Trouble Activating Your iPhone? You Don’t Happen to Have a 64-bit OS, Do You?

Remember how difficult it was for Apple and Microsoft to get iTunes working on Vista? Well, that was only 32-bit Vista that they got it to work on. Realization coming now? You can’t use iTunes on 64-bit XP or Vista, so you also can’t activate your iPhone.

Now, it does say it in the minimum system requirements specification on Apple’s website. ‘Course it’s buried in the fine print, and I missed it the first time I looked. I would have made it bold print, myself. And if you look in the technical specifications (at the time of this writing; I wouldn’t be surprised if they update it soon), it lists Vista and XP, but says nothing about 32-bit vs. 64-bit.

Actually, this says less about Apple than about what I’ve been telling anyone who asks me … do not use 64-bit Windows XP or Windows Vista yet. There are simply too many things that do not work yet. On the other hand, if you simply want to activate your iPhone, I guess you could borrow a friend’s PC.

U.S. Online Matchmakers Looking for Chinese Partners

It’s Valentine’s day and this is obviously an appropriate story … apparently eHarmony and Match.com, among other U.S. online matchmakers, is looking to find some partners in China to enter (what else) the emerging market there.

Private equity and technology sources told Reuters on Wednesday that Match.com, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, has already secured Love21CN.com, one of China’s biggest online dating service providers, as its main target for a potential stake purchase or business partnership.

Meanwhile, eHarmony, Match.com’s top rival in the U.S. market, is also looking at a number of potential partners in China, though eHarmony, which has over 12 million users globally, has yet to secure a specific target, the sources said. Source: Reuters

Based on China’s growing gender gap, fueled by the one-child policy and the desire (obsession?) for families to have a male child, Chinese men are definitely going to need some help, so this might be the ticket!

Workaround for "Clean Install" for Vista Upgrades Discovered

Earlier I wrote about clean installs not being available any longer with Windows Vista Upgrade DVDs. There was conjecture that it might be related to Home versions, but even the mainstream press was confused. Now, it seems Paul Thurott, through some internal Microsoft documents, has discovered a workaround. However, he did not test it, but the enterprising folks at DailyTech did, and they confirm it works.

You could even say this is even more liberal than a “clean install” for XP was (and therefore, probably a bug). Why? Because done as instructed in the DailyTech article, you don’t even have to have an XP key. I’m not going to print the DailyTech instructions verbatim (please use the link above), but to summarize:

With a clean drive, install Vista by booting from the DVD but do not enter the key when asked. This installs Vista as a 30 day trial. Once complete, run the installation from inside Vista and do an in-place upgrade. Viola.

This Web Site ‘Names That Tune’

Have you ever had a tune get into your head, but you can’t figure out the name, despite all your efforts? If you’re like me, you may be bugged until you figure out just what the name is. Midomi just launched its beta today, and it claims to be able to identify a song that you hum, whistle or sing “to it.”

The underlying speech- and sound-recognition technology, dubbed Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System, or MARS, differs from similar technologies in that it looks at a variety of factors for recognizing samples, including pitch, tempo variation, speech content and location of pauses, said Chief Executive Keyvan Mohajer, who has a Ph.D. in sound- and speech-recognition from Stanford University. Source: News.com

Does it work? For my wife, yes; for me, no. But then, no one ever accused me of singing on key.

The Gates Foundation – For Better or Worse

First, don’t get me wrong. The Gates Foundation does incredible good. The problem exists not with the work the Foundation itself does, but rather with the way it invests the money it has.

The Gates Foundation had $35 billion in assets at the end of 2005, and then received a promise from Warren Buffet for $31 million of his money last year. This is a huge amount of money. That said, the Foundation “only” distributed about $1.4 billion last year. The rest of the money is invested, and here lies the problem.

The LA Times has a two-part series (here and here) about the conflicts between the philanthropy of the Foundation and the interests of its investments.

Examples:

• A vaccination drive in Ebocha, Nigeria, funded by the Gates Foundation, at the same time that fumes spout from a nearby power plant, owned by Eni, whose investors include The Gates Foundation. These fumes are causing bronchitis, asthma and blurred vision.
• That same plant has oil workers, and they and the soldiers that protect them are magnets for prostitutes, contributing to HIV spread … a target of the Gates Foundation.
• Investments by the foundation in mortgage companies that were accused in lawsuits or by government officials of making it easier for thousands of people to lose their homes.
• Investments in chocolate companies said by the U.S. government to be profiting from the slave labor of children.

Now, there is a firewall between the investment side of the business and the philanthropic side. This can explain the sometimes direct clashes where the Foundation may be working on something in an area which is actually being harmed by the investment side.

It doesn’t explain why the investment side should even be looking into these type of investments at all. Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure my private investments in mutual funds and the like are not 100% socially responsible. But the Foundation and its huge assets make a much larger impact on the market when its money is invested.

