a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
The recording industry has withdrawn a lawsuit against a Newbury woman because it falsely accused her of illegally sharing music — possibly the first case of mistaken identity in the battle against Internet file-traders. [Boston.com]
Seems an open AP enabled a windows user to trade music over a Mac households network which confused the intelligence gathered by the RIAA. Perhaps the more who share the bandwidth the more likely the RIAA is to have to drop suits due to lack of evidence…
A new laptop is imminent and as a result I’ve started really rethinking my PDA/Phone strategy… For the first time I will have bluetooth which means I can get wireless access on my computer while traveling via the right kind of phone or PDA. The Treo 600 will certainly do wireless email, but won’t let my laptop share the ride unless I use a cable as it does not have bluetooth or wifi inside. The Sony UX50 has both bluetooth and wifi, but is not a phone.
It’s coming down to a one-piece vs two-piece issue. If bluetooth reliably connects it all together I think I can handle doing it through multiple devices. It would certainly not be horrible to get a new phone (which I am planning to do as soon as portability kicks in) and a new PDA. The new Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones look great, work with iSync and can be quite small as well which would be nice.
It’s all personal preference… I just have to figure out what mine is.
Gov. Gray Davis signed into law last night a bill that outlaws sending most commercial e-mail messages to anyone in the state who has not explicitly requested them. That makes it the most wide-reaching law of any of the 35 other state laws meant to regulate spam — or any of the proposed bills in Congress.
“We are saying that unsolicited e-mail cannot be sent and there are no loopholes,” said Kevin Murray, the Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who sponsored the bill.
The law, which also prohibits companies inside the state from sending unsolicited e-mail to anyone outside the state, imposes fines of $1,000 for each message, up to $1 million for each campaign. [New York Times]
Get to know the man behind the animal-woodcut covers that fill our bookshelves. His mission: “Technology transfer–helping important technologies become more widespread” and to “create more value than we capture.”
Many forget how influential O’Reilly & Associates was during the early days of the Internet. They created Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first portal and serious e-commerce web site, which they sold to AOL, who proceeded to drop the ball. (Tim tells us why he doesn’t regret selling GNN.) And remember Internet In a Box, a collaboration of O’Reilly and Spry Software?
All of this and more in a great IT Conversation with Tim O’Reilly. [Web Services Strategies]
Great audio interview…
A federal judge has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission overstepped its authority in creating a national do-not-call list against telemarketers. [ABCNEWS.com]
PalmSource has announced at its developer seminar, currently under way in Munich, that Palm OS 6, code-named Sahara, will be complete by December 29th. The new version will focus on wireless technology standards, security and multimedia.
Developers will also be able to write fully ARM native applications. With OS 5 developers have had to use armlet’s, or snippets of ARM code, to speed up applications to take advantage of ARM processors. OS 6 will also include Multi-processing/threading features, web services (XML/SOAP), a reference Java VM and the PalmSource proxy-less web browser.
Assuming the first devices to be native are released in the spring – a somewhat usual delivery timeframe for PalmOne, will existing OS 5 devices be upgradeable?? I really like the idea of the Treo (with possible SDIO WiFi), but don’t want to be too locked in, though upgrades and trade-ins always work.
Dartmouth College has long been at the forefront of wireless technology, and now plans to provide free VoIP to incoming freshman via the campus wireless network. The college was one of the first to implement e-mail in the 1980’s, long before other colleges. Now the campus is providing 1,000 students their own seven-digit phone numbers and software allowing them to use the campus wireless network for VoIP calls. Though the campus currently only plans to offer the service to incoming freshman, the school intends to provide VoIP to all 13,000 college attendees (NY Times, Free reg. required), including faculty and staff. In a year, the school intends to launch a similar video service. [DSL Reports]
More on the Roku… no wonder it’s so cool
ReplayTV creator Anthony Wood on Monday unveiled his latest consumer electronics effort, a company named Roku whose first product is a media player for high-definition televisions.[CNET News.com – Personal Technology]
I’ve always thought Replay had a tech edge over TiVO but was too gunshy to buy a product that was being hamstrung by legal actions. I will definitely be watching this one.
