• Step 1. Add the "Facebook Developers" application (available here).
• Step 2. Click "Go to applications" and then close the page.
• Step 3. Follow this link.

Online schedules: NBC's Olympics listings takes a bit of work (you have to enter your ZIP code and select a television provider, even if you just want online listings). However, once you've done the work, it'll send you notifications when events you've selected will be broadcast. Jason Kottke has found Google and iCal calendars, which will allow you a bit more flexibility in setting up alerts, and the New York Times has a schedule as well. And of course, there's an official schedule from the organizers in China, with times listed for Beijing's time zone (16 hours ahead of San Francisco, 13 hours ahead of New York) — probably the best place to go for daily updates, as smog and weather may upset the schedule.

Sling Media's Slingbox: For those with more money than time, the best solution might be a Slingbox. Then you can beam your home satellite or cable signal over the Internet to your laptop, desktop, or iPhone, and remotely switch between NBC and MSNBC.
Pros: You can get great quality, even HD, if your home Internet connection is fast. There is SlingPlayer software available for a range of not just operating systems but handheld devices as well.
Cons: Prices start at $129.99 and your selection of Olympics coverage is limited to what's available from your satellite or cable provider, which means missing early heats and niche events and having to put up with tape delays by the networks.

International proxies: It is possible to watch live streams from other countries, such as BBC Sports from the UK or CBC Sports from Canada, by configuring your browser to run through an anonymous proxy. I recommend using Mozilla's Firefox browser with the FoxyProxy add-on installed. Xroxy has a handy list of proxies which you can sort by country to find proxies in the UK or Canada — which must be anonymous, and preferrably running the SOCKS protocol. Your best bet is to get a geeky British or Canadian friend to install a proxy on their machine for you and your Yankee friends. The latency can be frustrating, but once you get a stream started it will work fine.
Pros: Quality streams from legitimate providers, and if you're accustomed to jingoistic U.S. coverage, the charming accents from the Beeb's announcers and the humble mien of the Canadians can be quite refreshing.
Cons: Takes some technical know-how to set up, and proxies come and go. You might miss an event because you're too busy fiddling with your settings or a proxy fails when too many people sign on.

Video on demand: If you're running Windows Vista, you can download events using TVTonic for "Olympics on the Go." Torrent client Azureus works on any system to help download events after the fact, especially the most popular ones like tennis, football, boxing and basketball — Torrentz cross-site search of multiple BitTorrent indexes should make it easy to find the Spain versus China women's basketball game you might miss tomorrow. YouTube's official channel is blocked — even using international proxies — though a reader came up with a crack that works for now. Other less thoroughly policed online video sites like Veoh, Metacafe, Dailymotion and Megavideo will also have videos.
Pros: Torrents will be high quality and work for anyone, while video-sharing sites will be easiest to use.
Cons: Nothing will be live, obviously, and no one knows how long video clips will remain on sharing sites.

P2P Streams: The way I'll be watching online will is through MyP2P, a site that catalogs live sports and television streams from around the Web, listed by event. It helps to run Windows, though not necessarily Vista, because many streams require software downloads — check out MyP2P's beginners guide for tips, including where to find software downloads and optimization settings. I ended up finding live BBC coverage of the opening ceremonies via Justin.tv, which ran just fine in my browser. If you can't find the channel you want in the media format you prefer, check wwiTV, TV For Us, TV Channels Free, Channel Chooser or BeelineTV among others.
Pros: Free and fairly easy once you've installed most of the media players listed by MyP2P. And it's fun to watch coverage from other countries — I'll be watching all my football with spanish-speaking announcers whenever possible.
Cons: Quality is hit-or-miss, stream links come and go, and you have to think ahead in terms of scheduling to make sure you've got all the necessary programs installed. Also, Mac users will want to install Windows XP through Parallels or Fusion for the widest selection of channels.

Here's Foley's description:

Albany consists of 2007 version of Office Home and Student; Office Live Workspace, Microsoft's collaboration-service complement to Office; Windows Live OneCare, Microsoft's consumer security/backup service; and three Windows Live services — Live Mail, Live messenger and Photo Gallery. The bundle will be delivered via a single installer. When Microsoft releases new versions of any of these software or service components, Albany users will get the latest versions pushed to them automatically for as long as they are paying for the Albany subscription.

• Office-productivity software that can be had for $119 at Amazon.com, but is likely already installed on a user's computer.


