...more recent posts
Google has offered to help host Wikipedia.
I saw some video projected from a Mitsubishi XL5U projector last night. Wow. I have no idea if this is a really good projector, or if they are all this good, but it looks great. And huge. And so bright. I was under the impression that you had to have a dark room, but that is most definitely not the case. The picture is blindingly bright. Why don't more people have these? There must be some downside I am missing.
I've mentioned the photo sharing site flickr many times as an example of how much is possible right now in terms of building very sophisticated application-like web interfaces.
Here is an interview with flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield that is a pretty good explanation of what the site is, and why it has grown so popular.
The Sonos Digital Music System is really cool. If you are a rich person with a big house you should buy this. And then let me come over and play with it. Wow.
I am tempted by this camera phone: Sony / Ericsson S710a.
Google Maps.
I used to equate Google with the ability to build huge data centers out of commodity PCs. But lately I find myself equating them with kick ass web application interfaces. That is a pretty powerful one two punch.
Homograph attacks allow for the spoofing of domain name URLs and SSL certificates thanks to a problem with International Domain Name [IDN] support in modern browsers. This is devastating.
Vulnerable browsers include (but are not limited to):Proof of concept. Damn. IE is safe because it doesn't have IDN support built in. Let's see how fast these vendors respond. They need to fix this immediately.
Most mozilla-based browsers (Firefox 1.0, Camino .8.5, Mozilla 1.6, etc)
Safari 1.2.5
Opera 7.54
Omniweb 5
A couple pieces of Apple (and Steve Jobs) history have been released recently. The first is a video from the original (1984) introduction of the Apple Macintosh. God he looks so young. You can see the RDF (the famous Jobs' Reality Distortion Field) already at work.
The second is of Steve demonstrating NeXTSTEP 3.0. NeXTSTEP is the operating system developed by NeXT, the company Jobs founded between his first and second stints as head of Apple. When Jobs returned to Apple he had them purchase NeXT in order to lay the groundwork for what was to become OS X. Insiders like to joke that this acquisition amounted to a NeXT take over of Apple since the influence was so pervasive. It is amazing to see what NeXT had in 1992! They were so far ahead of the curve it is amazing.
Ant is a video blogging (vlogging) aggregator application.
More bad news from the cellular front. These 3G networks are so cool, but the carriers are completely fucking it up by being greedy bastards. I guess I'm the fool for hoping it might go some other way.
In any case, the bad news here is about "Symbian Signed" and the trend to lock down Symbian OS devices so that the end user can only install carrier approved software. Symbian and MIcrosoft are the two big OS makers for smartphones (yes, the Treo has a Palm OS, but they are on the way out.) And we know Microsoft is going to try to screw the consumer (or, more gently, we know Microsoft will do whatever their customers - the cellular companies - want,) so the hope was that Symbian would go the other way. But it looks like there is reason to suspect that won't be the case.
I think the cellular industry learned from the "mistakes" of the PC world. If you give the people control of the computer (in the PC world that meant the desktop; in the new world that means your smartphone,) they won't be interested in using it for what you, the carrier, want them to use it for (buying Britney Spears ringtones at $2 a pop, and useless crap like that.) So you have to severely limit what the user can do with her computer in order to lock them into using just the services you are selling.
Crap.