Note the time of the Scrubs premiere show. It starts at 8:32PM. huh? Coupling is a new show that also sports an odd time slot: 9:27PM-9:58PM. ER starts at 9:59PM that same night. Friends runs for 47 minutes and is followed by a 39 minute long Will and Grace. What in the hell is going on? My TiVo is currently reporting these start times as the actual slots for this Thursday and next Thursday’s line is mostly back to normal, but ER starts a few minutes early as well.
It appears that NBC might be doing this to tweak PVR owners wanting to record CSI or Survivor over on CBS opposite their shows. If you had a season pass for both CSI and ER (both shows would likely have audiences that overlap) and you wanted to record ER you wouldn’t be able to tape CSI during the preceding hour, thanks to the minutes of overlap that would produce a conflict.
[PVRblog]
Good thing my DVR box has two tuners…
Got the official green light today for a new Powerbook. I believe it was even ordered today!! A new machine is going to be a great change of pace, though after three years my current TiBook has really put in some good service. I’ve been to Europe (Switzerland, Netherlands, Czech Republich), all over the US, Mexico and the Bahamas with my trusted companion. It’s been a true workhorse giving about 9000 hours of service (I think that is a low estimate at 8 hours per day).
If you are reading this in your aggregator you’ve been missing my messing with the template on the site. I’m far from an expert coder, but with a little help from the Dreamweaver MX Trial, I am able to tweak my style sheet with relative ease. I’ll be messing in the free cycles that I get over the next week or so so pardon any construction oddities.
I have noticed that Safari is not treating my blog very nicely. The sidebar is loading at the bottom instead of on the side – even in the 10.2.8 update which was applied tonight. Moz and IE do just fine… if anyone has any thoughts, I’d appreciate knowing how to fix this.
iPass is offering a new Wi-Fi roaming service, designed for wireless carriers and service providers that want to quickly enter the hot spot market and increase the reach of their networks.
On Monday, the network software and service developer launched its Wi-Fi Roaming Service, which essentially allows business travelers to gain access to several Wi-Fi hot spots using a single account. [CNET News.com]
This is just what the doctor ordered. It is impossible to to pick a single Wifi carrier at this time due to the lack of coverage and the deals that have been cut with hotels and airports. Hopefully this will work quickly to simplify the process and enable a much greater group of people to gain access. Now if iPass would just update the OS X client to enable WiFi, I’d be all set. For some reason my version is the latest (and shows WiFi on their site) does not include WiFi as a choice yet.
This looks very cool…
For the first time, you can enjoy viewing your favorite digital photos in high-definition on your HDTV. Simply snap in your digital camera’s memory card or use the easy network connection between Roku and your home PC. And if you like a more sophisticated atmosphere, choose from a wide selection of motion and still artwork to turn your Flat-Screen or HDTV into beautiful wall art. Roku offers custom Art Packs on CompactFlash cards so you can create an inspiring home gallery in your living room.
Roku even plays digital music files over your home network, so you can finally enjoy that growing MP3 library on your home stereo system. Any way you use it, Roku is simple and easy. Just connect to your home network for sharing digital media from your PC, or pop in a variety of memory cards and watch your HDTV come to life with high-definition digital photos, art and music.[Roku]
Two lawsuits later…
VeriSign said it was creating a committee of “Internet leaders” to advise it on technical matters although it planned to continue offering its SiteFinder service, launched last week amid a firestorm of protest from privacy advocates and rivals. [CBS MarketWatch]
Why doesn’t my digital camera have an “email this picture” option? Why can’t my iPod be updated with news or email or RSS feeds? Why does Tivo require a physical connection to a telephone landline? Why is data access so much more expensive than voice access? [MediaSavvy]
It’s time for applications to start running off of remote configuration files. By this, I mean have applications store their settings in a file they access via an HTTP call, instead of on the local file system. [Gadgetopia]
This would be fantastic across a few apps – RSS Aggregators (subscriptions and what’s been read or updated), mail programs (junk filtering and rules) and the browser (cookies, passwords and bookmarks).