• A "collaboration" service most home users will have no need for


• Windows Live OneCare, a PC-security and maintenance service which Microsoft already sells as a subscription


• Three Web services Microsoft already offers for free

Microsoft hasn't specified what they'll charge, but lets assume they don't plan to lose money. A discounted copy of Office runs $119; OneCare costs $49.95 a year. Office Live Workspace is in beta, so Microsoft's not charging yet. Still, let's call it $15 a month. I can't see consumers paying that much for a package they mostly already have.

In "Albany," Microsoft has picked a perfect codename: a byword for bureaucratic waste, dysfunction, and corruption. As in New York's capital, someone needs to clean house. And as in New York's capital, it's not going to happen.

News Corp. made a deal with Digg.com at the end of last year. Users who click through to a WSJ.com story from Digg get to bypass the pay wall entirely. Similarly, when users click through from sites like Google News and Drudge Report, the pay wall is skipped.

Why do this? By making it easier for casual readers to find Journal articles, Murdoch gets more readers. If they like what they see, they can get all the WSJ content they want for a modest fee — and it's likely cheaper than all the direct-mail come-ons the Journal's circulation department is used to mailing. Murdoch gets to have his cake and eat it too. The Financial Times did something similar last year when it allowed readers to get 30 articles a month free before forcing them to cough up some dough.

The scheme falls apart, though, if people just read WSJ.com for free because they can. Courtesy of Manjoo, here's how:

• Search for the headline of the story you want in Google News. Frequently the story will already be there and clicking the search result will get you to the full story.

• If you're using Firefox, download the refspoof add-on. It allows you to fake out the WSJ into thinking you've clicked a link on Google News or Digg. Last year, Digg and the Wall Street Journal formed a partnership where any WSJ story that gets linked on Digg bypasses the pay-wall. By spoofing WSJ's servers, you can access any story for free.

What about Salon.com, the outfit that pays Manjoo's salary? To read the deeper parts of Salon, readers must either pay a monthly fee or watch a brief full-page advertisement — known as an "interstitial" — every day. Everyone needs to make money, but it can be annoying to readers. Since Manjoo passed on telling readers how to bypass it, we'll oblige.

The quick and easy way: *bookmark this page. Hitting that link will give you a "SItePass" for the day, leaving you to browse Salon all you wish. Perfect! However you do it, there's one unanswered question: Why are you reading Salon in the first place?

*deleted:Immediately click "skip" in the top-right hand corner. You'll get a free day of Salon without dishing out anything except a few seconds of time. If even that annoys you, you can use the same techniques Manjoo recommends for the Journal's site: Search articles from Google News, or download a Firefox plugin.

I'll tell you what the problems are. But it's going to be Greek to those of you who don't use Macs and I don't want to spend a whole lot of time with this. But here we go.

• 1. Back to my Mac, screen sharing, doesn't work. It's intermittent on occasion. Now, I got six computers on the network, maybe it's only meant to go back and forth one computer to the next. And the second thing, and this is the biggie, because I have found a work-around to screen sharing back to my Mac not working, direct access to my IP address I can do it without going back to my Mac.
• 2. They've got this great new backup program called Time Machine. I primarily live in my mail application. I use it for my word processing. The only time I open word processing is when somebody sends me something in a Word document or whatever. I don't use the phone because of my hearing. Email is everything, and Time Machine will not restore email mailboxes. Restores everything else but that, and ought to restore either a single message or a whole mailbox, and it won't. On one machine, this one here in New York, I have found a way to restore a single message or a multiple list of messages from wherever the Time Machine archive is, but on none of my other five machines does that work. They're identical.
  
  So, Mr. Jobs, there's got to be somebody who can — this is major. I'm not calling it a bug. They just left it out of the operating system. To not back up — and, by the way, when you open Time Machine in your mail program, it says, "click restore" to back up your in-box or to back up the message you had selected. So it was supposed to, it just doesn't do it. And there's a whole thread at the Apple site of people having the same problem. But posting the problem on the website is not going to solve anything. It's like filing a bug report, goes out to the ether, nobody ever sees it, you never hear.

1. Make sure your Facebook account contains a contact email address (such as Yahoo or Gmail).
2. Delete any college, high school, or work email addresses listed in your Facebook account. Your contact email should be the only address listed.
3. Deactivate your Facebook account.
4. Register using an email address other than your contact email (a college, high school, or work email is fine).
5. Once you are signed into your new Facebook account, add your contact email address to the account. Open the link in the confirmation email that has been sent. This step will wipe out your previous Facebook account, rendering it inaccessible.

