Well, the year is quickly coming to an end and it’s taking work productivity, Lynne Spears’s parenting books, and Paris Hilton’s bankroll along with it.
Reflecting on 2007, the hot items this year were smartphones and gaming consoles, particularly the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii. Both were difficult to get a hold of and anyone who was able to get one suddenly became very popular.
Getting these items sometimes required desperate and extreme measures. People waited in line for hours (some waited for days) to be one of the first few to obtain an iPhone. On the day of its release, the mayor of Philadelphia planned to wait in line all day for an iPhone until a passer-by asked him how he could spend his entire day in line when his city boasted one of the nation’s highest murder rates.
A father found out how much demand there was for the Wii and its games when he put his son’s Guitar Hero III up for sale to punish him for smoking pot, and unexpectedly sold it for over $9000 on an online auction. The Wii wasn't the only console in high demand, though. Desperate to get his hands on a PlayStation 3, an employee at EB Games stole one from his own store and stuffed the box with a phonebook in its place.
So what do we have to look forward to in 2008? There will undoubtedly be more tech toys that everyone will want to get their hands on, but technological advances aren’t just going to be seen in gaming consoles and phones. In fact, it’s moving to game shows, where technology will be giving American Gladiators a 21st century facelift and I couldn’t be more giddy about it.
Although the events have been modified and the gladiators are bigger and more athletic (likely thanks to the same decade of steroids that Major League Baseball and the WWE has experienced), I don’t know if they can ever live up to the original events and gladiators. These updates might be a downgrade. After all, this is what it has to compete with:
While the writers strike marches on and new episodes of TV shows like The Office and Grey’s Anatomy have come to an abrupt halt, we must turn to unscripted television for our entertainment these days. Sometimes, though, the funniest things can’t be written:
As you're out partying next week and making your resolutions, GURU wishes you a safe New Years and, in the words of my favorite original American Gladiator, Malibu, have an "excellent" 2008. "Sweeeet!"
Friday, December 28, 2007
Friday, December 21, 2007
GURU 2.0 is born...
Welcome to the launch of the GURU blog. This blog will act as an informative, yet entertaining, source for IT news, ideas, and rants. While it will be centered around IT, I can’t promise that I won’t go off on tangents; after all, I DID grow up in the age of video games, MTV, and British Knights high tops.
A 2007 survey done by Salary.com, shows that the average employee wastes 1.7 hours of every workday browsing the Internet, socializing with coworkers, and attending to personal business. Well, I hope you’ll find a few minutes in those 8.5 hours each week to read the GURU blog, in between setting your Fantasy Football lineups, shopping online for holiday gifts, and learning to “Crank That” like Soulja Boy.
There have been a lot of advances in technology since the * and # keys were introduced on telephones. While technology primarily serves to make our lives easier and more efficient, a lot of it can be intimidating, especially for end users who are afraid to adapt to the changing times. I’ve worked with a number of clients and there is still a significant percentage that gets nervous when they hear “geek speak.” As soon as a techie drops an acronym like DNS or PCI, they run away faster than eight cows at a McDonald’s drive thru. Well, this blog will help, as I will often use this forum to comment on new and existing technologies and provide some useful how to’s and IT tips for the everyday user. Not to leave out the seasoned veterans, this blog will also cater to all experience levels; from people who just like to fiddle with electronics, to PC and network technicians, to systems administrators and engineers.
My job with GURU requires me to be out in the field a lot, supporting and providing consulting work for business all over the Washington, D.C., area. The most common question I get, from company decision makers and from staff who just have home PC questions, is whether or not they should upgrade to Vista. During all my years with working in IT, I have never seen such a universal hesitation with adopting new technology as with the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s latest operating system. Getting clients onto Vista has become my newest fear, surpassing this:
91 percent of IT professionals have admitted to having concerns about deploying Vista. In fact, more than half have no plans of ever deploying it. There are still a number of issues with Vista, primarily incompatibilities with certain software and certain printers, that threaten to make networks less stable and more complex. Unfortunately, Vista is the future and it’s not a matter of if companies need to upgrade, but when. As an IT consultant, I almost always take a proactive approach; in this case, I recommend taking the wait-and-see approach. In time, the hardware and software incompatibilities will be ironed out. But until Service Pack 1 is released for Vista, and time has passed for hardware and software vendors to make their products compatible, stay with Windows XP. Surprisingly, Windows XP’s success and reliability is what is preventing most companies from switching over to Vista, as companies don’t see the need to replace what works well for them. I completely agree with that, at least until Vista’s kinks are worked out and the new features far outweigh the bugs. Just to give you an idea of where you stand, only about a third of companies expect to roll out Vista by the end of 2008. So for now, hold off on Vista and think back to the simpler times.
A 2007 survey done by Salary.com, shows that the average employee wastes 1.7 hours of every workday browsing the Internet, socializing with coworkers, and attending to personal business. Well, I hope you’ll find a few minutes in those 8.5 hours each week to read the GURU blog, in between setting your Fantasy Football lineups, shopping online for holiday gifts, and learning to “Crank That” like Soulja Boy.
There have been a lot of advances in technology since the * and # keys were introduced on telephones. While technology primarily serves to make our lives easier and more efficient, a lot of it can be intimidating, especially for end users who are afraid to adapt to the changing times. I’ve worked with a number of clients and there is still a significant percentage that gets nervous when they hear “geek speak.” As soon as a techie drops an acronym like DNS or PCI, they run away faster than eight cows at a McDonald’s drive thru. Well, this blog will help, as I will often use this forum to comment on new and existing technologies and provide some useful how to’s and IT tips for the everyday user. Not to leave out the seasoned veterans, this blog will also cater to all experience levels; from people who just like to fiddle with electronics, to PC and network technicians, to systems administrators and engineers.
My job with GURU requires me to be out in the field a lot, supporting and providing consulting work for business all over the Washington, D.C., area. The most common question I get, from company decision makers and from staff who just have home PC questions, is whether or not they should upgrade to Vista. During all my years with working in IT, I have never seen such a universal hesitation with adopting new technology as with the introduction of Windows Vista, Microsoft’s latest operating system. Getting clients onto Vista has become my newest fear, surpassing this:
91 percent of IT professionals have admitted to having concerns about deploying Vista. In fact, more than half have no plans of ever deploying it. There are still a number of issues with Vista, primarily incompatibilities with certain software and certain printers, that threaten to make networks less stable and more complex. Unfortunately, Vista is the future and it’s not a matter of if companies need to upgrade, but when. As an IT consultant, I almost always take a proactive approach; in this case, I recommend taking the wait-and-see approach. In time, the hardware and software incompatibilities will be ironed out. But until Service Pack 1 is released for Vista, and time has passed for hardware and software vendors to make their products compatible, stay with Windows XP. Surprisingly, Windows XP’s success and reliability is what is preventing most companies from switching over to Vista, as companies don’t see the need to replace what works well for them. I completely agree with that, at least until Vista’s kinks are worked out and the new features far outweigh the bugs. Just to give you an idea of where you stand, only about a third of companies expect to roll out Vista by the end of 2008. So for now, hold off on Vista and think back to the simpler times.
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