What do I think will happen? Likely, Bill and Melinda Gates will take a closer look at these issues. In fact, I have no doubt. Now that it’s public (and it’s possible they didn’t know, or simply didn’t have the time to now), they could (and I hope they do) lay down the law to ensure that future investments are socially responsible.

Time will tell.

Typo When Booking Takes Tourist 13,000 km Off-Course

This is crazy. I can’t believe this guy … he booked a flight to visit his girlfriend, but made a typo and booked the flight to Sydney, Montana instead of Sydney, Australia. Coming as he was from Germany, at first he thought it was possible he was making stops in the U.S. before heading for Australia.

Dressed for the Australian summer in T-shirt and shorts, Tobi Gutt left Germany on Saturday for a four-week holiday.

Instead of arriving “down under”, Gutt found himself on a different continent and bound for the chilly state of Montana. Source: CNN

I still can’t understand it. He never checked his ticket, didn’t notice the signs in the airport indicating destination? Someone sure was flying on “autopilot”.

Cheating via Cell Phone Earns Chess Player 10-year Ban

Shoot, you can’t even trust chess players now. Much as many students have tried to do, a chess player was discovered to be using a Bluetooth headset to cheat at a recent tournament. The player, Umakant Sharma, had risen so quickly officials were suspicious.

Sharma was finally caught at a recent tournament when officials discovered that he had stitched a Bluetooth device in a cloth cap which he always pulled over his ears.

He communicated to his accomplices outside the hall, who then used a computer to relay moves to him, Indian chess federation secretary D.V. Sundar said on Wednesday. Source: Reuters

Hey, at least it wasn’t steroids, right? As a former player of my high school chess team (yes, yes, don’t say it … geek), all I can say is … dang, they didn’t have Bluetooth when I was around.

SDelete – A Key to Safely Donating Your PC

As the year draws to a close, charitable institutions and non-profits see a marked increase in donations. For people like me, sometimes those donations include used PCs. How do you make sure your information is secure when donating a PC?

Obviously, you can format the drive. But is that enough? Not really. All that space on your hard drive still contains traces of the original files, meaning it is still possible to recover sensitive information.

Enter SDelete. From SysInternals (whose founder, Mark Russinovich has since joined Microsoft, thus making SysInternals also part of Microsoft), “SDelete implements the Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DOD 5220.22-M, to give you confidence that once deleted with SDelete, your file data is gone forever.”

It’s a command-line utility, meaning you have to open a command window to run it. From the site:

SDelete Usage

SDelete is a command line utility that takes a number of options. In any given use, it allows you to delete one or more files and/or directories, or to cleanse the free space on a logical disk. SDelete accepts wild card characters as part of the directory or file specifier.

Usage: sdelete [-p passes] [-s] [-q]
sdelete [-p passes] -z [drive letter]

-p passes

Specifies number of overwrite passes

-s

Recurse subdirectories

-q

Don’t print errors (quiet)

-z

Cleanse free space

I love SysInternals’ utilities, and I’m currently preparing 2 PCs for donation, so it’s getting a workout!

‘American Father of the Prius’ Killed in Plane Crash

Despite the arguments about the Prius and its ability to save money … and there have been plenty (here and here for example) … there’s no denying the Prius has changed automaking. Although the Insight was first, the Prius is still the most popular, and one needs only peer into the carpool lane in California to see tons of them.

Much of the design was done in Japan, of course, but David Hermance was a major contributor in the US, and was among the country’s top experts on gas-electric hybrid vehicles. He was piloting an experimental plane when it crashed on Saturday afternoon.

David Hermance, 59, was piloting an experimental plane when it went down Saturday afternoon about 50 yards off Los Angeles’ San Pedro area.

While much of the car’s technology was developed in Japan, Hermance was perhaps the “American father of the Prius” for his tireless work evaluating and promoting it in the U.S., longtime colleague Bill Reinert said.

“When that car came out, no one knew what it was,” said Reinert, a Toyota national manager. “Dave dedicated his life to championing this technology.” Source: MSNBC

I scoffed at hybrids at first, but the Prius, at least the second generation which I now drive, won me over. I’m sure Hermance’s work at promoting it had something to do with it.

New Way to Fit Extra Ads into TV Shows

Heck, the good thing is I can skip ads with my Tivo. But they’ve managed to fit more ads into a half-hour without affecting the length of the actual show. How are they doing this? So far, I’ve only noticed this on CourtTV.

What they’re doing now is overlapping the ending credits of one show with the intro of the next show. While the ending credits of the last show are on the RHS of the screen, the intro of the next show is on the LHS of the screen. With this technique, they can now show at least one more commercial every half hour without reducing the show length (which has already gotten shorter and shorter, right)?

Maybe they should start showing commercials the entire half hour on the RHS while the show itself runs on the LHS of the screen. Then there’s no way to skip them at all! Or maybe I’d better keep my mouth shut and not give them any ideas.
Tags: Tivo, Television, Ads, CourtTV