Quick Hits

Adobe has released the PDF format as an open ISO specification. While a good move for the rest of us, and bad for Microsoft, I am unsure as to the long-term benefit to Adobe. I have a copy of Acrobat Professional available to me on my work laptop. I am here to tell you, I wouldn’t buy it myself. It’s way pricey for what it does, especially considering I have OpenOffice on my PC at home, which can save to a PDF natively without any plug-ins. I don’t know that Adobe is going to sell many copies of Acrobat Professional once competing apps come out with the same functionality. On the plus side, perhaps Microsoft will, in the distant future, build PDF functionality into a future release of Word and Excel. Thank Make for the news.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin gave a speech over the weekend on why we are in space, and why we should be in space. Good stuff, go read.

Bill Gates thinks we’ll all be wowed by Windows Vista. I think quoting the Fark headline is in order here:

Bill Gates claims Vista will "wow" its users. As in, "Wow, does this suck" or "Wow, WTF happened to all my data?"

Given everything I’ve read about Vista, DRM, and the unpleasant news that MS is integrating more functionality into the OS, I’m not enthusiastic about the new release. There’s a reason I spent a lot of time this weekend doing research here and here. I’m less than thrilled about the path forward for personal computers at the moment. Everybody is sucking off content providers in a death spiral to provide me with crippleware. I’m the guy paying for the equipment, not Warner or Sony or Vivendi Universal or anybody else. It should do what I want, not what they want.

Air America is apparently not dead yet. I’m entirely sure that no one cares given Air America reaches approximately six people at any given moment. Now that Al Franken is leaving, I’m sure his mom will quit listening, so that knocks it down to five. The leadership was incompetent at best, fraudulent at worst, and the product sucks. No wonder they’re not blazing up the airwaves. Everyone forgot the primary goal of a business is to make money, not be a bully pulpit for a particular ideology. I don’t even think we have an AA affiliate station down here, so I have to get my deranged leftist rantings from Commie Radio.

More news about my weekend cooking will be posted when I get around to uploading the pictures. I’m also thinking about this and this in an effort to determine if I have something to say. I think I do, so if time permits, expect thoughts on management and spectrum.