Hasn't this "clone attack" been happening for years, from the likes of Sony, Creative, Archos, and others? What's different here, what the headline doesn't make clear, is that these are *phones*.
The important quote is buried towards the end of the article:
With digital music and video it will be Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Sony Ericsson -- the mobile phone manufacturers.
This year they will start releasing phones with the same storage as iPods -- up to 30 gigabytes. iPods themselves will have to become phones.
One device in my pocket or two? It's a no-brainer if you ask me.
Just goes to show why we need open protocols and open code for the future of VOIP. It's too important to leave to a single company, which is why I prefer SIP and clients like Google Talk and Gizmo where possible.
Except when you consider that mac users are going to have disproportionately larger bank accounts.
I don't know why that's been modded as Funny. I'd happily bet a powerbook for an acer laptop that Mac users on average are worth more to banks than pc users. Not only because they are almost definitely more wealthy (do I have to explain it), but also because they are much more influential on average. Think about it - bloggers, entrepeneurs, geeks, richer people in general. All have more influence than average.
gvim will do it - and command-line. Just run it with a couple of initial commands (use -c to specify comands). ":syntax on" to turn syntax highlighting on and ":hardcopy" to print.
Haven't tried it, but should be a breeze. And a portable solution too.
Knoppix might be useful for rescuing a system, but as an overal distro, it suffers from the problem that you can't install it to your hard drive. There are complex workarounds, but it defeats the purpose. I really hope the knoppix team add that functionality.
Meanwhile, MEPIS does exactly that. It's a live distro like knoppix, but once you've decided you like it and it's compatible with your hardware, you just install it on your HD like a regular distro. And it's also based on Debian. One downside, though, is lack of activity: the current released version is a year old.
You forgot "hiring a Linux strategist to instill fear in customers who take SCO's claim seriously" and "pay SCO a 'licence fee' to fund their 'operating system'".
Yeah agree, other extensions try to launch new windows or something and the tabbrowser extension just pops up a blank tab. To be level with opera, firefox needs a proper API for launching windows which makes the window/tab issue transparent to other extensions.
Most of the extensions were already compatible with 1.0 PR, but had version support limited to.9. You could often hack them yourself to.10 manually and then install them. Would you rather have this inconvenience, or an extension that screws up your new version because there was no version checking?
I'd rather have a third option: an extension that the Firefox team considered important enough to upgrade themselves, or not break, when stepping up to 1.0. Where's the logic in every user manually hacking plugins? Besides which, it will certainly not go mainstream if users have to hack XUL on the side!
One cool thing about Firefox is support for extensions, extra search engines, etc. Totally configurable and that's the kind of users it's going for.
If firefox is to hit mainstream, some of the more popular plugins need to be incorporated directly into the product. At the very least, offer for download a chunky version with lots of stuff already installed. But even that won't cut it. Some features, like tabbed browsing, can't just be added on as extensions because they interact badly with other extensions.
Also, there are backward-compatibility problems with each new release. Developers of open-source extensions aren't going to keep updating their work, so supporting at least the more important extensions should be considered essential from a release perspective, and perhaps they should be incorporated into the core project where possible.
There's nothing wrong with an extension arhcitecture per se. In fact, they have worked very well in open source, e.g. Eclipse and Linux. And that's true for firefox too. However, the management of extensions requires careful consideration. In Firefox's case, there's room for improvement.
(BTW maybe this has nothing to do with the interview but it's slashdotted, that's my excuse for waffling on.)
The anti-trust suits against Microsoft would have resulted in at least one of two things. The first would be removing IE so the person has to manually install it from the CD or download it after install. Second, force all of Microsoft's web development tools to be 100% standards compliant. Instead, the Bush administration gives them a get out of jail free pass and California accepts coupons for MS products which is the anti-solution for software monoculture in schools.
Yeah politics is rough, it's not fair, etc. But OTOH this story shows that Mozilla/Firefox has become more popular (even if not yet 15%) in the face of it all. Just as google rose to fame well after yahoo, alta, msn were entrenched in the homepages and bookmarks of the world's browsers. Well after the megacorps realised there was a buck or two in this thing.
Same applies to server-side linux and apache BTW.
Quality and innovation account for a lot too, naieve as it may sound.
