every mac fan is more excited about Steve Jobs' keynote and revelation of what the new, killer Apple products are.

Fun comic from Foxtrot today about the excitement surrounding a Jobnote!

http://www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2006/01/09/

I'll be keeping a keen ear peeled tomorrow to catch all the news!

The end of Slashdot?

More on the quick rise and fall of technologies. I love Slashdot for its ability to inform me of technology news faster than traditional news outlets. I then learned about Digg two days ago. Now some have proclaimed Digg to be Slashdot's demise! My response was, "already?"

Steve Mallett, in an article getting "digged" quite a lot lately, gives some reasons why Digg is superior to Slashdot:

"Hidden submissions. While everyone agrees that a filter to the front page is a good idea it does leave the question of whether the stories are legitimately refused. I'm sure most are legit, but...

User moderated stories. Slashdot has a 'flavor'. The editor's. That's cool. It is their site after all, but people obviously prefer their own flavor. If you don't like digg's flavor who's to blame?

The biggest boon of the open backend is that you don't have to wait to see that big story to approved by moderation if you don't want to.

Comments. Flat threads appear to retard flamewars. You can also complete ignore some users. This was a feature if Kuro5hin originally I think. "

He makes some good points, particularly the value of users determining what gets on the front page rather than the owners of the website. I hope this means fewer stories on Star Trek/Star Wars and more on important issues instead (whoops, did I say that? :-). We'll have to see!

DVDs are dead - anyone want to buy mine?

Man! Everytime I start to get a good media collection going, the media of choice changes. I still have some of my favorite movies on VHS, and am grateful you can still find a VCR in some stores. DVD is a superior format, of course, so I've been happily buying new DVDs --- alot lately, as we don't have cable right now---and now feel pretty satisfied with our movie collection. Even more, my wife and I gave ourselves a new ClearPlay DVD player this Christmas so we could watch DVDs without the language, nudity, and blood (Clearplay is awesome, by the way, and they have a sell going on right now. Maybe I'll post on that sometime).

So what happens right after I buy all these movies and a new DVD player? Online pundits start declaring that the DVD format is dead. I knew it was, of course, with the rage of TIVO, and Intel's announcement of Viive at the CES show in Las Vegas this week. But to hear comments like this:

"The technology industry is in agreement: the DVD is dead. Consumer electronics companies have begun to show off what they believe will be the next generation of home video technologies."

Walmart: Will you take back my new copies of Hello Dolly and It's a Wonderful Life? What about the other DVDs I've bought recently? You see, I'd like to wait and save my money for the next big format ...

What's the use? Trying to stay up on technology will become increasingly impossible. So I guess we should just enjoy the technology we have now instead of worrying about whether it'll be obsolete tomorrow!