Of course, Epinions are not too helpful when the product is brand new. I usually go through a couple of five-star reviews and several one-stars (if such exist) to see what people are generally complaining about.
It is really hard for a newcomer to enter the Wi-Fi market right now. The wireless LAN market suddenly achieved saturation and started experiencing price wars even before it was fully developed and there was an 802.11 hotspot at every house.
However, this is bonanza time for consumers and businesses, here are some quotes from the market report quoted above:
The average price for a chip that enables connections for an 802.11b wireless LAN (WLAN), also known as Wi-Fi, was $16.06 in 2002, but that price will drop to $6.61 by the end of 2003.
The price for chips based on the 802.11g standard is also expected to fall this year, from $18 per chip in 2002 to $9.68 by the end of 2003
Other Infinion story - instant-boot chip
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Infineon seems to be all over the news today. Besides this release here's another one:
International Business Machines Corp. and German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said they have made an important step toward developing a new kind of memory that could enable computers to boot up instantaneously.
IBM said that the magnetic random access memory technology, or MRAM, could replace existing forms of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM -- which is the most popular form of computer memory -- as early as 2005.
This story sounds like a wrap-up of an SNS issue, written by analyst Mark Anderson about half a year ago. Yes, Bluetooth has essentially failed to deliver promises on its wild popularity, and Wi-Fi is the NBT (Next Big Thing). However, it's important to remember that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were designed for different reasons.
If Bob Frankston were writing for an automotive magazine, he'd probably write a subheading 'Why has car business flourished while bikes have essentially failed? Should we even care about bikes?' If you want to connect to the Internet and have wireless access within your house or in the hotel room, use Wi-Fi. But what if all you want is to have devices talk to one another? Remote control to your car computer, telephone handset to the telephone base, PDA to the laptop, etc.? In some cases Bluetooth makes sense more than 802.11b, if you consider cost of deployment and power consumption issues.
Thus Bluetooth is not really a competitor, it's a niche technology that's out there and that's getting more attention from manufacturers. Wi-Fi is immensely bigger and more marketable, but in the nutshell Bluetooth has its own applications and will persist in hardware design for next few years.
The following statement is being issued by SCO (Nasdaq: SCOX - News): SCO owns the contract rights to the UNIX® operating system. SCO has the contractual right to prevent improper donations of UNIX code, methods or concepts into Linux by any UNIX vendor.
Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.
SCO's lawsuit against IBM does not involve patents or copyrights. SCO's complaint specifically alleges breach of contract, and SCO intends to protect and enforce all of the contracts that the company has with more than 6,000 licensees.
We formed SCOsource in January 2003 to enforce our UNIX rights and we intend to aggressively continue in this successful path of operation.
1) Record your roommate singing in the shower, rehearsing a speech, whistling on the toilet seat. 2) Using roommate's login, upload the recorded file to the university network the file named 50_Cent-Complete_Album.mp3, or R_Kelly_Ignition(remix).mp3 3) Wait to see the look on his face when the letter from RIAA arrives.
It is comparable with Librettos and Porteges. Read the specs on the manufacturer's site, the notebook is quite small and slim (although not ultra-slim).
This baby has been selling at Best Buy for $550 after rebates, which means that a lot of those items would be popping up on eBay brand new and sealed. It's a subnotebook from Sotec, a good Japanese brand, that's apparently trying to wage a price war on the US market.
I was able to boot up Knoppix CD with no problems, brought networking up and was capable of playing MP3 and MPEG video files. Have not tried installing Linux on it, but the assumption is it would go fine, since everything worked in bootable-CD version of Knoppix.
Do you think that with PressPlay, MusicNet et al. the digital music business is at the point where it should be? Is it heading in the right direction? Is that what you planned to eventually achieve with MP3.com?
Since the Lindows PCs have been selling for a while, your marketing and customer service folks must have gotten some kind of feedback from current or prospective users.
What are the things people ask for? What are some things general users would like to see in Lindows or Linux-based desktop distributions that aren't there yet?
Rebate tracking - great forum from FatWallet.com, search for company name before you purchase anything that requires a rebate.
I would recommend Dell, Amazon.com and Viking Components for rebate deals - never had problems with either one of those, and just got another $50 Dell Axim rebate in the mail today. The rules are always clear, the fulfillment is on time.
The whole rebate thing does strike me as odd - if they can pay you back the money, why not lower the price right there in the store? You still have to pay state sales tax on the before-rebate price.
