Brian Myrick's blog

You may have heard that Amazon recently discovered that it was accidentally selling illegal copies of Orwell's novel 1984. This is easy to understand as Amazon makes it relatively easy to publish your own content in a Kindle edition.

Someone with the text to 1984 did just that, published it on the Amazon Kindle publishers toolkit.

When Amazon discovered the problem, not only did they remove it from the Kindle store, but they removed it from users Kindle devices, and refunded their money.

Kindle users were outraged.

On Tuesday, Apple had their quarterly conference call with investors. Today, Microsoft announced some financial news of their own. Let's compare and contrast.

 Comcast just upgraded the service is my neighborhood. I now have as part of my standard Internet service 20MB download speed. Before the upgrade, I had 16MB. I called today to find out my other options, and I can get as high as 50MB.

As expected, Apple announced the latest edition of the very popular iPhone this week at their World Wide Developers Conference. (They also talked about the upcoming next version of OS X - Snow Leopard.)

Lots of 3G users are grumbling about the price for current iPhone users. Here's the rundown:

Apple is well known for its best in industry customer service and support, and today I was able to enjoy experiencing it (at least in a small way).

Microsoft is planning on including Virtualization features in Windows 7 that will allow Win7 to run XP apps in a Virtual Machine. This is significantly more complicated than the DOS Virtual Machine that enabled Windows to run DOS apps that began with early version of Windows and continues to this day.

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I've tried Google Docs. And for small projects and small teams its OK. But it isn't fabulous - at least not yet. Lots of other Google stuff is really good, so I'm sure Docs will get better. But in the meantime, if you're looking for an online collaboration document tool, David Strom has a pretty good article. He mentions Etherpad, SlideShare, and Yammer and how you might use those instead of Google Docs.

Today, via LinkedIn, I received an invitation to learn about ChatToText. The service allows members to post a badge or a link on a web page or email signature. People click the link and are able to Instant Message with the member, but the messages go to the member's cell phone. Making this unique compared to regular IM clients is that the member's cell phone number is never revealed to the chatter.

Oh, the irony. Entrepreneur.com has an article posted called "Downtime Deterrent: 24/7 Web Monitoring." In it, they link to a company whose only service is providing web monitoring services and alerting you when your website is down. The company is called Just Uptime.