Today's Stuff

No time to write my own stuff, so here's a Reader's Digest version of some of the best things I've read or stumbled across today.

Vista to cost $449??? This may be Canadian dollars, but the exchange difference is quite small these days. Thanks to Stephen Downes for the tip. I absolutely agree with him that if this is true, you can expect to see increased sales of new computers with Linux pre-installed, if the big box retailers can break the stranglehold that they must feel around their necks from Microsoft. (UPDATE: there are lower prices depending on whether you are upgrading from XP and/or want less than the "Ultimate" version: see Wired Blog, or ZDnet.)

I was going to post more of my thoughts about the book A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. However, I came across this post today at Presentation Zen, one of the feeds in my Bloglines account. This is much more thorough review than I could ever give, so I'll just point you there instead. This particular post puts Pink's concepts into the context of presenting, which is not what Pink's book is about...but as they say, "The six fundamental aptitudes outlined by Pink can be applied to many aspects of our personal and professional lives."

The Tom Peters Company also has a post about this book in the form of an interview with Dan Pink. In my opinion they missed the boat on this one. I would much rather listen to the interview than read it. I want to hear the emotion in his voice. Pink has also written a shorter companion article about all of this stuff at Wired News called Revenge of the Right Brain. This article is a brief synopsis of one of the major points of his book. As he says, he believes there is a cause and effect going on here: "The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance."

The Read/Write Web has a post that should be of interest to Firefox users out there. They list their choices for the "Top Ten Firefox Web 2.0 Add-ons." I haven't tried Browster, but I think I will. I personally would have included the Performancing plug-in for making blog posts, but maybe that wasn't "2.0" enough for them.

TechCrunch reports that Webshots has changed their policies to now allow free accounts to upload 1,000 photos initially and another 100 photos per month, plus they will begin allowing video uploads in September that will be converted into Flash video (a la YouTube) for web viewing. This seems like a very generous offer. I have two Flickr accounts but think I'll have to check this out also.

Flickr has finally added geotagging of photos to their services. Long awaited, this now allows people to tie their photos together with maps using their Organizr tool.