Click where the red arrow points.
Type the fraudster's name where the red arrow points. Then press enter.
Click where the red arrow points.

Most of those people know how to use Tumblr responsibly and only post when they have something worthwhile to say. Others don't. First execution: Julia Allison. 40 posts a day? Are you f—-ing kidding?

Just three easy steps and it's off with their head. Click where the arrow points.


And now they're dead! Yay!

Southwest Airlines Bringing the Internet to the Sky Via Satellite DALLAS, Jan. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Southwest Airlines will be the first US carrier to test satellite-delivered broadband Internet access on multiple aircraft. With this innovation, Southwest Customers with a wi-fi enabled device will have full access to the Internet including e-mail, music, shopping, and virtual private networks (VPN) via a high-speed connection. Southwest Airlines is partnering with Southern California-based Row 44 and hopes to begin testing Internet capabilities on four aircraft this summer.

"Southwest Airlines is pleased to announce its partnership with Row 44, and we intend to deliver the highest bandwidth available to commercial airlines in the United States," said Dave Ridley, Southwest Airlines' Senior Vice President of Marketing. "Southwest's selection of satellite technology will offer a more robust experience for more Customers per aircraft versus other solutions available in the marketplace."

"Southwest is looking for the best solution for our Customers not only for Internet e-mail access, but for additional inflight entertainment as well," Ridley said. "We look forward to exploring this cutting-edge technology with Row 44 and hope this will keep our Customers productive and entertained inflight."

"We're excited to partner with Southwest Airlines to keep passengers informed, in touch, and entertained," said Gregg Fialcowitz, President of Row 44. "This service will set the standard for excellence in inflight connectivity."

After almost 37 years of service, Southwest Airlines continues to differentiate itself from other airlines-offering low fares and a reliable product with impeccable Customer Service. Southwest Airlines is the most efficient airline in the sky and offers Customers a pleasant traveling experience. Southwest recently updated its gate areas and improved its boarding procedure to make flying Southwest productive and convenient. Southwest Airlines (NYSE: LUV), the nation's largest carrier in terms of domestic passengers boarded, currently serves 64 cities in 32 states. Based in Dallas, Southwest currently operates more than 3,300 flights a day and has more than 33,000 Employees systemwide.

Row 44 is the fast, global, fleet-wide solution for inflight broadband services — high-speed Internet, video entertainment, cell phone support, and airline operational services. The system offers wide-body, narrow-body and even regional jet support along with flexible service deployment options. And its cost effective because installation is quick, the hardware is light, and the service leverages existing satellite networks.

Adobe confirms the function, saying they use information gleaned about user behavior to gain "business insight into how to create better user experiences." Don't want to be their guinea pig? Omniture lets you opt out.

Avoiding Gmail hackery
1. Log in to Gmail and click on "Settings."
2. Click on the filters tab.
3. Make sure any filters turned on were your call.

To block Beacon ads, just add the URL http://www.facebook.com/beacon/* to your ad-blocking tool. If you don't have one, these instructions will set you up on Firefox.

Social Ads will supposedly use the news feed URL http://www.facebook.com/stories.php?filter=28. We at the 'Wag haven't seen any yet. But hopefully they'll be adjustable via the News Feed Preferences page, as are other numeric categories. If Facebook won't let you customize your feed not to show any #28 items, expect a Greasemonkey hack to appear shortly.

• 1. Go to Facebook and click on "Businesses" at the bottom of the page.
• 2. Click on "Facebook Pages."
• 3. Click on "Create a Facebook Page."
• 4. Select "Brand or Product". I picked "Communications," for lack of a better category. Fill in the name of your business, site, product, or the brand called you.
• 5. You've created a page! You can upload a picture, add basic info like your business's founding date, and detailed info like a tagline or product description.
• 6. Make sure to publish the page when you're done editing.
• 7. Important: Click "View Page," and then add yourself as a fan. Your friends will see that you're a fan, and hopefully sign up as fans, too.
• 8. Avoid the paid advertising options. Instead, post links to your Facebook page's Wall for free. Your fans will see them in their news feeds.

Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal: Faster, easier than Vista. For me, the marquee features are Time Machine that automatically backs up your entire computer in the background; Cover Flow and Quick Look, for rapidly viewing the contents of files; and new techniques that allow you to access other computers on your network or over the Internet with no technical expertise. The menu bar is now translucent, which can make it hard to see the items it contains. The new folder icons are less attractive than their predecessors.

David Pogue, The New York Times: Sleek, modern-looking desktop. Time Machine, Quick Look. Having virtual-screen software built in with so much polish makes a huge difference. A more polished Boot Camp lets you restart in Windows. Screen sharing lets gurus assist newbies from afar. iChat blue-screen effect. It also lets you display documents, presentations or movies to your videoconferencing buddies. The most serious misstep: See-through menus.

Edward C. Baig, USA Today: Time Machine. Cool video chat. Pretty e-mail: more than 30 stationery templates — baby announcements, party invitations — with integrated photo browser. You can create Notes and To-Dos inside Mail. It can detect addresses, phone numbers and dates inside a message. If you join the $100-a-year .Mac online service, you can access your machine remotely. I ran into snags trying to remotely connect from a hotel.

Evite: Use Socializr or MyPunchbowl
The main problem with Evite is the uninformative email. "You are invited to Heather's Divorce Party," says Evite, with a personal message from the host but no actual information. To make a decision as a guest, I have to click over to Evite; that cramps my style if I'm trying to be at all productive with my inbox. Plus it's a pain when I'm en route to the party and need to double-check the address. If only I could just check my email on my phone, but no, all the info is trapped in Evite! The "send it to my phone" option is silly, as I probably won't remember to do that until I'm already away from my computer.

The site is also annoying to use: I can only export the event to iCal, RSVPing takes me to a useless page instead of back to the event, and the site is full of ads and unrelated links. Evite is the MySpace of invitations.

That's almost all fixed with Socializr and MyPunchbowl. Socializr sends a complete email with party time, location and information:

But the event page only lets guests export info to Outlook, not iCal, Google Calendar, or Yahoo Calendar. MyPunchbowl allows all of that, but although it leaves guests a pretty informative email, it leaves out the event location. (It's also cluttered with more "features" than I care about.) Because of that, I'm using Socializr for my next party.

YouTube: Use Vimeo
Seriously, why put anything on YouTube when Vimeo exists? Of all the alternative video sites — Veoh, Blip.tv, Revver — Vimeo is the best option for the average video maker (people with professional shows should also consider Blip.tv or VideoEgg). Here are YouTube's failures and how Vimeo beats them:

• Crap video quality: Remember the '90s, when online video was tiny and grainy? And then connections got faster and video was decently pretty again? And then YouTube made it all grainy again, with dissonant sound? Vimeo has better video quality, especially in its new HD format, which has 12 times the resolution of YouTube. (Those with pre-Intel Macs will have to watch the non-HD versions.) Viewers can also download the original video file.
• Ugly site: And ugly embeds. Not with Vimeo, which has a freshly updated embedded-video style that matches its slick, uncluttered web site.
• Horrible commenters: YouTube comments are spam and illiterate evaluations: "dis sux" or "lol." The video creator can either take hours to pick through all of them deleting bad comments, or ban comments altogether. Vimeo comments are not only readable, they're nearly all encouraging. Is the fantastic community only there because the site's so small? Who cares, it's not going to explode any time soon. It'll just steal the best creative users from YouTube.

An example of Vimeo's beauty:

Blogger: Use WordPress.com, Vox, or Tumblr
In its first few years, Blogger rocked; then like most Google acquisitions, it languished, until now it's a hive of spam blogs. Blogger isn't particularly heinous to use, it's just quite limiting. Now there are plenty of friendly blog interfaces for those of us who just want a simple blog with no mucking about in HTML.

WordPress.com is the most flexible, useful for people who want the power of WordPress without installing the whole thing on a server, or whatever people do to make their own WordPress blog (I've had a few, but I always needed someone else to set them up). There's room for HTML and custom CSS and stuff, so you can upgrade it. I Can Has Cheezburger is built on WordPress.com.

Vox is the new Blogger, as far as simplicity and friendliness. Pretty much no learning curve. It's designed to be the blog your mom can use. Lots of Vox blogs are happy and sunny; this one is also Warm 'n Fuzzy.

My favorite is Tumblr (which powers my personal site). This one's less about "dear diary" blogging and more "here's some stuff I found." The small input boxes encourage brevity, which is what your blog could use, isn't it?

