Windows Vista = Windows Me II? Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tackles the "Does Vista = Windows ME II?" subject in a ZDNet blog post.

First, let's clear the air with this statement: Vista sales are strong.

Windows ME was marketed to home users, not corporations. The same will not be true with Vista. There is an enterprise edition and there are countless features specifically designed to replace XP Pro on corporate networks. A year from now when a large company orders hundreds of PCs from Dell, they won't request XP - an eight-year-old operating system with (likely) dwindling legacy support. Back in 2000, companies could easily bypass ME in favor of Windows 2000, a new corporate OS. It's a different world today and there are three options that are not realistic for most large companies: 1) sticking with XP, 2) moving to Linux desktops and 3) moving to Macs. The path of least resistance will be moving to Vista, thereby solidifying its place as the dominant OS.

I'm certainly not advising people to rush out and purchase Vista. Far from it. I remain convinced that upgrading your operating system (in the Windows world) is really not something that most users should do themselves. Buying a new PC is the best way to upgrade your operating system. The other route is a clean install performed by a trained technician. If your existing PC will "do" everything you need to "do", why upgrade? If your existing PC is used to check email and surf the Internet there is absolutely no compelling reason (at this time) to upgrade to Vista. None. If your interest lies in the very latest multimedia hardware and software and the next generation of PC games, then Vista is in your future.

Did I mention the killer app? Vista Media Center. What else? I saw a print ad for Halo 2 yesterday. The ad featured this statement: "Windows Vista Required". Slowly, PC Gamers will be forced to move to Vista.

How could Vista be improved? Well, if Microsoft were to grant me a one-on-one sit-down with their head of development and their head of sales, I would say this:

   - We want ONE version of Vista: Ultimate Edition.

   - Lower the retail price by $65

   - No more BS on hardware requirements. Tell people the truth, namely, they'll need at least 2 GB of RAM and new hardware

"Creeptastic" Will someone please point me to an article (or tell me) how American Idol did the Elvis and Celine Dion performance? I was both impressed and creeped out at the same time. It is a must-see.

UPDATE: ABC News explains how this was done. (Thanks, Courtney)

NBC's Disastrous Ratings Continue Their ratings are in the tank, but they still have the best show currently on TV, The Office.

Update on iTunes Subscription Service I personally think Steve Jobs is full of crap, on this topic.

Hey, Steve, why don't you ask all of those "uninterested" people if they like Netflix? I would guess that more than 50 percent of your existing iTunes customers have a movie subscription account.

Asking existing iTunes customers if they want a subscription service is not the right approach. Many of these people have never tried such a service, as they owned iPods, which don't currently support these services. Offer the service, then measure the response.

Can a person "truly" not like something that he or she has never tried?

"Buying the War" Bill Moyers: Buying the War. I caught a few minutes of this last night. The interviews with the Knight Ridder team were quite interesting. The entire show is available online, separated into five chapters.

HDHomeRun Nathan Willis, writing about HDHomeRun: HDTV Reception and Network Streaming in a Box. If you're a Linux/MythTV user, this looks great. Vista Media Center support is in the beta stage. (More at Engadget.)

Jungle Disk Jungle Disk - A front-end for Amazon's S3 online storage service. This looks very promising. Data loss may become a thing of the past, as high-speed Internet and easy, affordable online storage become more available.

Yankees The Yankees are dead last in their division right now. Bring Bernie back!

Rosie Exits CNN: Rosie gets fired.

Her loony claims that the WTC was brought down by a controlled demolition were stupid and offensive to more than a few people.

You may recall this quote by Rose: "This is the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel."

Bill Whittle puts that particular claim into perspective for us: "This is a statement of such pristine and perfect idiocy that it surely must be emblazoned in stone across the entrance to the Physics Imbecile wing of the Moron Museum of Natural History."

The Story of Jessica Lynch Rich Lowry: The Story of Jessica Lynch. It's not the story you remember from the news.

White Chocolate Cheesecake Flickr: White Chocolate Cheesecake, with photo and recipe, via Meg.

Yapta TechCrunch: Yapta Will Be Awesome for Heavy Travelers - "Yapta is very different from other travel sites. It is not hooked up directly to airlines' systems (as Expedia and Oribitz are), nor is it essentially a search engine for low fares like Farecast. Instead, they’re using some of the ideas behind del.icio.us and bookmarking to create a potentially compelling new way for people to search for cheap flights."

Ebert Well, he's a survivor.

