Dell Rumors?

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Our Dell Field Rep stopped by this morning.  It was the first any of us had met him.  He seems like a pretty nice guy, and was very honest with us about what he was willing to do to get our business.  What I was happiest about, was getting  a chance to look at the roadmaps for Dell's Optiplex and Precision lines.  It appears that the Optiplex GX150 Mini-tower will be released on or by the 23rd of this month.  We've been buying the GX115 series lately, but we despise the integrated video, and the lack of an AGP slot.  The GX150 series have the AGP slot, but the current cases lack options for Zip drives.  The new GX400 models are using the Pentium IV CPUs and the expensive RDRAM that comes with them.  Too rich for our blood...

I also told him that Dell should start offering Microsoft's optical mice as an option with their computers.  We prefer them, as we don't have to clean them all the time, especially in high-traffic areas like our computer labs.  I was told by both him and our Texas-based Dell rep that such a bundle was likely in the works. 

Good News!

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Why am I not suprised?  Mac OS X isn't going to support several "goodies" when it ships, according to this article at ZDNet.  When it comes out later this month, you'll be unable to play DVD movies, or use Apple's iTunes and iMovie software.  It's pretty sad when Apple can't even get their own software ready in time for the launch of the OS.  This means you can expect to see third party applications available sometime around 2010...

Good news from my mom today regarding my sister's MRI!  Here's the e-mail:

The MRI showed no malignancy and seemed to indicate that it may be a lymph node. she has an apt with her ENT next Friday so I will keep you posted as to what he says. His office staff yesterday said she could wait until her next regular apt but they called again today. I have no idea when he thought her apt was!

 

Too Early

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John has posted some great pictures from our little adventure yesterday.

Office XP was interesting, it has a lot of the usual feature bloat, but Microsoft finally caught on to a few things about Office 2000 that annoyed people.  The paperclip guy isn't turned on by default now, you can use the group scheduling functions of Outlook, even if you don' t have an Exchange server, and it's much easier to format and perform a lot of the common tasks in Word.

In my opinion, UserLand should be scared of Microsoft's SharePoint server product.  It's everything Manila & My Userland On The Desktop could be, all ready for the masses.  Microsoft has something called "web parts" which allows you to create your own little applets for web pages, that retrieve news, stock quotes, etc. from other sites via JavaScript, VBScript, or even using XML.  They demoed it by retrieving headlines and stock quotes from other services, and said there will be several hundred pre-built web parts available at launch.

Sorry Dave, no RSS in there... 

The web integration looks pretty cool, but I'll have to use it in person before I can judge its true utility.

The "smart tags" in Office XP are a feature that I'll have to get used to.  The amateurish comedian demo guy showed us how you could start typing someone's first and last names in Word, at the beginning of a letter.  Word would scan your Contact List, and if it found the name, you could simply right click on it, and choose to insert the person's mailing address, saving you the hassle of typing it. It's a neat feature, but only for those who use Outlook.

If nothing else, I learned a lot more about transferring a NT domain into Windows 2000 ActiveDirectory, and had a good lunch at the Machine Shed...