I've never heard of them and htey've got their own domain already? No http://stanford.edu/users/jerry/? No http://google.stanford.edu? If these guys want it big-time, they should earn their keep on stanford.edu - go for http://morpheus.cs.stanford.edu/~tableausoftwareid ea, ???, profit.
I'm still not convinced the market of divxed simpsons watching on train consumers is that great... No, me neither. My point is that with the form factor taken care of, more people will buy these and experiment. Then maybe we'll both be convinced.
Wait a sec... out of curiousity, what are you using to do this? I'm posting from a Treo 600 right now, and wasn't aware such software was available for this.
Check out mmplayer, which does a great job of playing... wait for it... native divx! You still need to convert divx so it's small enough, but you can easily store a half-hour cartoon in 20MB, or a non-cartoon movie in 200MB. Since you can get 1GB SD cards now, there's plenty of room left over for backup, mp3s, etc. You can make the movies with virtualdub or check out pqdvd.com, which lets you rip a dvd straight to divx.
As I said on the treo thread yesterday, I only wish they ditched the keypad and got a full-size screen. Especially when high-resolution comes out!
A simpler option is kinoma, but nowhere near as powerful.
Lots of people say "why would I ever need to watch movies". Fair enough, but the new player takes away the biggest reason *not* to have a video player. Not everyone will go for it, but there will now be a lot more people who'll say "why not have video as well, if the form factor is the same".
People might not think they would use video, but they'd be surprised if they actually had the opportunity, as I do on my Treo. When you can't be bothered reading on a crowded train, or you've got to wait somewhere a few minutes, nothing beats pulling a Simpsons episode out of your pocket. And you're not going to bring a player especially for that, but if it's already there anyway (because you carry your music everywhere), you'll use it.
I hate to be one of those "if only it had X" posters, but I feel strongly here...
I wish they'd bring out models without keypad, especially if they're going hi-res. I know you can use newpen or whatever, but it's almost pointless on such a small screen.
The P900 form factor is much better for many users - it only takes an hour or two to learn jot/graffiti after all, is that really worth sacrificing all that screen space. The original handspring units did have a stylus-only option, maybe it wasn't popular, but the P800/P900 success shows there's a big market.
So please sony or someone bring out a PalmOS phone with big screen instead of useless keypad that's too small for the adult male users who are your primary target!
Don't worry. They *will* release DVDs of the originals, in a couple of years, as part of the Platinum Uber-Fan Comlpete Ripoff Collection. And, to watch a few dialogue changes and some crappier CGI, a million sucke^H^H^H fans will fork out $199.95 for the priviledge.
Another interesting publishing model is Sourcebeat. Not self-publishing, but a publisher where new online editions are released each month, to keep up with open source projects as they develop.
Nice to see these new models by people who "get it".
I learned to touch-type simply by programming lots. Others will undoubtedly learn by playing games or using MS-Word, etc.
Computers are ubiquitous enough that people automatically learn how to touch-type anyway. Going through the motions of "homing on the middle row" etc seems boring and, if anything, would mislead people into thinking that's the only way to learn how to touch-type.
Just because something is a necessity in life doesn't mean it has to be formally taught.
Teach programming, teach searching techniques, teach word-processing if you must. But don't teach typing.
The Japanese market is very different. You have all sorts of internationalization, cultural, licence model issues. I don't know much about the Japanese blogging scene, but I'm willing to bet they're not using blogger etc as much as in the West. You might have to emphasise blogging from mobiles, for example.
The Japanese internet is pretty isolated in general. It sounds like a smart move by MS as they probably have the resources to target the market carefully.
No kidding, not only is it available this side of the decade, it's been online for two years and was even linked from a comment on this very site.
Well, the dotcom world hasn't moved that much since then, but by the same token, the semantic web hasn't really made much progress either. Clay Shirky has some wisely pessimistic views on the subject. For example, he cites the W3C's own example in promoting the semantic web: Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web?
A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller's own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/]
As Shirky observes, One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.
Slashdot Mirror
The important quote is buried towards the end of the article:
One device in my pocket or two? It's a no-brainer if you ask me.
Just goes to show why we need open protocols and open code for the future of VOIP. It's too important to leave to a single company, which is why I prefer SIP and clients like Google Talk and Gizmo where possible.
Except when you consider that mac users are going to have disproportionately larger bank accounts.