Kelly Clarkson's New Single Kelly Clarkson's new single, Never Again, has arrived. I like her two previous albums, but this song is not impressive at all, to me. Let's hope the album has better tracks.

Sal & Mookies Local News: Sal & Mookie's New York Pizza & Ice Cream Joint - A new pizza joint has opened in the historic Fondren District of Jackson. In my opinion, after tasting the goods yesterday, they make the best pies in Jackson. (The Pizza Shack on North State Street would be a close 2nd with the pies, but Sal & Mookes is much more than just a pizza joint.)

What follows is a series of random thoughts about Sal & Mookies, based on my first visit and my communications with friends and staff.

The building is newly remodeled. It features both indoor and (climate-controlled) outdoor seating. Smoking is not allowed in any of the dining areas. They have more than 10 beers on tap and a full bar, with a nice wine selection. Free parking is available. They take their web presence seriously, as they've promptly answered all of my questions by email very professionally. The wait staff is friendly and attentive. The owners selected their recipes after touring a number of NYC pizzerias. All pies are baked in brick ovens. They grow their own herbs. Kids can watch the pizza chefs by standing in an elevated viewing area and holding onto handles that line the window. The restaurant is the creation of the folks that own Bravo and Broad Street, here in Jackson. Read more details on their site, here.

Courtney and I had the "Riker's Island" pie, which has Italian plum tomato sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, spicy Italian sausage, Canadian bacon, green bell peppers, mushrooms, red onions and Kalamata olives. Delicious! The small pie is easily enough for 3 or 4 people.

They officially open on Friday, but sneak previews are available by invitation only, if you contact Jeff Good by email. Enjoy! UPDATE: It appears that there are no more early invites available.

Sheryl Crow Cannot 'Spare a Square' BBC News: "Singer Sheryl Crow has said a ban on using too much toilet paper should be introduced to help the environment. Crow has suggested using "only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required". The 45-year-old, who made the comments on her website, has just toured the US on a biodiesel-powered bus to raise awareness about climate change."

Words fail me. Let me at least muster something...

- Sheryl Crow has too much time on her hands. Please, someone buy some of her records and concert tickets.

- Does Sheryl offer hands-on demonstrations of how an average person can actually take care of his or her paperwork with a single square of tissue?

- Will some recording artist please make fun of Sheryl by writing a song and shooting a video about this ordeal?

- Is this a real news article or a late April Fools joke? Perhaps the BBC is poking fun at their trans-Atlantic neighbors?

- I would love to see a press conference from Toilet Paper Executives, denouncing Sheryl, asking us all to double and triple wipe, whatever it takes to separate us from lower animals.

- The Onion should be very afraid. With 'real' news stories of this caliber, their very existence is in jeopardy.

UPDATE: Thankfully, this turned out to be a joke. Sheryl wanted to raise awareness for Global Warming, and this was her method. It worked.

Dot-Com Bubble 2.0? Jeff Atwood: "Seven years later, we're now clearly in the throes of another dot-com bubble."

The Lemon Float Stephen Green provides a weekend cocktail recipe: The Lemon Float. Repeat until naked, he adds. :-)

New Bourne Ultimatum Trailer Very similar to the last trailer I saw, but this is being called a 'new' trailer. Fans of the Bourne series will enjoy it. More.

A Cam in Every Classroom Post-VT killings, Jeff Jarvis renews his call for a 'Cam in Every Classroom'. Interesting point, but I don't see a clear benefit to this, pertaining to the prevention of violence.

Gonzalez vs. Carhart Tony Woodlief offers some poignant commentary on Gonzalez vs. Carhart.

Dell Brings Back XP to Home Systems Dell has realized that there are quite a few customers that don't want Vista. I can certainly understand this, as Vista thrives on new hardware and plenty of RAM. (NOTE: I also agree that there a number of legitimate reasons that one would want to stick with XP. Legacy hardware/peripherals and legacy applications with no free Vista upgrade path are great reasons to stay with XP, even on a brand new PC.)

Some of the Dell ads I've seen in Sunday newspaper flyers feature Vista machines with 512 MB of RAM. Pause. Think about that. 512 MB of RAM? Folks, the minimum amount of RAM for a Vista machine is 2 GBs. I don't care what the box says. Trust me on this one.

