Tech Essentials | Paying Taxes Painlessly

The best in new business technology

Jan 1, 2010  

by Gunnar Blodgett

Laptops on a Diet

The MacBook is no longer the only ultra-slim laptop on the market. MSI is now shipping the X-Slim. At 0.96 in. (24.5 mm) high, the X400 is almost 0.7 in. shorter than the Aspire 5000 and comparable to the 0.95 in. high MacBook Pro. Weighing in at 3.3 lbs. (1.5 kg), the X400 is just over half the weight of the 6.2-lb. Acer and lighter than the 5.5-lb. MacBook.

The video card is significantly better than any other Windows video we’ve used; images are crisper on the X400 monitor and on our ViewSonic projector than anything produced by our regular towers or laptops. On the downside, the widescreen (16:9) monitor feels a bit compressed. Perhaps it’s optimized for video watching, but with a maximum memory of 2 GB (vs. 4 GB for the MacBook), there won’t be any multi-tasking on movie night. The CPU usage goes to 100% and memory goes to 1.3 GB when iTunes plays a two-minute trailer. There is also a built-in webcam.
www.msi.com
(Pricing not yet available)

Smart Phone Addendum

Motorola Milestone

The Android operating system is seeing another implementation in Motorola’s just-announced 3G smart phone, the Milestone. It will be available from Telus, again in 2010. Reviews favour the Milestone’s touch-screen over the slide-out keyboard. Google Maps and Google Search by Voice are reportedly unavailable. Curiously, Tech Essentials found no reviews of audio quality.
www.motorola.com

Our October 2009 Tech Essentials look at smart phones did not acknowledge any of the BlackBerry line as worthy competition to the iPhone or the HTC units. Perhaps in response to this, or perhaps because of its fluctuating share price, Research in Motion has released a 3G-compliant smart phone. The Storm 2 is not yet available in Canada, but it’s been well-received in the U.S., particularly for its crystal-clear reception, but also because of its web-based applications.
na.blackberry.com

Online Stock Market Simulation

Tech Essentials, like many people, is wary of the stock market. So, when we found online applications that give us $100 K of play money and lets us create a stock portfolio, we just had to try it. Investopedia’s interface is information-loaded and very intuitive. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us access to Canadian stocks.

The Financial Post Stock Market Challenge did allow us to buy stocks from the TSX, the TSX-V and the US. Unlike Investopedia, it does not include company names or running totals in our portfolio list.

Vote buying and social media

Hits to your site or Twitter account, according to the new conventional wisdom, are everything; they increase your visibility, your online presence and your potential advertising revenue. In the grand tradition of North American democracy, you now can purchase votes from social networking sites via web traffic generation vendors. uSocial stands out at this point because of its volume pricing. How long before such methods become branded as aggressive spam? So far internet vote buying has more proponents than detractors.

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