Twitter: Use Pownce
I haven't stopped using Twitter. But I used to use it to ask questions when I needed a whole bunch of ideas ("Anyone know some songs about transvestites?"). Now I use Pownce, which lets people reply within a thread. It's like a comment thread without a blog post at the top, or a quick and easy mini-forum. It's also a more rewarding place to pimp your boring blog posts link to entertaining webpages.

Digg: Use StumbleUpon
What if you could get Digg-like traffic without suffering the wrath of Digg commenters? Try StumbleUpon, which asks for "reviews" instead of a stream of comments, forcing users to actually think before posting about a site. That gives StumbleUpon the same community advantage Vimeo has over YouTube.

Get your site "Stumbled" and you could get several thousand pageviews — not always as much as Digg, but without the "this sucks u suck LOOSER" commentary.

MapQuest: Use Google Maps
You already know Google Maps is the best, but apparently most folks still use MapQuest, despite its awkward input forms and such. But, well, those folks aren't you. So I guess we've got a little extra time here before the article runs out. Go spend it at Vimeo.

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag, Too Much Nick, and Look Shiny. Seriously, Vimeo is like licking chocolate off the Venus de Milo.

We're told that Accel is looking at investing in Facebook app developers. Naturally. Breyer's $13 million investment in Facebook two years ago was seen by some as a sign of a building bubble. Now with estimates of Facebook's value ranging in the billions of dollars, of course, rival VCs like Bay Partners are jealous.

But Breyer can't possibly be content with just one home-run investment. It stands to reason that he wants to build a keiretsu — a network of startups which partner with each other to build their businesses and boost their common investor's returns. John Doerr and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins did this in the 1990s, with AOL, Netscape, Amazon.com, Intuit, Excite; Michael Moritz, at Sequoia, likewise, parlayed his firm's investments in Cisco, Yahoo, and Google into other moneymakers. Breyer's only real '90s hit, meanwhile, was RealNetworks — a thin reed on which to lay a keiretsu.

You have to admire the evil genius of the plan, if true: Breyer, a Facebook board member, can cherry-pick only the most successful app developers before rival venture capitalists have even heard of them. And Breyer, too, can guarantee favored startups something no one else can — protection from an abrupt decision by Facebook to block or cripple their apps. That power — implied, never spoken — also would bear a concomitant threat: Startups who don't play along with Accel, and accept the valuation they're given, may suddenly find Facebook an unfriendly place to write software.

So, Facebook developers, report in — is the rumor true? Has anyone gotten an offer they can't refuse? A hard sell from Accel? Drop us a word.

• Lawrence Lessig: The highest-profile email bankruptcy to date. The copyright attorney (who fought a Supreme Court case against a 20-year extension of all U.S. copyrights) sent a mass e-mail in 2004 asking anyone with important unanswered e-mail to reply, which would flag their mail as important. He carried off the task with aplomb, apologizing for failing to maintain "cyber decency." But rumor has it that Lessig still went through much of his "bankrupt" e-mail.
• Andrew Baron: The producer of the Rocketboom show reportedly declared an e-mail reboot in 2006.
• Michael Arrington: In October 2006, the publisher of the TechCrunch blog came back from vacation and deleted months of e-mails. He also turned off instant messaging.
• The better fix: Sean Bonner: Instead of dropping all his current e-mails, Sean Bonner put a throttle on future mail. The founder of the Metroblogging city-blog network started autoresponding to e-mail this month, saying he only checks e-mail once a day.
• Tim Ferriss: Sean's following what Ferriss recommends in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. Ferriss follows his own plan (and apparently truly works four hours a week).
• Andy Baio: Upcoming's founder says he built a 10,000-e-mail backlog in 2006. He spent six weeks fixing it.

Before you try this at home, remember that the people above can get hundreds of e-mails a day. Try autoresponders before you try bankruptcy; everyone appreciates some sort of response. Consider hiring an assistant, even part-time, for less than you could make by saving your e-mail time. If these measures seem like too much, you're not that bad off. You just need to get quicker at managing your e-mail.

(Photo: Midnight Beep)

Realize what's unsafe
To put it simply: Illegal activity, very unsafe. Unethical activity, just as bad. Drug use, usually unsafe. Heavy drinking, inadvisable but not always a deal-breaker. Online drama, another red flag, as it's a warning sign that you'll be a "difficult" employee or a bad team player.

