Bnpositive's Blog

Here I follow-up on my last post about what our lives would be like without Windows. Initial reactions would be a world full of rainbows and butterflies, but everything might not be as great as you would expect.

Significant changes in developer tools: Here’s an area where I think Microsoft does good work. The amount of resources I have available to me to both use and learn Microsoft applications and developer more solutions on the Windows platform. Similar to the changes with client applications, there would be changes to developer expectations as well. This impact would probably be less those with the evolving standards of other development platforms and languages.

Hardware changes: This one I’m not so sure about. Although their is something to be said for knowing that if you develop hardware to work with a PC system, there’s at least a known economy of scale available. The article states there would need to be another major player that would arise to standardize hardware needs again. I’m not so sure that would be Apple by any means.

I’m sure there will be plenty of disagreement with this article because there were plenty of comments on the PC World article as well. I’m very eager to hear what our readers have to say and look forward to bouncing ideas off each other in the comments.

Blast away!

I’ve been reading an interesting article on the PC World website titled "What Would Life Be like Without Windows". I’ll admit, I’m a fan of Microsoft. Don’t jump to conclusions though, I think there are plenty of areas for them to work harder and deliver a better product to their users.

Of course there’s the initial knee-jerk reaction that life would be fantastic without this giant monolithic software elephant in the room. After all, everything they make is crap and they strong-arm competition and their business partners to do what they want. Right?

It’s not that easy, the article discusses these potential impacts to the industry around us and our everyday lives changing because of that change to the industry.

Unexpected results with client applications: Except for the fairly recent changes in the Office user interface, most Windows applications share a familiar if not very similar interface with other Windows applications. With the failure of Microsoft, people would need to start learning a much wider variety of user-interfaces.

Stay tuned and read my follow-up to this post with some more impacts of a world without Windows.

One of my absolute favorite television events is starting next month! It’s the winter Olympics and this year they’re in Vancouver, Canada. NBC is covering the games which is fine with me because I’ve always liked Bob Costas for sports commentary.

I think I may be looking forward to this years broadcast of the games more than ever because I’m going to be able to enjoy them on my AT&T U-verse television programming. U-verse has recently released what they call a multi-view option. It provides a multiple picture-in-picture effect onscreen as you can see from the small image above.

Initially they’ve offered it for other sports and kids programming, but now they’re making another multi-view channel available just for the Olympics.

There’s so much coverage of the events it’s hard to keep up with what’s going on when sometimes, so I’m super excited about being able to see the Multi-view features with this content.

I can see what’s happening on a variety of channels and quickly switch to one of the channels instantly if I want to see what’s happening there on the larger screen.

AT&T is offering more coverage than just what’s being broadcast on TV. You can also get online coverage and mobile coverage taking advantage of the AT&T U-verse network.

My son loves playing video games. We just got him a new Nintendo DSi for Christmas and he spends lots of time playing that. This weekend he was able to score an old school Nintendo from his aunt (even though I had one in the garage).

My son has been engrossed with playing the old school Super Mario Bros. 3 on the original Nintendo system. He’s even gotten the full-blown experience, literally. He’s now realized that back when we were kids we had to blow on the game cartridges to get them to work.

It’s not confusing to me why I would enjoy playing these old school games, I’m reconnecting with my youth right? I will admit though, even I’m a little bit amazed at what I remember thinking were absolutely amazing graphics!

The confusion I’m trying to figure it out is why doesn’t my son like the idea of just playing the same game on the Nintendo Wii through the virtual console features? I paid good money for the Nintendo Wii, for a little bit more money we can play all of those favorite games without blowing on any cartridges.

One of my favorite new commercials out right now is the new one from Walmart that has the dad dressed up as a clown and getting ready to surprise kids at a home birthday party. The expression on both the clown and the kid’s faces is just classic.

With my Indianapolis Colts playing in the Super Bowl, I’m obviously excited about the big game next week, but I think I always look forward to the commercials as well.

I may be wrong, but I think Hugh Laurie’s greatest popularity has been gained since his appearance and starring role in the Fox television drama, "House, M.D.". It’s been one of our regular shows since we first watched it and every new episode is captured on the DVR each week.

Hugh has done plenty of other work prior to his stint as Dr. Gregory House, but here’s a video of him you may have not seen up until this point.

His character development for Dr. House is so great, sometimes it’s hard to forget he doesn’t really walk with a limp and that he has a strong British accent. Now with this video we see he’s got serious musical skills too that we sometimes see a glimpse of on House when he plays the piano.

As my wife and I continue to gather more information about homeschooling our kids, I continue to find more and more education related resources that’s not just related to homeschooling. The Internet4Classrooms has a variety of educational resources.

I wrote awhile back about the Spelling City website that has been helping my kids master their spelling lists for the classroom. The folks at Spelling City let me know about the Internet4Classrooms website.

With Internet4Classrooms you can find assistance for your children based on their grade level, class subjects, special needs, seasonal learning opportunities, technology training and even help with preparing for different assessment tests.

