For those of you interested, there's a really interesting analysis of the pains that Superman has had in terms of returning to the big screen. If you think the skinning community sometimes has "issues", holy cow, you ain't seen nothing yet! 
Tomorrow WindowBlinds 5 will be officially released.
Longhorn blogs takes a first look at the new Windows Vista UI that showed up in last week's beta build.
Here's a list of new features in that build. Windows Vista is due out at the end of next year.
CNET has an interesting outline of all the things Google is working on. And it's quite clear -- Google is trying to take over the world.
And I for one am glad. As a trusted member of the community, I can help round up adjatators to work in their underground sugar mines.
But on a more serious note, the battle heating up between Microsoft and Google may have very negative long-term consequences for consumers. In the short-run, both are taking slash and burn tactics to one another as one tops the other in releasing free products and services to bring more people into their folds.
Free stuff is great in the short term, but what about the long term? The recently released Analytics.google.com is terrific. It's incredibly powerful. And it's going to likely cause a few dozen companies to go bankrupt. As one goes through the list linked to this article, you can start to see how Google is looking to take over all kinds of segments that others already occupy. But since Google makes so much money right now, they can give it away in exchange for market share.
Microsoft is doing much the same thing with their Live.com initiative. They've been scooping up companies left and right and taking their commercial products and making them free.
Again, in the short-term consumers win. In the long-term, things get murkier. At a certain point, corporations have to satisfy stockholders and they can do that only by increasing the value of their shares. Marketshare has a value but at some point they'll start to saturate that marketshare and then services that don't bring money will either have to be made non-free or they'll die on the vine.
The problem in that event is that most of the products and services they're acquiring required millions of dollars to develop. Even if they die on the vine, it would take years for someone, from scratch, to make a competing product that had enough value-add to justify charging for. The analytics.google.com one is probably the most obvious one since there's so many places that make use of those kinds of services that are about to be severely disrupted.
It will be very interesting to see how this goes in the coming months and next few years. As for me, I've got to go get the "good paper" to polish my resume, I hear they're hiring..
PowerUser.TV Episode 17 is out. This week the gang covers:
Go have a listen or we'll cry! You don't want that now do you? Crying? There's no crying in skinning is there?
Most of us are going to be spending the Thanksgiving break with friends and family so we may not be around as much to bump the servers if something goes awry.
SphereXP is a new program that is in beta that is designed to turn your desktop into a 3D space. According to the developer:
It requires the .NET frame-work 2.0 to use. I haven't tried it yet.
We customize everything else, why not soap bubbles? Turns out it's not so easy after all. Bubbles have long been a favorite of kids. But they've always been clear. This article linked below gives some details on why it's so hard to colorize bubbles and how an 11-year quest to color them is bearing some fruit.
The Xbox 360 is now out..sort of if you can find it. Availability of the next generation gaming console is currently not widespread. Skinners such as Gabriel have already released WindowBlinds 5 skins that give their take on bringing the Xbox 360 style to the Windows XP desktop.
Meanwhile, Business Week has taken a look at the Xbox 360 business plan, their conclusion: Microsoft loses $126 per unit. Obviously, the hope is to make that back up on game sales.