Decide if you really want to be safe
Before you prune, realize that an employer's angst isn't really about what's online; it's about your real life as the web represents it. Do you want to be part of a company that doesn't let its employees goof off on their own time? Or say there's a photo online of you smoking up. Most major companies have every reason to reject an illegal drug user. But not everyone — for instance, smoking up and getting trashed is a requisite for many startups. Even megacorp Google was started by two guys who still attend drug-friendly Burning Man.

So before you clean up your image, see if someone will hire you just as you are. Where would the world be if Hunter S. Thompson had cleaned up for Rolling Stone?

Google yourself
Say you decide you do need to clean up for your boss-to-be. What's the first place they'll look? Like anyone else (unless you're applying to Yahoo), they'll check Google. Google your full name right now, with and without quotation marks. Look at the first thirty results; 90% of searchers don't check results past page 3. Make yourself a chart: List the results under two categories: "in my control" (pages you can edit) and "out of my control." Cross out every item that is "safe." Now to tackle the others, first go down the "in my control" list:

Check your profiles
Someone could check your MySpace, Facebook, and other social profiles without Google. But a lot of your profile may be protected from outsiders. Log out of MySpace. Now look at your own profile and see everything an outsider could. List your profiles under "in my control."

Make your profiles private
The easiest way to clean up your profiles for employers is to set them to private. The most beautiful part of your MySpace should be:

Note that MySpace still shows your profile photo and quote. Shouldn't be too hard to make those presentable, no?

On Facebook, click "My Privacy" in the left column. Note that you can be part of several "networks." If you're part of your city's network in addition to your college, you can turn off parts of your profile just for people from the same city who aren't your friends. Of course, an alumnus from your college may check your profile. No worries; you can specifically deny access to alumni. If you want, they'll only see your profile photo, name and networks. Just remember, if you "poke" or request to add anyone as a friend, they'll be able to see your profile.

Check your blog
If you write on a public blog, you have a messier job: Search for any legal scare words like "pot," or "steal." Check for obscenities to find your most vehement posts. Delete offending posts, and realize that deleted posts won't disappear from Google's cache for a few days. If you don't want to delete posts, at least edit any keywords out. They'll at least be harder to find.

Control the pages you don't control
Say the embarrassing photo or the obscene comment is on a page in someone else's control. The best approach is to privately e-mail this person asking that they "temporarily" remove the material. After all, technically you don't have to hide the info forever, and people respond much better to helping someone out for a bit than to permanently sacrificing their right to make an ass out of you. Whether you ever tell them to put it all back is up to you.

Unfortunately, if the material ends up on a journalistic (or even pseudo-journalistic) site, the chances of this favor are small. Journalists generally consider it unethical to clean up a subject's image. (I've had to decline several people's requests at Valleywag.) So please, when you go nuts, stay away from the press.

Run the best defense with a good offense
Listen to lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago: "What if your hinges all are rusting? What if, in fact, you're just disgusting? Razzle dazzle 'em, and they'll never catch wise!" When you have a polished blog that shows your professional expertise in a presentable manner, Google is your friend. Did United Way write up the charity event you volunteered for? Make sure they spelled your name right. Better yet, link to it from your own site. Use Marketing Pilgrim's resources for reputation managing. Read Paul Boutin's guide to LinkedIn. The Internet is your resumé.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Blogebrity, and Look Shiny. He'd take the Hunter S. Thompson route, but he can't find a good mescaline dealer.

From: mossberg@wsj.com
Subject: Re: Valleywag press query
Date: January 22, 2007 2:37:18 PM PST
To: Paul Boutin

Hi, Paul.

This was a review of Vista, an operating system piece, not a piece recommending which system to buy. That kind of column involves hardware comparisons that would go well beyond the scope of this particular review. I am certainly not afraid to very clearly make such comparisons. For instance, I am on record saying that the best consumer desktop computer on the market is the iMac. But this was the wrong column for that sort of comparison.

I did feel it was essential to describe Vista in the context of its only real competitor for the consumers for whom I write, if only so devoted Windows users could see how many of its major features really aren't new. Still, I devoted only about 100 words out of more than 1700 to the Apple context.