Yeah, I am the one who submitted that link and did it on late Saturday night. Now if only the approval/rejection process was a little bit faster, the link would have been relevant.
Issa believes the construction of a GSM network could benefit companies from France and Germany, the two European nations that have most strongly opposed U.S. policy on Iraq. Issa is incensed that vendors such as Alcatel SA and Siemens AG currently stand to benefit from purchase orders for what he calls "the outdated French standard".
Shutterfly - great if you plan to use Internet Explorer to communicate with the site, they have an ActiveX plug-in, where you can select multiple files to upload. Warning though, you will not be able to download your photos in original resolution once you upload them. The only way to get back a high-res photo is to buy a CD from Shutterfly.
Epson Photo Center - one of the few services where you can download exactly the same resolution as you uploaded, so great for storing large pictures. Except that they require Web forms for the photos to be uploaded, and the Web forms they have accept a single photo at a time (maximum of 10-20 per page, if I recall). Might spend your whole evening clicking and selecting, when downloading 1000 new images off your flash card.
Ofoto - nothing too thrilling, pretty much the same offering as Shuttefly without the ActiveX plug in for multiple uploads. Has connections with Amazon, so it's possible to get some promotinal free photos with them if you buy some related items at Amazon. I got 25 free photos with the software I bought at Amazon site.
Yahoo! Photos - 30 megs is a bummer, but if you use other Yahoo! services regularly, might find the site easier to navigate and play with. Although all other guys mentioned above allow unlimited (well, supposedly) hosting and sharing.
and here are some of the reasons I did not like this PDA. Linux OS aside, the price-performance ratios are quite poor (well, for the mentioned price after the drop not too poor), but got tired of needing to recharge the thing after every major effort. Good toy, but nothing productive.
This bug has been confirmed by Microsoft and they are currently researching this problem. Don't expect a quick fix, since the last time the support article was updated is Oct 1999.
Well, he's talking about opening his own business. Oregon is still pretty attractive for low cost of living, great outdoors and lack of sales tax. I believe the broadband within Portland or Salem areas is not a problem either.
Slashdot Mirror
But I am planning to insult every person in the Universe.
$521,000,000 USD isn't much to Microsoft. They probably have 8 times this amount saved up for legal issues anyways.
How about 100 times as much? Microsoft has near 50 billion of good ole cash in the bank.
Nomad Zen reviews
iPod reviews
Of course, Epinions are not too helpful when the product is brand new. I usually go through a couple of five-star reviews and several one-stars (if such exist) to see what people are generally complaining about.
The cautious definition "one of the largest" does not fit here. AOL has the largest market share of U.S. subscribers with 27.3%, with the closest competitor, MSN, being at 9.3%.
TechKnowledge claims that even though the shipment volumes will grow, the revenues from the wireless LAN sales will decline , since this market is currently experiencing oversupply.
However, this is bonanza time for consumers and businesses, here are some quotes from the market report quoted above:
The average price for a chip that enables connections for an 802.11b wireless LAN (WLAN), also known as Wi-Fi, was $16.06 in 2002, but that price will drop to $6.61 by the end of 2003.
The price for chips based on the 802.11g standard is also expected to fall this year, from $18 per chip in 2002 to $9.68 by the end of 2003
New chip boots up computers like a light
This story sounds like a wrap-up of an SNS issue, written by analyst Mark Anderson about half a year ago. Yes, Bluetooth has essentially failed to deliver promises on its wild popularity, and Wi-Fi is the NBT (Next Big Thing). However, it's important to remember that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were designed for different reasons.
If Bob Frankston were writing for an automotive magazine, he'd probably write a subheading 'Why has car business flourished while bikes have essentially failed? Should we even care about bikes?' If you want to connect to the Internet and have wireless access within your house or in the hotel room, use Wi-Fi. But what if all you want is to have devices talk to one another? Remote control to your car computer, telephone handset to the telephone base, PDA to the laptop, etc.? In some cases Bluetooth makes sense more than 802.11b, if you consider cost of deployment and power consumption issues.
Thus Bluetooth is not really a competitor, it's a niche technology that's out there and that's getting more attention from manufacturers. Wi-Fi is immensely bigger and more marketable, but in the nutshell Bluetooth has its own applications and will persist in hardware design for next few years.
That was quick:
The following statement is being issued by SCO (Nasdaq: SCOX - News):
SCO owns the contract rights to the UNIX® operating system. SCO has the contractual right to prevent improper donations of UNIX code, methods or concepts into Linux by any UNIX vendor.
Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights.
SCO's lawsuit against IBM does not involve patents or copyrights. SCO's complaint specifically alleges breach of contract, and SCO intends to protect and enforce all of the contracts that the company has with more than 6,000 licensees.
We formed SCOsource in January 2003 to enforce our UNIX rights and we intend to aggressively continue in this successful path of operation.
1) Record your roommate singing in the shower, rehearsing a speech, whistling on the toilet seat.
2) Using roommate's login, upload the recorded file to the university network the file named 50_Cent-Complete_Album.mp3, or R_Kelly_Ignition(remix).mp3
3) Wait to see the look on his face when the letter from RIAA arrives.
It is comparable with Librettos and Porteges. Read the specs on the manufacturer's site, the notebook is quite small and slim (although not ultra-slim).
This baby has been selling at Best Buy for $550 after rebates, which means that a lot of those items would be popping up on eBay brand new and sealed. It's a subnotebook from Sotec, a good Japanese brand, that's apparently trying to wage a price war on the US market.
I was able to boot up Knoppix CD with no problems, brought networking up and was capable of playing MP3 and MPEG video files. Have not tried installing Linux on it, but the assumption is it would go fine, since everything worked in bootable-CD version of Knoppix.
Do you think that with PressPlay, MusicNet et al. the digital music business is at the point where it should be? Is it heading in the right direction? Is that what you planned to eventually achieve with MP3.com?
Since the Lindows PCs have been selling for a while, your marketing and customer service folks must have gotten some kind of feedback from current or prospective users.
What are the things people ask for? What are some things general users would like to see in Lindows or Linux-based desktop distributions that aren't there yet?
Rebate tracking - great forum from FatWallet.com, search for company name before you purchase anything that requires a rebate.
I would recommend Dell, Amazon.com and Viking Components for rebate deals - never had problems with either one of those, and just got another $50 Dell Axim rebate in the mail today. The rules are always clear, the fulfillment is on time.
The whole rebate thing does strike me as odd - if they can pay you back the money, why not lower the price right there in the store? You still have to pay state sales tax on the before-rebate price.
Yeah, I am the one who submitted that link and did it on late Saturday night. Now if only the approval/rejection process was a little bit faster, the link would have been relevant.
Will you accept a check?
What's wrong with Sharp Zaurus - mainly battery life, applications crashing when dealing with lartge documents, inconvenient thumb keyboard.
What's good and bad about Dell Axim - mainly problems with battery reporting, problems with ActiveSync and infamous battery reporting bug.
Yeah, there's been a massive celebration of that event, I think I've on hof for a while.
Right, missed the fact they have special software besides the Web site upload forms.
Shutterfly - great if you plan to use Internet Explorer to communicate with the site, they have an ActiveX plug-in, where you can select multiple files to upload. Warning though, you will not be able to download your photos in original resolution once you upload them. The only way to get back a high-res photo is to buy a CD from Shutterfly.
Epson Photo Center - one of the few services where you can download exactly the same resolution as you uploaded, so great for storing large pictures. Except that they require Web forms for the photos to be uploaded, and the Web forms they have accept a single photo at a time (maximum of 10-20 per page, if I recall). Might spend your whole evening clicking and selecting, when downloading 1000 new images off your flash card.
Ofoto - nothing too thrilling, pretty much the same offering as Shuttefly without the ActiveX plug in for multiple uploads. Has connections with Amazon, so it's possible to get some promotinal free photos with them if you buy some related items at Amazon. I got 25 free photos with the software I bought at Amazon site.
Yahoo! Photos - 30 megs is a bummer, but if you use other Yahoo! services regularly, might find the site easier to navigate and play with. Although all other guys mentioned above allow unlimited (well, supposedly) hosting and sharing.
and here are some of the reasons I did not like this PDA. Linux OS aside, the price-performance ratios are quite poor (well, for the mentioned price after the drop not too poor), but got tired of needing to recharge the thing after every major effort. Good toy, but nothing productive.
This bug has been confirmed by Microsoft and they are currently researching this problem. Don't expect a quick fix, since the last time the support article was updated is Oct 1999.
Tony Perkins, the editor-in-chief of Red Herring, or I guess, it's former editor-in-chief now, posted his position and thoughts on AlwaysOn.
Well, he's talking about opening his own business. Oregon is still pretty attractive for low cost of living, great outdoors and lack of sales tax. I believe the broadband within Portland or Salem areas is not a problem either.