It’s not the end of the story but still a good result. The Open Office XML “standard” is quite hideous and contains many non-interoperable quirks that — in a proper world — should definitely keep it away from certification.

Canada voted against the fast track motion.

Ars Technica has a great very in-depth review of the iPhone. I don’t have my hands on one yet since they’re not available in Canada but one of my US co-workers brought the toy over and I love it.

It’s hard to describe just how nicely polished the interface is. Everything is animated but not in an overly obnoxious way. Even ignoring the phone features, this is a kick-ass PDA/iPod. The screen is great for watching movies, crisp, bright! Being able to connect to any open wireless, check your email, iCal, Safari, Address Book is amazing. I think those features alone make the product worth having.

It’s definitely going to set the bar higher for other cell phones. And that’s a good thing considering what’s out there right now.

If you’ve ever purchased music from the iTunes Store you may know that there are limitations imposed on the files that you get. Without going thru some quality loss, you’re limited to playing it in iTunes or an iPod only.

Recently, a bunch of European governments have started complaining about this. Rightfully so!

And, in response, Steve has posted his thoughts on DRM. His position is that Apple cannot realistically open the FairPlay DRM to other vendors without it resulting in leaks in the protection. So, he argues, music should either be protected with proprietary technology by each vendor (like Apple, Sony, and Microsoft do today) or it should just be protection-free, open to everybody.

Personally, an iTunes Store with no DRM would definitely get my business so I’m really glad that these issues are finally being explored by the European governments. Hopefully, with enough pressure, the music labels will remove the DRM requirements to the music they sell online and Apple will follow suit.

One can only hope that all this nonsense will eventually go away!

For kicks, I wanted to see how the “Apple” and “iPod” brands compare on Google Trends. I was a little surprised on how close the two brands are in terms of mindshare.

It’s really interesting! You can try “iMac”, “iBook”, “MacBook” vs “iPod” as well …

I just got my MacBook Pro yesterday and today, Apple announced Boot Camp. Yeeha! I immediately gave it a spin and it’s awesome!

Windows purrs on the machine and even Unreal Tournament 2004 (Demo) ran great. I got it at 60fps with most of the settings turned up. For some reason, Unreal didn’t recognize the full resolution 1440×900 and instead only allowed me to go to 1152×864. Windows itself ran at the native resolution with no problems.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m some sort of Windows back-switcher. But it’s nice to have around for testing web pages and games!

I bet it will really increase the sales of MacBook Pro …