Hawt Damn Week 4

I missed one last week, so here’s a second for this week.

See here. I wouldn’t normally post to something like this, and I have no idea how this thing would be to actually USE but fuck me gently does it look pretty.

Hawt Damn Week 3

And it’s my birthday. This is almost as good as the time Hercules came out on my birthday. Or Lion King before that (:

Firefox 3

Well, download day 2008 is about 5 and a half hours underway. If you don’t know what it’s all about, Firefox is trying to set a world records for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. So far they’re doing really well, at 2.2 million (a map and count). Unfortunately it kicked off to a rather shakey start. At precisely 1:00PM EDT, and 10:00PDT, the Mozilla.org servers were pummeled by likely thousands of people trying to download at once. Since then things have smoothed out considerable:
Firefox 3 Coming Soon

The outpouring of interest and enthusiasm around Firefox 3 has been overwhelming (literally!). Our servers are currently feeling the burn and should be back to normal shortly. Download day will officially commence once the site goes live. The 24 hours period will be clocked from that moment. Thanks for your continued support.

The blog also posts some interesting numbers:

• We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3.
• Net Applications is already reporting a 300% positive change in Firefox 3 market share worldwide just today.
• Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to from Google News
• The Firefox 3 launch made the front pages of BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News
• The completely redesigned Mozilla.com launched in over 25 language versions
• New community activity on SpreadFirefox.com has skyrocketed with dozens of new groups and hundreds of new postings
• Over 700 community launch parties have been registered on mozillaparty.com

I think it should be interesting to see how this turns out. I hope all of the automatic downloads have been counted, such as those through Ubuntu’s Repositories, and Gentoo’s Portage. I’ve been updating various computers around. Unfortunately, most of the computer at my university won’t be counted, as they’re all just ghost images of each other.

My first impressions of Firefox 3 weren’t great. While it was compiling on my Gentoo box, I looked at the screenshot on the Firefox page, it had a really spiffy looking UI:

Unfortunately, I use KDE, and KDE is set to make GTK apps to look like Qt apps, however, Firefox really looked mangled, so after I fixed that, it looks a lot better, but still not as nice. Other than that, it’s too early for me to comment on memory usage, and I haven’t notice a big speed improvement.

On the bright side, their choice to show a Wikipedia article from Atlantic Canada (where I live) amused be quite a bit:

Hawt Damn Week 2

Hawt Damn @ price.

Mobile Computing: Past, Present, and Future

Our concept of mobile computing has change drastically in the past 5 years. Five years ago, it was all about the laptop/notebook. Notebooks were carted all over the place, but they all didn’t have internet access. Wireless internet has reshaped the way we access our data. We now have the ability to move around, and keep in touch without being tethered to a wall.

The PDA used to be the center of ulta-portable computing. A number of advanced has push the PDA back, and out of the limelight. The iPod allowed people to listen to all their music, anywhere. Soon after that, mobile phones got faster, and soon could do a lot of the things a PDA could, while retaining their true heritage as a phone.

Once again, Apple pushed the boundries, and blurred the line between phone, laptop, pda, and iPod. There’s no doubt that if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, that you feel like you’ve got a small computer in your hand. Now with the iPhone 3g announced at WWDC, the price point is coming closer to the average consumer, with speeds that rival that of wireless access, meaning you can load those pages and exchange internet anywheres where there’s cell coverage.

The last step that we’ve seen is the introduction of the Asus Eee PC and the Macbook Air. Both of these computer start from the laptop side of the equation and push it towards the even more mobile side.

So where can we go from here? We can expect to see cheaper, faster, and more widely accessible devices. People are going to start getting used to having their everything in the palm of their hand. E-mail, music, web, movies, and the list goes on. I can see Blackberry users converting, for the fact that the blackberry lacks in some aspects. The Blackberry feels very outdated by todays shiney interfaces. The touch screen revolutionizing the way we interact with data, and it’s here to stay. Mobile Safari lets people view webpages like they’re supposed to look, unlike the Blackberry browser.

Step by step, our lives are becoming more mobile, and people like it.

Hawt Damn Week 1

The woman directly to his left knows what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

Media Here and Now

Most people will tell you that they’re lazy. I know, that’s shocking, but lets look at the facts. Most people want things as quickly and easily as possible. This means, ordering out, renting a movie, and downloading songs.

Wait a second, downloading songs? It’s pretty much accepted that downloading music from sites you don’t pay for is illegal, especially if it’s from limewire/bittorrent. Lots of people are even starting to figure out how to download tv shows and movies this way. But what’s the fix? The fix is to make pay for media easier to access than content you don’t have to pay for. There’s one company that’s ahead of the gang, and that’s Apple.

As you may or may not know, the iPhone and iPod touch both have a built in iTunes store, which you can browse and buy songs and albums, usually cheaper than you can get it from a brick and mortar store (albeit in lower quality, and a lot of times DRM’d). Before you throw your hands up in the air, and denounce iTunes for carrying DRM music, lets remember that Apple is trying to move away from DRM, and pushing up the quality of the songs… at the same price. So far, only indie labels and EMI have jumped on board, but I believe there’s a big push in some consumer markets against DRM. The accessibility of music using my iPod and iTunes now makes it easier to obtain music, sometimes easier than it would be if you ‘acquired it’ through other means.

Now that music is available, what’s next? Apple has been providing movie rents in the United States for a while now, and soon it’s rumoured that it will arrive in Canada. In fact, now that you can rent or buy a movie without leaving your computer is a big bonus. iTunes currently rents both standard and HD movies, and probably delivers them faster than what you could get them from bittorrent, and at prices cheaper than you can rent them from a store like Blockbuster. In the case of movie rents, you have to worry about DRM… or do you? Most rental stores require that the movie be returned by a certain date/time, which is what DRM accomplishes, and to be able to order the movie, you’ve got to have iTunes anyways, so DRM is not that big of an issue in this sense. You’re renting the movie, not buying it.

When you rent a movie, you get the added bonus of being able to watch it on your iPod. This means I can rent a movie for a flight and watch it without having to worry about figuring out how to reencode the video. People that don’t want to use iTunes at all, can still enjoy watching and purchasing media with an AppleTV. AppleTV is a sleek little set top box device, which you can think of like a DVD player, only digital and high definition. If you do in fact have another computer running iTunes, you can stream music to the AppleTV, much like you can stream songs between iTunes clients, so you can have full access to your music and movie library from your couch, which is were most people would want to listen to music. The AppleTV features both component and HDMI connectors to your TV, as well as analog and digital sound (for 7.1 goodness). What’s more to like?

The only downside to using iTunes, is that it’s available only on Windows and Mac, which is solved by dual booting. Unfortunately, those on Linux are left out until the Wine project can get iTunes working and watching movies, those with iPhones and iPod touches have to resort to jailbreaking to sync.