Gaim / Pidgin Sucks

Pidgin is a free multi-chat client. It used to be called GAIM. It is similar in intent to Trillian.

So, the quick review. My main reason for investigating it was that Trillian does not offer encrypted messaging outside of AOL, and that messaging is subject to relatively simple attacks.

So, on to Pidgin. After 30 minutes of screwing around with it, neither AOL nor Yahoo were connecting. Only MSN worked.

I'm very very happy to get rid of it.

Lexicon vs. Oppo Blu Ray Player

Stereophile ran a fairly decent article on the Oppo player and it's reincarnation under the Lexicon brand name. I nearly chocked. Not because the article was descent, they do that now and then, but because I had no idea Lexicon still existed! Hah!

Apple iPad - Two Comments

Two things you should know about the Apple iPad:

1. It has no USB adapter.

2. It doesn't support Adobe Flash, but I doubt Steve Job's explanation that it's too slow. The real reason they won't support flash is that the moment they do they open up the iPad to being a remote computing platform. Imagine what you could do if you could run programs on your Mac or Windows PC, but control it from your iPad, or what if you could purchase a service, allowing you to run any program from a cloud based application. This would break Apple's main goal in selling the iPad: To get money from every single application. That's where their real cashflow is coming from, not the hardware itself.