I don't know why that's been modded as Funny. I'd happily bet a powerbook for an acer laptop that Mac users on average are worth more to banks than pc users. Not only because they are almost definitely more wealthy (do I have to explain it), but also because they are much more influential on average. Think about it - bloggers, entrepeneurs, geeks, richer people in general. All have more influence than average.
Can someone please post it.
This is not meant to be a flame, but... ... that's just the way it turned out?
A bit OT but Linux sucks (not meant to be construed as flamebait).
gvim will do it - and command-line. Just run it with a couple of initial commands (use -c to specify comands). ":syntax on" to turn syntax highlighting on and ":hardcopy" to print.
Haven't tried it, but should be a breeze. And a portable solution too.
Knoppix might be useful for rescuing a system, but as an overal distro, it suffers from the problem that you can't install it to your hard drive. There are complex workarounds, but it defeats the purpose. I really hope the knoppix team add that functionality.
Meanwhile, MEPIS does exactly that. It's a live distro like knoppix, but once you've decided you like it and it's compatible with your hardware, you just install it on your HD like a regular distro. And it's also based on Debian. One downside, though, is lack of activity: the current released version is a year old.
GmailFS - The Google File System (August 4)
I suspect that most of the downloads were made by the existing Firefox users who wanted to upgrade to the new version.
Yep, alhough there's been some decent media coverage, so probably more IE guys than normal.
Mozilla, well done but please report on browser stats for something like this!
You forgot "hiring a Linux strategist to instill fear in customers who take SCO's claim seriously" and "pay SCO a 'licence fee' to fund their 'operating system'".
Yeah agree, other extensions try to launch new windows or something and the tabbrowser extension just pops up a blank tab. To be level with opera, firefox needs a proper API for launching windows which makes the window/tab issue transparent to other extensions.
Most of the extensions were already compatible with 1.0 PR, but had version support limited to .9. You could often hack them yourself to .10 manually and then install them. Would you rather have this inconvenience, or an extension that screws up your new version because there was no version checking?
I'd rather have a third option: an extension that the Firefox team considered important enough to upgrade themselves, or not break, when stepping up to 1.0. Where's the logic in every user manually hacking plugins? Besides which, it will certainly not go mainstream if users have to hack XUL on the side!
One cool thing about Firefox is support for extensions, extra search engines, etc. Totally configurable and that's the kind of users it's going for.
If firefox is to hit mainstream, some of the more popular plugins need to be incorporated directly into the product. At the very least, offer for download a chunky version with lots of stuff already installed. But even that won't cut it. Some features, like tabbed browsing, can't just be added on as extensions because they interact badly with other extensions.
Also, there are backward-compatibility problems with each new release. Developers of open-source extensions aren't going to keep updating their work, so supporting at least the more important extensions should be considered essential from a release perspective, and perhaps they should be incorporated into the core project where possible.
There's nothing wrong with an extension arhcitecture per se. In fact, they have worked very well in open source, e.g. Eclipse and Linux. And that's true for firefox too. However, the management of extensions requires careful consideration. In Firefox's case, there's room for improvement.
(BTW maybe this has nothing to do with the interview but it's slashdotted, that's my excuse for waffling on.)
The anti-trust suits against Microsoft would have resulted in at least one of two things. The first would be removing IE so the person has to manually install it from the CD or download it after install. Second, force all of Microsoft's web development tools to be 100% standards compliant. Instead, the Bush administration gives them a get out of jail free pass and California accepts coupons for MS products which is the anti-solution for software monoculture in schools.
Yeah politics is rough, it's not fair, etc. But OTOH this story shows that Mozilla/Firefox has become more popular (even if not yet 15%) in the face of it all. Just as google rose to fame well after yahoo, alta, msn were entrenched in the homepages and bookmarks of the world's browsers. Well after the megacorps realised there was a buck or two in this thing.
Same applies to server-side linux and apache BTW.
Quality and innovation account for a lot too, naieve as it may sound.
I've never heard of them and htey've got their own domain already? No http://stanford.edu/users/jerry/? No http://google.stanford.edu? If these guys want it big-time, they should earn their keep on stanford.edu - go for http://morpheus.cs.stanford.edu/~tableausoftwareid ea, ???, profit.
I'm still not convinced the market of divxed simpsons watching on train consumers is that great...