The coming freedom to keep your cell-phone number when changing wireless companies has overshadowed a possibly more revolutionary change also due this fall: the power to move a number from a regular wired phone to a mobile handset.
While traditional local phone companies see the government-mandated change as an unfair invitation for wireless rivals to steal their core customers, they say they’ll be ready by a Nov. 24 deadline to fulfill certain requests by customers who want a home or office number to become a cell-phone number.
The new rules also require that cellular companies be prepared to transfer a mobile number to a landline phone, though such requests are expected to be somewhat scarce at a time when millions of people have gone all-wireless at home and at work. [Wired News]
Divmod Quotient brings together your email, IM/IRC and IP telephony. Having not tried it yet, it looks a little like Zoe. [Hack the Planet]
Looks like a very cool project that will allow for Bayesian spam filtering, indexing of mail including IMAP, as well as safe (no image loading) mail. I love projects like this and today use Zoe which indexes my mail, but does not include Spam filtering. For that I’ve been messing with SpamSieve when I am in Mail.app and Moz’s built in when I read from within the browser.
Right now it is still a bit too early for me on this one, but something to follow certainly.
Mozilla 1.5 RC1 is the latest version of the alternative Web browser for Mac OS X. Version 1.5 adds improvements to Mozilla Composer, support for logging in Chatzilla, improvements to tabbed browsing, and improved unstyled XML display. [MacNN News]
I’ve been hooked on Mozilla for a month or two now and can’t see going back to Safari until it gets a significant update. I’m too hooked on the sidebar and the integration of Mail (the client is excellent with great junk filtering) but there are still a few kinks I’d like to see worked out either in Mozilla or Firebird. Nothing I see as a showstopper, and only one that continues to actually bother me continously (though not enough to switch back):
Open links from external apps in new tabs instead of windows – not sure why you can’t do it, but at least I know it’s like that on all platforms, not just Mac. Safari has this as an option in the prefs and Moz needs to get on this. It’s a pain to have multiple windows going after you’ve adjusted to tabbed browsing.
Mozilla has a much more robust password management system than Safari and can actually maintain multiple passwords and logins for the same page which is very helpful in the work environment when you are switching between views as either you or your client.
I don’t understand though why the form auto-fill feature is not able to be added as either a button on the toolbar or a keyboard shortcut. It stores a plethora of information if you choose and can would be even more helpful if it were more accessible.
Overall, Mozilla is an excellent browser. There are only a few instances when I have to use something else and unfortunately it’s IE.
Hertz does not let you rent a car successfully without IE since the page does not work unless you are in that old piece of crap. Too bad they don’t mention it when you arrive.
Lotus Notes forces IE as well since it only successfully opens links in IE (not even Safari). Usually I cut and paste, but click here link-types don’t paste since you can’t capture the location.
I highly recommend Mozilla and would encourage anyone to put it to the test. It hold’s it’s own against any option proving in many cases to be superior.
While the infamous blue screen of death may haunt many desktop computer users, the banking industry and security experts dismiss the fear that someone will break into Windows-powered ATMs to empty bank accounts. For one, the ATMs will use a stripped-down version of Windows NT that is quite different from the software on desktop computers.
“What Microsoft actually sells to the banks for ATM use is a cut-down version of Windows that doesn’t contain things like Web servers,” said Ross Anderson, a researcher in Cambridge, England, and author of Security Engineering. “They have tried to cut out the unnecessary rubbish that clutters up the typical PC. How good a job they’ve done, I just don’t know…. So we definitely can’t rule out the possibility that someone in the future writes a Slammer-style worm that causes thousands of ATMs to start spewing out cash.” [Wired News]