Given my general inability to string together sentences and form coherent articles, as well as my questionable mastery of proper syntax, I decided it would be best not to tax myself this week by trying to write a whole article. Instead I have some Cheers and Jeers; I figure these tidbits are better for our MTV-addled attention spans.
Jeers:
Last week, Microsoft was supposed to release Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. It was to contain hundreds of fixes, enhanced security, faster speeds and even less reason to upgrade to Vista. When the time came, however, the download for the service pack could not be found.
As it turns out, Microsoft pulled the update last minute when they discovered an error in it. It is now delayed until whenever they get their act together. Is it not ironic that the Microsoft bug fixes have bugs? I wish they did not make it so easy to poke fun at them; the last thing I want is to be labeled as an Apple fanboy.
Cheers:
The Latest in a Series Showcasing My Love for Obscure Storage Formats
Most people these days still remember, or at least have a vague impression of Zip disks. At the end of the 20th century they were quite popular and were described as "superfloppies." They were even, for some bizarre reason, featured on Sex and the City. Not that I have ever seen the show, but I am trying to interest a wider audience here than a handful of engineering students.
Digression aside, the Zip disk is not obscure enough to deserve a Cheer. Instead, the (dis)honor goes to its little brother, the Clik! disk. The Clik! was created, and awfully named, to be a more portable storage solution.
Iomega, the company that made both Zip and Clik!, tried to get digital camera and portable music player manufacturers to add support for the 40MB Clik! disks. The Clik! also had a drive built into a PC card so removable storage could be added to laptops without cables; this was a boon in the days before you burned a CD or used USB flash drives. This was back when flash memory cost an arm and a leg and external hard drives were only used by the corporate world.
The story of Clik! ends rather ignominiously. Iomega renamed its brand PocketZip to hopefully ride on the coattails of its bigger, more popular brethren. The last hurrah came with the Iomega HipZip, a soapbar-sized MP3 player that took two PocketZip disks at once so as to hold 80MB of music. The player was known to skip due to the slow spinning drives and was quickly replaced by smaller, more capacious music players and something called the iPod.
Question Mark?
Highly Speculative and Probably not Worthy of Publishing
Rumor has it that there will be a BlackBerry flip phone released in September. If this were true, it would make it the most hotly anticipated release this fall short of Pirates II.
Pictures floating around the nerdy reaches of the interwebs show a phone that looks like a fatter cousin of the RAZR2, one with the customary BlackBerry metallic camera accents. The keypad and navigation keys looked ripped from the Pearl, and there just seems to be a great deal of empty plastic space around the phone. The outside cover has a sizable display and an iffy-sounding, color-changing LED border.
Luofei is a staff writer for The Mirror. He is totally a Carrie.