Shipping a new Vista PC with 512 MB of RAM is like shipping an XP system with 128 MB of RAM. It will boot - and that is about it. So, Dell is partly to blame for customers demanding XP, over Vista. Word of mouth can be a real bummer on emerging technology. If you hear enough people say 'Vista sucks', you'll be influenced to not even try it. I can assure you that anyone running Vista on a machine with 512 MB of RAM has every reason in the world to think that Vista sucks.

Shameless Vista Plug: Vista Media Center is awesome.

Molecules Acting Upon Molecules Dinesh D'Souza: Where Is Atheism When Bad Things Happen?

Taking on Richard Dawkins, D'Souza writes, "To no one's surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it's difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho's shooting of all those people can be understood in this way--molecules acting upon molecules."

VT Killer Personally, I found the 24-hour cable news broadcasts of the VT killer's videos and photos a little too much. Yes, I wanted to see the monster, if only once. However, I'm certainly not interested in seeing him over and over.

Ithaa Undersea Restaurant Someone emailed me this interesting item. I'll share it with you here.

Ithaa Undersea Restaurant - "The world's premier mostly glass undersea restaurant, secured five metres below sea level, at Rangalifinolhu, Maldives of Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa. The five-by-nine meter restaurant has a capacity of 14 people and is encased in a transparent acrylic roof offering 270° panoramic view to its customers." Construction costs topped $5 million. Snopes has some great photos here.

Bernie Williams I am upset that Bernie Williams is not on the Yankees' roster this year. What the heck? Bernie is a class act and darn good fielder and batter. Oh well, at least he can play rock and roll music with The Allman Brothers.

Microsoft Patches Vista File-Copying Bug Great news! Microsoft has patched an annoying Vista bug. I noticed this problem when I first installed Vista, and it was a major pain.

ComputerWeekly.com - Microsoft Issues Hotfix for File Copying Bug in Vista

New Dual-Core AMD PC Details I would like to share some of the details of my new PC with you. Most of the parts were purchased online via NewEgg, the best online retailer for PC parts, in my opinion. I assembled the machine this past Friday.

I'm very impressed with the performance of this machine, as it loads and runs Vista quite effortlessly. Vista's resource-hogging indexing and system restore features do not bog it down. The Vista rating of this new PC is 5.3, compared to a rating of 3.7 on my old PC (assembled in 2003). The Vista rating scale currently runs from 0.0 to 5.9. The difference in the way Vista runs on my two machines is dramatic.

NOTE: The following list does not include every single component. Second, the prices shown at these links do not necessarily reflect what I paid. In most cases, each part was purchased (sometimes significantly) below the standard retail price.

Monitor
SAMSUNG 206BW 20" Widescreen LCD 3000:1 2ms 1680X1050

Video Card
EVGA e-GeForce 7600GT 256MB DDR3 PCI-Express

Memory
4 GB of DDR2 PC2-5300 667 MHz RAM

Processor
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Windsor 2.6GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2

Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX AMD

Primary Hard Drive
Western Digital Raptor 36 GB 10,000 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s

Secondary Hard Drive
Western Digital Caviar SE 16 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

Dial-a-Human www.dialahuman.com - Stop talking to machines, already!

Top 10 Windows Vista Hacks Preston Gralla, writing at Computerworld: Top 10 Windows Vista Hacks: "Now is when the fun begins. There are plenty of ways you can hack Windows Vista, make it jump through hoops, bend it to your will and generally make it behave the way you want it to behave, not the way Microsoft does."

TV Shows That Should Be Canceled MSNBC: Five Shows That Should Be Canceled. I couldn't agree more, concerning Lost and 24. I've never watched any of the others.

24 has almost descended into a parody of itself. How many times can Jack "go rogue" and it be an interesting plot line? For me, the final blow to 24 was when Jack killed Curtis. I suppose I should have jumped ship when they killed off Tony like a punk.

Regarding Lost, I must admit that the latter half of the current season has been stronger than anything in Season 2 or the first half of this season. When the new episodes began airing after the mid-season 'break' began airing, the difference was dramatic. I'm not aware of whether new writers were brought in, but it wouldn't surprise me. The problem with Lost remains the same: more questions raised than adequately answered. My favorite character is Sayid, as he (seemingly) is the only person on the island with half a brain. Hurly, Locke, Kate and Jack have become so boring it is beyond words.

American Idol Voting Mystery Anna David, commenting on this week's American Idol: "My favorite part of the J-Lo lecture series, however, was when she noted, without irony, that you don't have to have a great voice to sell a slew of records. As it turns out, you don't need one to remain on "American Idol," either. Right, mystery voters?"

