According to gizmodo, If you purchase or have purchased Vista’s Business or Ultimate edition, you’ll be able to request a “downgrade” CD to get back to the Windows XP that we’ve all come to know and love.

I don’t quite understand calling the move from XP to Vista a downgrade, but I’ll take the option however it is termed. It seems everyone who has touched Windows Vista seems to have a horror story about the experience. We have been lucky that Dell’s small business side still sells XP, but rumor says that this practice will stop in early 2008. Finally, we’ll have a solution in the days to come.

It is nice to see the trend in computing toward lower power consuming servers and better battery life in laptops, but if you’re interested in saving more, you’re in luck!  The city of Boulder’s Office of Environmental Affair is offering free services to small businesses.

Some of you may also find this device useful to find out where your power use is going.  I’ve found out that most of my computers take around 90 watts when in use and some even draw 10 watts when turned off but left plugged in!  I know now that I really need to unplug some devices.

The Mozilla suite isn’t the next hottest thing anymore. A lot of people have heard of Firefox. Roughly a quarter of the internet is using it. The Mozilla suite are spectacularly useful Open Source software. Google provides a spectacularly useful server to host your email and calendar data accessible via web browser. As of Thunderbird 2.0 and Sunbird/Lightning 0.5, we find we can easily sync calendars and check our email.

“The Google”
Google is a HUGE corporation with an enormous stock price, but I like them. I like their employees who blog. I like Picasa! I like the investment in renewable and sustainable resources. I like that they recently created and announced an Ubuntu repository where they house applications they packaged for Linux! I can’t say enough good things about their webmail client. The quick-loading keyboard-shortcutted AJAX smoothness is dreamy!

Email with Thunderbird
With the recent 2.0 release of Thunderbird, we find it horribly easy to add a Gmail account. I know gmail is just SSL-encrypted POP and SMTP, but the point is, you don’t have to know! I like the free POP access which is more than other webmail providers give, but I wish Google would implement IMAP functionality to keep your folders organized across devices. I’d even pay for this!

Calendar with Sunbird and/or Lightning
If you use Thunderbird and want calendaring integrated into it, get Lightning! If you want a separate application, in a more iCalendar like approach, for your calendaring needs, get Sunbird. No matter which one you get, it’s easy sync to Google as long as you install the Provider for Google Calendar.

Replacing Exchange?
We are starting to see a few major players here. Google and Apple are getting their products real close if not ready for some. We also see some action in the open source arena with Zimbra who can sync directly to Outlook. Still, we can still accomplish quite a bit with an exchange server. I wish Google could do it for me, but not yet. For me, I still enjoy syncing contacts over the air to my server. Hopefully we’ll see feature parity with exchange real soon from our friends at Google.

Savor the net radio while you can! If you’re an avid listener, expect the beauty of silence on June 26th as many internet broadcasters turn off the tunes to bring awareness

I’ve never listened to net radio, why do I want it?

Because music is awesome and the choice and control available via the internet is amazing! Today in net radio options, we still have classic streaming models with no control, you just hook in for the ride! Services like shoutcast, your preprogrammed itunes stations, and even local private and public radio stations allow you to tune in to their music stream where you may enter mid-song or mid-program.

Rather than this wild-ride, recently we’ve seen a more sane model of “on-demand” audio. Great! I love pausing, playing, etc at my pace. Whether it be controlled streaming from pandora or last.fm, or listening to the local podcast of etown, net broadcasting is here to stay! Most musicians will allow you to stream their songs from their website and chances are you’ve streamed audio this way.

Peril of Netcasters

Net radio producters are going to find a new cost on them soon. I’m not talking about the electricity. I’m not talking about the need to get faster internet connections to service this. I’m not even talking about buying more space because people want better quality audio. I’m talking about an artificial cost of royalties. And soon, the royalty fees paid by netcasters are going to increase tremendously. New laws, supported by the RIAA, have been instituted that change the way royalties are calculated. Webcasters are being treated harshly for what I see as a way to bail out large media outlets from losing revenues to internet and independent media users. Punishing the latter will not make people magically jump back to large media, will it? It does pad the wallets of an industry that exploits very talented people. If you’d like to be heard on the subject from your government, please take a moment to do so.

That said, “Support music! Support artists! Support independent artists! Go to musical shows! Buy direct from the artists! Download from their site and pay them direct! Save everyone the needless transportiation and plastic production costs!”