Apple to Limit iPhones to Canada?

Written on another blog is news that Apple, king of the new mobile market, and creator of the iPhone, has bitchslapped Rogers, Canada’s only real GSM carrier across the face.

Rumour has it that Apple, who is dissatisfied with Roger’s data plans, is limited shipments of iPhones. Numbers have not been mentioned, but apparently the numbers have been “significantly reduced,” and apparently it’s been confirmed that the extra units are going to Europe. There are some other interesting tidbits, and I encourage you to RTFA.

In other similarly related news, Bell and Telus are supposed to start charging users for incoming text messages if they’re not on a texting plan $0.15 per text. Users that go over their current plan, or do not have a plan, already get charged $0.15 per text. There are several facebook groups dedicated to the issue, and a petition at the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada. Bell and Telus have released new texting plans, as follows:

• $5/mo, 250 outgoing, unlimited incoming
• $10/mo, 2500 outgoing, unlimited incoming
• $15/mo, unlimited outgoing, unlimited incoming

There’s an internal PDF document with steps on how to deal with the matter here

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:

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.

Nokia to Aquire Trolltech?

I think this is pretty big news (from the Trolltech Website)

There seems to be mixed feelings about it on the QT Mailing list I’m on, but mostly negative.

Read on for some posts and their letter:
Continue reading Nokia to Aquire Trolltech?…

Welcome to Wordpress 2.3.2

I just finished upgrading my wordpress. It went really smoothly. I was actually surprized, because usually php scripts aren’t so upgradeable. I’m not sure of the new features, but I do really want to change the blog header. I’ll see if I have anything.

Upgrade!

Well, this version of Wordpress is ANCIENT. I plan on fixing that next week. Starting somewheres on Monday, I’ll be starting to do the big upgrade. I’ll first back up all my Wordpress files, and database, so I can restore. From when I start, comments will be disabled. Jason wants me to put some Flickr stuff up, so I’ll see to that after the upgrade. Hopefully find a new theme? This one’s getting kind of old, don’t you think?

Moving, Yet Again

Well, I’m pretty pissed off at how Awardspace’s free service, and honestly, I don’t want to keep them on, so I did some searching, and I found this pretty nice host, called A Small Orange. I purchased one month of hosting from them for $5. I get 400MB space and 10GB of bandwidth. I’m looking at redesigning the Vectec homepage. Because it sucks. Badly. I like the minimalistic feel that ASO gives me.

I should get my login details within 24 hours, and I’ll start moving my blog then.

Edit: Oh yeah, and I’ll reenable non registered comments, and I’ll finally get working mail (so wordpress can actually send mail), and get an anti-spam plugin for wordpress, which Awardspace doesn’t support

Website Moved

Well, probably you came here from a blank HTML page saying “Vectec.net has recently moved. Coming soon.”. Well, I got annoyed with my old host, so now I’m on a new webhost, AwardSpace. Should be a bit quicker, although I can’t post large files and will have to link back to my other host.

Tell me what you think! (PS: The old blog is still at yuckfou.vectec.net/blog)