Category: Technology

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Excel Can’t Multiply – AppScout

Excel Can’t Multiply – AppScout
Well this is a major problem for Microsoft. They released a program with a major bug that would give errors when performing simple calculations.

…for example, it divided 65,535 by 26 to get 2,520.577. Then it multiplied 26 by 2,520.577 to get… 100,000?! Over ten thousand of these simple calculations gave the wrong answer. – AppScout

For a major spreadsheet problem, this is a big problem. They need to be more aware and test this a lot better.

According to AppScout, Microsoft is aware of the problem and is working on it.

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Google Docs and Online Collaboration

I have been struggling with a way to develop an online collaboration solution for some work flow processes that we have.
What we have been doing lately is developing a newsletter and it has been hard to track what the status of everything is. Plus we have several authors and a couple editors working on a story.

And did I mention that the people working on these are located all over the country? Continue reading “Google Docs and Online Collaboration”

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Variety.com – Apple seeks TV price cut

Variety.com – Apple seeks TV price cut
This could be one of the reasons why NBC left, but I think the media companies are crazy. They will make a lot more money in increased volume in downloads from the iTunes store, selling TV shows for $.99, than they would selling them for $1.99.

The story tries to say how much money the studios would lose in the DVD market if Apple gets their way. For example, the recently released Heroes DVD is selling for $40, but if it were to be sold in the iTunes music store, it would be $23. Continue reading “Variety.com – Apple seeks TV price cut”

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Apple Announcement Today…A DVR?

Apple will be making new product announcements today.  One of the rumors that is floating around is that we will have new iPods and that is pretty much expected.
One of the rumors that I have heard, on episode 550 of Buzz Out Loud, that wouldn’t it be cool if Apple announced a Apple DVR.  I took it to another level and thought,

…wouldn’t it be ironic if Apple has developed a Apple branded DVR, partnered with Tivo and people who have this DVR could download NBC Universal shows from Amazon’s Unbox.  Ummmmmmmmm.

This goes against Apple’s design history, but it may happen.

We will see later today.

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NBC Doesn’t Get it, Pulls Videos from iTunes

I’ll just say that NBC has lost a fan. NBC used to be on the top. It had the ratings and the best shows, but now they will be relegated to one of the lower tier networks.
They were already losing viewers and the only thing that was keeping them and some of their shows alive was iTunes. iTunes saved The Office and was allowing it to get revenue and prop up shows.

But they got greedy. For some reason they wanted to double what they charged on the iTunes music store. They have now left Apple and have gone over to Amazon’s Unbox. What, is that really a service? LOL. They will sell shows for the same price on Unbox, but will sell a lot less than they did on iTunes. No one uses the Unbox service and NBC will see a big drop in their revenue from selling videos.

As I have seen on many blogs and comments on blogs, people will go find it on the Internet and bypass the Unbox service. All NBC will do is whine that there content is being stolen, but nothing will happen and their viewership is going to go down.

When you abandon a service that has 80% of the market, whether that is good or bad, you can’t ignore them and that is what NBC is doing.

I think that we are seeing the fall of one of the greats in broadcast television. Unless they come crawling back to Apple sometime soon. Which I think will happen soon.

See the Webware blog: NBC says goodbye to Apple, hello to Amazon

See the Wall Street Journal story: Amazon’s Unbox to Sell NBC Shows

This whole falling out makes this ad by Apple on NBC Universal shows available on iTunes pretty funny.

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Blog has been down a while…

Well if you visited my blog over the weekend, you would have noticed that nothing was there.  The reason is that my hosting service, webhostingbuzz.com, did some tests on the server and then found that it wouldn’t reboot.
Well it took about 48 hours for them to get the server working and to them, restore the data.  But the restore feature didn’t happen cleanly on my account and it took until about 11 am this morning (MDT) to get the blog back online and working properly.

To me that is unacceptable for a hosting service to have my site down that long.  I have three sites with them and I am going to be paying close attention for a while to make sure that there are no other problems.  I figure I was down about 60 hours.

To make matters worse, I found out that the backups that I was making were bad and I didn’t have a copy of my data for this blog, so I thought I was going to lose it all.  But luckily webhostingbuzz was able to get it back and working properly.

It is inconceivable to me that a hosting company the size webhostingbuzz claims to be that they wouldn’t have a better back-up or mirroring plan.  To rely on one server these days is a bad business practice.  They should have some way to quickly bring the data back online and get sites back up.

If this does not serve as a wake-up call and they fix some things, I will consider moving my sites to another hosting service that is more reliable.

Just be cautious if you are looking at Webhostingbuzz and ask a lot of questions.  I have been with them a couple years and this is the first serious problem that I have experienced.

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Apple holding ‘special event’ on Sept. 5 | One More Thing – CNET News.com


Apple holding ‘special event’ on Sept. 5 | One More Thing – CNET News.com

It appears that the new iPods are coming. Yeah!

This is something that has been widely anticipated by consumers and industry a like. There are a lot of challenges to the iPod and iTunes these days and this will create and keep the buzz going towards Apple.

There hasn’t been a big design change in several years. So with this announcement coming, I think that we will see new iPods, both Nano and hard drive versions.

I can’t wait until the announcement. There is going to be a lot of buzz between now and then.