Resources available aren’t just for parents either. There are teacher resources and of course links to plenty of activities and lessons for your students as well.

If you’re a blog reader, you can read ongoing entries from the folks behind the Internet4Classrooms website as well as follow them on Twitter too.

"Is that on Hulu?" That’s a question I’m starting to hear more and more these days. My how times have changed haven’t they? Now there are so many different online video websites, trying to keep track of what’s on and available on what site is getting as challenging as what’s on cable television. What we need is an online clicker guide.

The Clicker website is setting out to accomplish being an online broadcasting guide. I can’t say what they do any better than what they say themselves.

As massive amounts of programming move online, consumers are entering a world of infinite choices, all on-demand. Great! Finding the show you want to watch? Painful. Thousands of episodes from thousands of shows are housed on thousands of different sites, mixed among billions of random clips and videos.

Clicker catalogs all broadcast programming online, along with TV-quality Web originals, from these silos and delivers them in one seamless, organized experience so you can easily discover what’s available to watch (and what isn’t) online, where to watch it, and what’s worth watching.

What’s great is that doing a search through the programming provides results for both current television programming and what I’ll call "classic" programming, or the stuff I watched growing up as a child.

Clicker also tracks down programming that’s only available on the web with it’s "Web Originals" category. You can also find movies and educational programming on Clicker as well.

If there’s one thing I haven’t done as much of as I would like, it’s travel. The irritating part is I worked in the travel industry for seven years and still didn’t travel as much as I should have. Let me make it clear though, don’t get into travel for the travel benefits, they really weren’t there like you would have expected.

Regardless of how frequently you do get to travel, the next time your planning that trip go visit WikiTravel. The ability to search for destinations and see what other people are saying about their own experiences while on vacation in that area.

Because the site is based on a wiki format the vast majority of the content is all added and submitted by users and readers of the site. If you travel frequently yourself, there are probably a number of people that would enjoy the tips and information you’d be willing to share with others.

Don’t just think foreign travel with WikiTravel either. There’s plenty of information about domestic destinations around the United States as well.

Compulsive? Prepared? What describes your methodology for getting that next cool tech gadget in your collection? Do you just rush out and grab whatever is on the shelf that looks cool? Or, do you research and plan out that purchase to make sure you get exactly the gadget that’s going to work for you?

If you’re more of the latter, then we’ve uncovered a website that will be just what you were looking for, and even help you find exactly what you’ve been looking for in a gadget.

The Measy website first asks you what kind of gadget you’re looking to purchase. It could be a new digital SLR camera, a new HDTV, a Netbook, or what I was interested in an e-reader.

The Measy website asks you a series of questions based on the features you’re looking for and that you think are important to you in your purchase. Sometimes depending on the question you rate the importance with a slider value to see just how important that aspect is to you in your purchase.

When you’re down, Measy gives you a suggestion based on what you’ve chosen and gives it to you in a nice little report that illustrates how your choices impacted Measy‘s choice for you.

Uncover your next new gadget purchase by using Measy to get the one that’s just right for you.

I think one of the things that makes the Google Chrome browser faster than the other common browsers is that there aren’t any add-ons or extensions that you can start cramming into it to do all sorts of cool things.

That may all change now that Google Chrome now has the ability to download and install a variety of extensions.

I’ve decided to try a few out. Since I’ve also decided that I really only use Google Chrome for a set list of uses, I was only really interested in downloading extensions that were directly related to other Google tools that I use on a regular basis.

I downloaded and installed the following:

• Google Dictionary
• Google Voice
• Google Wave
• Google Mail
• Google Calendar
• Google Reader

So far I like the integration of Google Dictionary, Google Voice and Google Wave the best so far. Mainly because they open in a small panel that extends from the toolbar, not in another browser window.

Google Dictionary seems to take quite awhile to load the information. I think I could probably type in www.m-w.com and get the answer I was looking for faster.

We’ll see how everything else plays out as I continue to use these new Google Chrome extensions and see if they start to slow the browser down altogether.

As a follow-up to my previous post about giving reimage PC Repair a try, my computer just finished it’s scan of my system. The user-interface information was nice during the scan. The scan looking for a variety of items during its testing.

reimage PC Repair was looking for things like system hardware information, general PC Stability issues, PC Security issues. After the scan was completed it detected a variety of issues with the hardware performance and software application stability. Perhaps most of this was true, but I always wonder about applications like this, especially when they show these graphs. Do they show your system being horrible a selling tool to get you to purchase the full-blown application?

In this case, when the scan was done, it prompted me that I’d need a repair to fix all the problems. In this case the repair would cost me $48, which was $20 off the regular price.

It would be interesting to find out just how good of a job reimage PC Repair would be able to do on my machine. The repair process is stated to fix things like rebuild the Windows platform, repair damaged OS files, refresh drivers, eliminate pop-ups, remove malware and fix registry key issues.

I’ll work on cleaning up all of those items myself with my other utilities and applications I’m already familiar with and that are free.