the tindog coffeehouse

…was including Internet Explorer 8 with it.

Hear me out.

Windows 7 has gotten a lot of praise for its improvements over Vista, both under-the-hood changes to the core OS as well as more visible changes such as a revamped taskbar and the introduction of features like Jump Lists and Libraries. It’s not a major upgrade of Vista and certainly not perfect, but most of my complaints are minor. For example, why is there still so much fluff (desktop gadgets, Wordpad, Sticky Notes, etc.)? Why all the boring and/or confusing “Microsoft-isms” (Home Groups, User Account Control, Windows Live Essentials, Windows Easy Transfer, BitLocker, Aero Peek, Aero Shake)? And why is Steve Ballmer still around?

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I’ve had my iPhone 3GS now for about three weeks, and overall I love it. It’s easy to use, the apps are great, and it’s just a fun and handy device to have around. But it’s not perfect, nor did I expect it to be. After using it for a few weeks, here are some things I would change about it if I could:

1. Add an option for different sound profiles. Every other cell phone and smartphone on the planet has this option, but not the Jesus Phone. I want the ringtone to be louder when I’m in the car but quieter when I’m in the office. Or maybe turn the ringer off but have the message tones still on. Is there an easy way to change that? Nope. You can go to Settings and adjust the volume slider, but there’s no way to assign these settings to different profiles. And as far as I can tell, there’s not an app for that.
2. Add a native To-Do app. I can plug my iPhone in to my computer and sync the Calendar, Contacts, and Notes with Outlook, but for whatever reason, the iPhone doesn’t have an app for my Tasks. Apparently Steve Jobs assumes Apple fanboys don’t do anything, but really this seems like a really dumb omission. Yes, there are third-party apps to get around this limitation, but why can’t Apple just include one natively?

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Microsoft wants you to know that Internet Explorer 8 is the perfect web browser for porn addicts.

At least that’s the message I walked away with after (reluctantly) watching their new IE8 commercial, in which a wife projectile vomits after finding porn on her husband’s laptop. (If you care to see it, it’s available here.) The point of the commercial is actually to promote IE8′s InPrivate browsing feature, aka “porn mode”, which hides the browsing history from, well, unapproving spouses.

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In recognition of the 50th anniversary of the creation of ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defense agency that would give birth to what is now the Internet, Vanity Fair has attempted to compile an “oral history” of the Internet, from ARPA to today.

So how’d they do?

Al Gore aside, they did pretty well, at least at a high level, interviewing pioneers such as Paul Baran (the inventor of packet-switching), Vint Cerf (the inventor of the TCP and IP protocols), Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet), Marc Andreessen (Netscape), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Larry Page (Google), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).

It’s mind-blowing to think that something so basic as a computer network wasn’t always so obvious, and how technology that we use every day and take for granted could very easily have never existed but for a few brilliant minds.

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