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Sometimes, buying intangible items makes sense: software, music off iTunes, even your electric bill (you can’t “touch” electricity in the truest sense, after all).

Sometimes it doesn’t make any sense at all.

Take Facebook gifts. These little icons (which I guess are 64x64 pixels each) can be yours to give to any facebook friend for a dollar! Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the idea behind giving the gifts; it’s a small gesture to let someone know you’re thinking of them, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that...I’m buying an icon. I’m buying something I can view on my computer screen ¹.

Whatever happened to sending cards? Or flowers? I mean, both cost more than a $1 Facebook gift, but you can smell and touch flowers. You can hold a card in your hands. Can’t do that with a Facebook gift. And a real gift is waay more personal. I don’t know.

Anyway, that’s my random thought for the night.

¹You could print the page, cut out the gift icon, and stick it on your fridge if you want, of course. ↩

Are you an avid Deep Thought reader? Take a look at our news feeds.

In case you haven’t already heard, Deep Thought will be closing up shop for about two weeks, and will relaunch on March 2, 2008. This is a project we’ve been working on for a year now. It’s had its starts and stops. The plans have changed once or twice. We’ve even gotten to some heated debates and arguments! Our relaunch has been a long time coming. I wanted to take a few moments to explain to you why we’re relaunching, and what you can expect over the next couple weeks.

Why relaunch?

With the exception of tweaks and changes made to our home page, the site you see as of this posting is the same design we’ve been using since July 2005. In Internet years, that’s an eternity. So just on those grounds, Deep Thought is about ready for an update. But there are other reasons to relaunch too.

Although a good deal of our content is Mac-related, we are not really a Mac site in the same sense that MacRumors or The Mac Observer are. We talk about Windows. We discuss hardware and gadgets. We do some gaming. If it’s tech, it’s on Deep Thought. This, of course, presents a problem. As it stands right now, everything is sort of tossed together. If all you want to read about is Mac stuff or Windows stuff, you’ll have to wade through a mess of articles discussing other matters before you get to what you want to read. We hope to correct…
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Obsolete. A word that has one meaning in the technology world: useless. Lately this is how I have been feeling about my life and my computer, video camera, digital camera, iPod, cell phone, and basically everything else I own that has a circuit board in it. My gaming rig that I built last year never actually began to serve its constucted purpose. It bever took me to any Counter-Strike tournaments. It was never used to host a game of CS either, nor was it used to even connect to the internet. No, my aspirations for that computer completely fell apart within hours of building it. My tyrannous parents informed me that it would never see any kind of internet connection, meaning no games. My life carried on, but much more low-spirited. The fact that my dreams for that computer were now dashed meant that the non-returnable parts had cost me about $800 USD--more than enough to buy a Mac mini. As I said, I trudged on, despite having missed my first chance to buy a Mac.

The frustration of becoming obsolete continued when an incident with a hardware review caused an uproar, a personal attack on me. I won’t go into the details, all I will say is that going through that experience greatly hurt me and my trust in others. That incident stole the joy away from reveiwing hardware. I felt as if all the time I had spent reading hardware reviews by other reviews on sites like Toms Hardware…
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What can you do with $44.6 billion?¹

You can fill the California state budget deficit three times over.

You can buy 7.8 Steve Jobses (according to his 2007 net worth).

You can buy nearly 111.8 million iPhones (before tax).

Or you can buy a struggling dot-com pioneer.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you already know which option Microsoft chose. Me? I would have chosen the iPhones.

So what do I think of the Microsoft-Yahoo buyout proposal? This could get very messy very quickly.

Dollars and cents

In buying Yahoo, Microsoft would burn through just about all of their cash on hand. While any large buyout or merger carries the risk of failure, Yahoo’s failing fortunes as of late makes me question the logic behind this move. According to their latest earnings report, Microsoft’s Online Services Business division is still losing money, and the losses have actually deepened over the same period last year.

So Microsoft’s online services are struggling. Yahoo is struggling. I’m confused. How is taking on a company with similar problems is going to help Microsoft?

Platforms

How is Microsoft going to incorporate a company based on open-source solutions into the fold? After all, the rest of the company runs Windows and Windows-based servers. The only way I see Microsoft making this work is if they take a hands-off approach and let Yahoo be. Let it be! 

Competition against itself

How will Microsoft deal with the fact that, once again, the company would be competing against itself?…
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