Better maps for your phone

It is illegal, in the state of Maryland, to text while driving. This is a good thing, right? What about reading a map? What if the map is on your cell phone??

Today, Google unveiled the beta version of Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 devices. Essentially, Google is trying to get into the fast-growing GPS system market. Now I've seen turn-by-turn directions delivered to a cell phone. One of my colleagues has a Sprint phone with a GPS application loaded onto it. It's very, very slick. And it has an entirely different set of benefits than a car-mounted device.

Features:
Screen size: Advantage car-mount
Portability: Advantage cell phone
Flexibility: Advantage cell phone
Adaptability: Push

These are my opinions, and I'd love to hear yours!

I saw this at ...
Google drives into new market with Maps Navigation beta for Android

Firefox continues market share gains

In the epic struggle for browser share, Firefox continues to take users from Internet Explorer. Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, claims that in 17 European countries, Firefox is now the dominant browser. Microsoft's enhancements to IE have simply not slowed down the open source browser's growth. I believe that their decision to restrict plug-ins in IE will prove to be as short-sighted as Sony's decision in the 1980's to not license VHS Beta technology.

Read more ... Firefox gains 30m users in eight weeks

A pretty good Win7 upgrade article

If you're preparing for your upgrade to Windows 7, this article is a good place to start. Some of their advice it is pretty obvious, like backing up your files. But it lists good resources for online storage if you'd rather not store everything on CD or DVD.

Be aware, though. Comcast places a daily upload limit of 1Gb. If you exceed that limit, they cut you off ... forever. It's a hard lesson to learn.

The article also links to several Microsoft sites that will help you determine if your machine will effectively run Win7. A few minutes doing that legwork will save you significant time and frustration down the road.

Before starting your backup, I recommend that you invest some time in installing and learning to use 7-ZIP. It is a free compression utility that does a much better job than WinZIP. You'll be glad you did it.

FAQ: How to prep for an XP-to-Windows 7 upgrade, from ComputerWorld

Windows 7 on the Virtual Machine

Today, VMWare announced support for Windows 7 Workstation in the virtualized environment. This should help Microsoft build momentum for the operating system and accelerate the pace of transition from WinXP to the new platform.

At the same time, however, it does make it easier to keep a limited number of PC's on WinXP. This will ease the transition costs since it will help companies put off purchasing new machines just to handle the demands of Win7. PC manufacturers who were hoping for a big lift along these lines may be moderately disappointed.

Credit where credit is due:
VMware ships Workstation for virtualizing Windows 7,
By Mikael Ricknäs , IDG News Service , 10/27/2009