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“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” - Oscar Wilde
This week we began with a brief explanation for our absence over the past couple of weeks. My week / weeks in tech were particularly uneventful, just some research on the bits I will need for the upgrade I plan to my venerable G4 iMac. A solid state drive will hopefully extend it’s useful life beyond the eight years I’ve already had. Gareth’s busy schedule also prevented any tech action, apart from a few iPhone apps that is, the Google Voice web app, and TaskPaper being his current favourites.
Then I started off the stories….
MS unveil ‘Windows Phone 7 Series’ – Yet another product with a catchy name from Steve Ballmer’s Microsoft. This one though carries a weight of expectation, not experienced in Redmond since, oh say, Windows 7. But maybe this one is a bit more critical. If MS want to stay in the mobile market, they had to pull something special put of the hat. And, colour me surprised, they did. Based on the Zune interface, it almost doesn’t look like Windows at all, which in my book, is always a good thing.
Is Apple banning iPhone jail-breakers – Certain app store visitors are finding that their Apple ID’s have been revoked. The common denominator at the moment seems to be that the phones were jail-broken, also one of the users in question is ‘prominent’ in the jail-breaking community. Apple’s cry of security, as the reason for their death grip on the iPhone platform, is seen as the main culprit for this. We can expect a full explanation in the press conference Apple have scheduled, for when hell freezes over.
Manufacturers and Operators join forces to compete with the App Store – A veritable bucket full of operators and several major manufacturers are pooling their efforts to try to take on the juggernaut that is Apple’s App Store. But with so many different handsets on different networks, it is sure to become a nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. Missing the one thing that makes the App store so good for iPhone users. Keep it simple stupid!
You’re never too old to Tweet – Vintage computing, something that generates huge passions. Well this time it’s the turn of the Commodore Vic20, allow me to pause a while to bask in a wave of nostalgia, twas my first foray into the wonderful world of computing. Right where was I, oh yes. It’s to get it’s own Twitter client. Is it futile to try to keep a platform so slow and limited going, or will the coders who toil on these projects, be able to transfer the knowledge gained, in writing compact, low bandwidth programs and web apps, to today’s computers. No your right, futile it is.
Google to build ultra high-speed networks in the US – Right now, if you want to nominate your town, those crazy guys in Mountain View might roll out 1Gbps fibre broadband to you. Hoping to stimulate the market incumbents to invest in their own high-speed networks, by delivering their network to up to 500,000 homes. It sound amazing, but does Google know something we don’t, building high speed data networks, making phones, selling electricity. Hell they may as well just buy Amazon, and be done with it, then I wouldn’t have to leave the Internet at all.