Another factor was that Vista computers must really be compared with Macs running the equivalent generation of OS X, which, as you know, is Leopard, due out in a few months. But I am not prepared to review Leopard head-to-head with Vista yet. Apple has only revealed some of Leopard's features, and Jobs has specifically said important new elements of it remain secret. I do not review products based on teasers and demos. (That's why I refused to print a full review of the iPhone, and told readers so.)

After Leopard ships, I will likely do a more comparative piece, and, as the hardware evolves in both camps to complement the new operating systems, I assure you I won't hesitate to keep making recommendations about which to buy, an area in which I have generally been more decisive than most other reviewers.


Walt
======================
Walt Mossberg
Personal Technology Columnist
The Wall Street Journal
mossberg@wsj.com
http://ptech.wsj.com

Skim Mossberg's WSJ review and Pogue's NYT piece. Count the number of times the words "Apple," "Macintosh" and "OS X" appear in each. To a reader who isn't a Mac user — the vast majority — it seems inconsistent to obsessively compare Vista features to another product in a definitive review, and then not say that one or the other is better.

A good national newspaper review isn't subtle. It spells out the takeaway clearly and quotably. No one misreads it. Mossberg in late 2005 was clear: "Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac." His new Vista review trails off with, "You may want to keep your older Windows XP box around awhile longer." If he means "until OS X Leopard ships this Spring," he should say so.

Why did Mossberg and Pogue, masters of the gadget review, stop short of telling readers to hold off on a new Vista PC until they'd evaluated a comparable Mac instead? I emailed both writers and got one reply... [UPDATE: Mossberg's reply arrived the day after he sent it.]

From: David Pogue
To: Paul Boutin

Hey Paul!

Excellent questions all.

I think that if you're just starting out and have no vested interest in either platform (like a 3-D game available only for Windows), a Macintosh will offer a smoother, more consistent experience—if only because a single company has designed the hardware and software to work together.


But not everyone has that choice. Plenty of people are deeply invested in Windows stuff: printer, scanner, software collection, years of experience, etc. For them, the question isn't "Mac vs. PC," but rather, "upgrade to Vista or not"?

That's why I think it'd be sort of pointless to pit the two against each other in a review of Vista. It's be like declaring a victor in a match between a truck and a convertible coupe.

But actually, that's a really good topic for an unrelated column: all things being equal—and if you have no investment to think about—which one comes out on top?

Incendiary and fuel for much blogger bashing, but a good column topic nonetheless!

dp

A really good topic! For another column! He's too humble — a David Pogue cage match between Vista and OS X Leopard would be the most-dugg URL all year. I can hardly wait.

¬ PR bloggers Steve Rubel (East Coast) and Jeremy Pepper (West Coast) teamed up to to form PR PR.
¬ Big sister Deathhacker battled the Z-words.
¬ Future AOL CEO Jason Calacanis ("We're also annoucing that we're buying Gawker Media") and Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble ("the free food rocks for a fat guy like me!") joined the Plex.
¬ Google blogger Matt Cutts and Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny swapped Kool-Aid.
¬ Yahoo bought Web 2.0.
¬ Three Frenchmen wished Apple a happy 30th. I blame the wine.

Then stumble over to the Velvet Spade around 900 Red River (near the invite-only Blogger party at the Iron Cactus, which started too early for our tastes). Ben Brown of the Consumating dating site co-hosts with music service Odeo and developer firm (and stellar party-throwers) Adaptive Path from 9 on.

Have fun, careful 'bout your drug choice (unless you don't have a panel to lead tomorrow), and keep that little card with your hotel room number.

As service journalism to all the would-be startuppers out in the Valley, here's the checklist to confirm that yes, someone else had your idea, and yes, they did it better than you can.

Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix: If your elevator pitch includes "Gizfeedblum is like [Billion-dollar company 1] mashed with [Billion-dollar company 2]," then it's already been cataloged here. Just check Billion-dollar company 1's row and 2's column.
Web 2.0 Directory: Just because it's not a mashup doesn't mean it hasn't been done already. This week. By someone with a cousin at Yahoo. Among over 900 Web 2.0 services, one represents your crushed dream.
Complete list of Web 2.0 Products and Services: Far from complete, but this might find your hope-squasher if the first two missed it.
Lifehacker: Our superproductive sister is already using your predecessor to organize her "pics of stuff on my cat" folder or something. Search the archives for your buzzwords.
TechCrunch: And Valley blogger Michael Arrington has already praised said predecessor.

Dude. Get over it. Maybe work on that screenplay instead.