Wow…I’m thoroughly impressed. This Helios guy has finally hit the nail on the head! If all you Windows users out there (yes, I know you use Windows, I can see it in my stats) thought I was being unnecessarily snobby about my independence from Redmond, you were right. I’m sorry. I see the light now, and Helios is here to explain it to us:
Who’d-a thought?
jkontherun has a nice, thorough review of the forthcoming Nokia 770 “Internet Tablet” up on his techblog… And despite a few shortcomings, this slick little geek toy looks like it might just end up a winner. It’s more than a PDA, less than a laptop or tablet PC, and it runs Linux, so you get that warm fuzzy open-source feeling when you use it.
With mixed reviews out of the bag, the 770 has yet to give me that gutteral, “I must have one of these the day they hit the market” feeling the way the Rio Karma or the Kahr PM9 did. That said, my Karma has long since been replaced with an iPod mini, and I have yet to drop the better part of a week’s pay into a PM9. I rarely (if ever) pay any credence to that feeling anyway; I much prefer the old standby of “the best things come to those who wait”. I also like it’s corollary, “the best prices come to those who wait!”
According to jkontherun, “those who wait” for the 770 can expect to be richly rewarded by Nokia with software updates and stability improvements. And they’ll also get to keep that extra $350 in their wallets that much longer, which is what I plan to do.
All this said, I doubt the 770 will ever make my shopping list anyway – unless companies like ePocrates start making their mobile medical software packages available for the Maemo operating system! Since my [older, but functional] Sony Clie is up for replacement in the not-too-distant future, and Kelly will be in the market as her graduate courses progress, I’m thinking “his and hers” matching PDAs are the way to go. No, this is not because I’m a sap who wants us to look cute when we’re sending wireless e-mails to each other at the local Wi-Fi-enabled bagel shop. It’s actually functional – I’m a big fan of beaming contacts and schedule entries (so I never again need to hear “but you didn’t tell me about that [insert event here]!”) and of being that much better prepared to fix problems and explain features.
Perhaps a pair of Tunsgten Es are in our future?
Australia: Students quit over anti-US slurs
While I can’t imagine the situation is unique, I can’t say I’m surprised that Americans (especially students) are suffering verbal abuse and threats of violence when they visit predominantly leftist Australia. What really surprised me was the double standard that’s being set up:
The Colorado-based Australearn organisation – which teaches “cultural adjustment” to US students before they come to Australia – started … to give [Australia-bound] American students “coping strategies” in the face of an attack.
So let me get this straight… We Americans are supposed to be welcoming, to embrace those of different cultures with different languages or different political views – but when we go down to Australia, we’re just supposed to “cope” with the insults and hate-speak that are hurled at us? So much for “tolerance” and “diversity”!
That big life change I mentioned? Well, here it is: In a few weeks, I’ll be starting a new job.
After a flurry of phone calls and interviews, the Fuel Cell Division of General Motors will be welcoming me as their newest electrical engineer. I’ll be working directly with the team responsible for bringing a commercially-viable GM fuel cell engine to market over the next few years.
To say I’m excited would be an understatement. To say I’m honored to be offered the job wouldn’t convey just how fortunate I feel. And to say I nearly peed myself when the offer came in – well yeah, that’d be pretty accurate.
Leaving my current job will, of course, be bitter-sweet. I’ll miss working on the product that my Dad and I dreamed up on the sidelines of an American LeMans race. I’ll miss the design team, too. But – if all goes well – I should be able to do a some evening consulting, maintaining the designs that I contributed over the last two years. And, with any luck, the product will be successful – the fulfillment of our dream despite my partial disconnection.
David Livingstone said, “I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s forward.”
I heartily agree.
As you can see, there have been some big changes here at daverea.com. After putting up with Blogger’s antics for far too long, I finally upraded my hosting and installed WordPress. Let me tell ya – it’s a pretty kickass piece of software.
With all these changes going on around my web site, long-time readers (I have those?) might be suspicious that a big life change is coming soon…
They’d be right.