No, me neither. My point is that with the form factor taken care of, more people will buy these and experiment. Then maybe we'll both be convinced.
Wait a sec... out of curiousity, what are you using to do this? I'm posting from a Treo 600 right now, and wasn't aware such software was available for this.
... wait for it ... native divx! You still need to convert divx so it's small enough, but you can easily store a half-hour cartoon in 20MB, or a non-cartoon movie in 200MB. Since you can get 1GB SD cards now, there's plenty of room left over for backup, mp3s, etc. You can make the movies with virtualdub or check out pqdvd.com, which lets you rip a dvd straight to divx.
Check out mmplayer, which does a great job of playing
As I said on the treo thread yesterday, I only wish they ditched the keypad and got a full-size screen. Especially when high-resolution comes out!
A simpler option is kinoma, but nowhere near as powerful.
Lots of people say "why would I ever need to watch movies". Fair enough, but the new player takes away the biggest reason *not* to have a video player. Not everyone will go for it, but there will now be a lot more people who'll say "why not have video as well, if the form factor is the same".
People might not think they would use video, but they'd be surprised if they actually had the opportunity, as I do on my Treo. When you can't be bothered reading on a crowded train, or you've got to wait somewhere a few minutes, nothing beats pulling a Simpsons episode out of your pocket. And you're not going to bring a player especially for that, but if it's already there anyway (because you carry your music everywhere), you'll use it.
I hate to be one of those "if only it had X" posters, but I feel strongly here ...
I wish they'd bring out models without keypad, especially if they're going hi-res. I know you can use newpen or whatever, but it's almost pointless on such a small screen.
The P900 form factor is much better for many users - it only takes an hour or two to learn jot/graffiti after all, is that really worth sacrificing all that screen space. The original handspring units did have a stylus-only option, maybe it wasn't popular, but the P800/P900 success shows there's a big market.
So please sony or someone bring out a PalmOS phone with big screen instead of useless keypad that's too small for the adult male users who are your primary target!
Don't worry. They *will* release DVDs of the originals, in a couple of years, as part of the Platinum Uber-Fan Comlpete Ripoff Collection. And, to watch a few dialogue changes and some crappier CGI, a million sucke^H^H^H fans will fork out $199.95 for the priviledge.
Another interesting publishing model is Sourcebeat. Not self-publishing, but a publisher where new online editions are released each month, to keep up with open source projects as they develop.
Nice to see these new models by people who "get it".
It's a win-win situation.
Er win-win-lose situation would be more precise.
I learned to touch-type simply by programming lots. Others will undoubtedly learn by playing games or using MS-Word, etc.
Computers are ubiquitous enough that people automatically learn how to touch-type anyway. Going through the motions of "homing on the middle row" etc seems boring and, if anything, would mislead people into thinking that's the only way to learn how to touch-type.
Just because something is a necessity in life doesn't mean it has to be formally taught.
Teach programming, teach searching techniques, teach word-processing if you must. But don't teach typing.
The Japanese market is very different. You have all sorts of internationalization, cultural, licence model issues. I don't know much about the Japanese blogging scene, but I'm willing to bet they're not using blogger etc as much as in the West. You might have to emphasise blogging from mobiles, for example.
The Japanese internet is pretty isolated in general. It sounds like a smart move by MS as they probably have the resources to target the market carefully.
(mysteriously available already)
No kidding, not only is it available this side of the decade, it's been online for two years and was even linked from a comment on this very site.
Well, the dotcom world hasn't moved that much since then, but by the same token, the semantic web hasn't really made much progress either.
Clay Shirky has some wisely pessimistic views on the subject. For example, he cites the W3C's own example in promoting the semantic web:
Q: How do you buy a book over the Semantic Web?
A: You browse/query until you find a suitable offer to sell the book you want. You add information to the Semantic Web saying that you accept the offer and giving details (your name, shipping address, credit card information, etc). Of course you add it (1) with access control so only you and seller can see it, and (2) you store it in a place where the seller can easily get it, perhaps the seller's own server, (3) you notify the seller about it. You wait or query for confirmation that the seller has received your acceptance, and perhaps (later) for shipping information, etc. [http://www.w3.org/2002/03/semweb/]
As Shirky observes, One doubts Jeff Bezos is losing sleep.