"Usability is Timeless" I'm implementing some design/function changes on my weblog, as a result of reading this post: Usability is Timeless.

First, hyperlinks will no longer spawn a new window. I personally prefer it that way, but this behavior can take away control from some users, which is undesirable. Second, I removed the CSS style that prevents visited links from changing colors. This color/behavior is now controlled by your browser. One caveat to this is the color of the permalinks and contact links.

Further usability improvement is needed. Stay tuned, and feel free to share your thoughts, using either the contact link or by emailing donny AT broomeman DOT com.

Apple Can't Face The Truth Ed Oswald, writing at BetaNews: "Instead of admitting that Leopard is taking far longer to finish than it anticipated, Apple has chosen an attempt to hide behind the iPhone to mask the hypocrisy of delaying the next version of Mac OS X. I can no doubt hear the snickers from Redmond this very minute after reading Apple's statement regarding its delay of Mac OS X "Leopard." This comes from a company that never passed up an attempt to bash Microsoft's incessant delays of Vista at every turn."

'10 Weeks with Windows Vista' Carl Campos: 10 Weeks with Windows Vista.

His conclusion? "It's fast, reliable and has some nifty new features. I wouldn't recommend that most consumers jump from XP just yet, and I think businesses should wait for service pack 1. Over the first 10 weeks of full-time use, I give Windows Vista a solid B."

iTunes Subscription Service It may be coming within 6 months. Please allow me to be the first person to welcome all iPod owners to the real world of digital music (that we Napster, non-iPod people have enjoyed for years). Just like with Netflix, access is more fun than ownership. A DRM-free subsription service would be all I've ever wanted.

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922 - 2007 Ting-a-ling, buddy, ting-a-ling!

Scot's Newsletter: April 2007 Read the latest issue of Scot's Newsletter here.

XP SP3 Update Paul Thurrot: "And while I'm ranting a bit, let's dredge up Windows XP Service Pack 3, which was delayed from 2005 to 2006 to 2007 and now to 2008. If you were looking for any glimpse into the mind of Microsoft, this is it: The company has completely abandoned Windows XP, and it has absolutely no plans to ever ship an XP SP3. My guess is that Microsoft will do what it did with the final Windows 2000 Service Pack: Claim years later that it's no longer needed and just ship a final security patch roll-up. This is the worst kiss-off to any Microsoft product I've ever seen, and you'd think the company would show a little more respect to its best-selling OS of all time. But the reality is, Microsoft is looking ahead to new revenue and not behind to money that's already in the bank. And though hundreds of millions of people will be running XP for years to come, despite Microsoft's best efforts at selling them a later Windows version, the company has absolutely no plans to actually support those customers. This flies in the face of its publicly-stated life cycle support plans. And it really freaks me out. It should freak you out as well."

He also predicts that Microsoft will ship Windows Vista SP1 before October 2007.

NES Games Online You can play the two best NES games ever, right within your browser, here: Super Mario Bros., Zelda. Cool.

EMI Drops DRM It's a first step in the right direction. Once you've experienced "access" to unlimited music, rather than "ownership" of specific titles, however, DRM loses some meaning.

HDTV Primer ZDNet: Don't Buy an HDTV Without Reading This First.

This is a great blog post from George Ou. Here are a few of the highlights:

1. "The bottom line is that you get a lot of size for your money when choosing a projection model, but the quality can't compete with the quality of LCD flat panels."

2. "Another word of caution is that there are some really cheap smaller plasma displays that have 1024×768 resolution that might sound like a good deal but you're getting something that doesn't have square pixels. If you try to hook up a computer to it then it will look ugly and distorted making everything look fat. Any model that has a resolution of 1024×768 or less is obsolete and I would stay away from them."

3. "So for the cost of a 72" projection HDTV, you can get a 52" LCD model that has vastly superior image quality with none of the interlacing and over-scan problems."

4. "If the HDTV you're looking at purchasing doesn't have an ATSC tuner or it doesn't have HDMI or DVI input ports, then skip it. All you need is an outdoor antenna though indoor models can still allow you to receive most of the digital channels especially if you live in an area close to the broadcast towers. There's also no such thing as an "HDTV antenna" and any old antenna will work."

5. "There is zero difference in quality between the cheapest $12 HDMI to DVI cable versus the $100 gold plated "monster cable". Monster cables are a hold over from the analog era where signal leakage results in a degraded image or sound. In the digital world, a data cable either works 100% or it doesn't work at all and there is no degraded middle ground."