So apparently, according to UN puppet group IANSA, this week has been the “Global Week of Action on Small Arms”. IANSA, your friendly neighborhood world-wide victim disarmament coalition, would like you to take this week to remember those who have fallen victim to gun violence. Counting the 150 million defenseless (read: disarmed) people who were murdered by their own governments in the 20th century, we’ve got a lot of remembering to do. And don’t forget all the gun violence victims in nations where civilian gun ownership is forbidden – who were somehow shot (or worse) by those pesky criminals (imagine that! illegally armed criminals!) anyway.
[smacks forehead]
In honor of IANSA’s “week of action”, I’m going to take action. The action of enjoying an extra box of ammo at the range this weekend. And while the hand-wringers at the UN fret over the horrors of civilian gun ownership, I’ll obliterate a few extra targets in their honor.
As I’m sure you heard yesterday when your local neighborhood geek started trumpeting “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”, Apple Computer has decided to switch to Intel’s processors. Of course, this has the computer/IT editorial world all abuzz, speculating wildly about the ripples that Apple’s big U-turn might have on the industry.
I read one article this morning that asserted that Apple’s switch to x86 will spell the death of Linux on the desktop by supplanting it as the “underdog of choice” on that hardware platform. Linux will, supposedly, become the “third wheel”, adopted as a daily-driver only by the cook fringe of the “free as in speech” computing world.
I’ve only got one problem with this view – it assumes that Linux on the desktop is worth something to begin with. Unfortunately, it’s not. Consider my week computationally: On Sunday, I re-compiled my operating system to add support for a new peripheral. On Monday afternoon, I re-built my web browser from source code to add support for the SVG image format. And last night, I installed Microsoft Activesync on a friend’s laptop while walking my Dad through the basics of Macromedia Dreamweaver. In the words of the vault guard from The Thomas Crown Affair, “We have … a … disparity here.”
Desktop Linux is good for those of us who got sick of paying big bucks for an unreliable, insecure, poorly-designed x86 operating system, and instead want to spend nothing for an x86 operating system that’s reliable as hell but an order-of-magnitude more difficult to configure. It’s also great for the open-source hard heads out there who won’t put anything on their computers that isn’t free as-in-speech in addition to being free as-in-beer.
But for folks like my friend the PocketPC user, Linux on the desktop is about as useful as a car that comes with the engine in individually shrink-wrapped parts in the trunk, and all the tools in the back seat. Sure, you get it for next-to-nothing, but you’re not going out for a spin ’till you assemble that engine.
All of this leaves us, of course, precisely where we started. Apple announced, to much fanfare and hand-waving, that they’re switching to x86 hardware for the Mac. But Apple isn’t planning on supporting those who run Windows on Mac hardware, nor are they planning on allowing OS-X to run on that Dell sitting on your desk. So the Mac users will continue using OS-X, the Windows users will (for the most part) continue using Windows, and we Linux geeks will continue doing what works for us.
If Linux wants to be considered a major contender on the Desktop, the community needs to ante up, bite the bullet and fix a few major problems that – until remedied – will forever banish Linux to the desktops of geeks like me…
Wired News is carrying a story about roadcasting, a new wireless music technology being developed by masters students at Carnegie Mellon University. Evidently, this way-cool idea is based on mobile ad-hoc wireless networks that create broadband data links between cars. As you drive, your car’s stereo can browse the music collections stored on the vehicles around you, and stream music from their collections to your ears.
Even cooler, the research team says your call will be able to develop a profile of your musical tastes based on your music collection, and select songs from others’ collections based on what it thinks you’d enjoy.
Pandora’s box? You betcha! But not in a bad way, just in a way that’ll make Bertlesmann’s lawyers a little richer…
Aside from the obvious whining, FUD and threats that will inevitably flow freely from the RIAA about this, there are other interesting potential developments… As the Wired article relates, data other than music could also be shared. If the system were augmented with GPS, cars ahead of you could warn you of traffic backups or speed traps. Inter-vehicle VoIP could make long caravan trips easier, or eliminate those pesky pull-overs when the car following you doesn’t make it through a traffic light.
At any rate – it’s cool technology that will probably work. Tor Amundson probably didn’t know how avant-garde his mobile Wi-Fi project would end up being! And now it’s going main-stream – so prepare to be entertained … and be careful not to catch the SoBig.exe virus while you’re driving through those “seedier” parts of town!
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