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What’s Redmond up to?

Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about - available wherever you happen to be. www.mesh.com

Microsoft being its usual self has joined the web 2.0 party, and looks as if the Yahoo! bid was a hint at a much larger plan.

So what exactly is the significance of Mesh and the whole Microsoft online play? Its validated a couple of ideas cloud computing is definitely going to have a massive impact the way in which we interact with both mobile devices and laptops/desktops, and also Microsoft has seen a little sense and is bending to the will of user. 

Office Online?

An obvious application that Microsoft will put into mesh is Office, quite frankly the current online offering is underwhelming and Google Docs beats it, but in mesh with a cross-platform version of office that follows you I would be willing to pay for that.

Did I here you say Cross-Platform?

Along with the announcement of Mesh some other intersting things came out of the tour, support for Macs! Is this a much bigger plan to get out of the Operating System business or transition to providing a thinned out operating system that can access mesh (They may even use an Open Source kernel) 

I think Microsoft has got themselves some new friends and I will be sure to check out Mesh in more detail very soon. Its going to interesting if they do it right…

The BBC actual seem to get things…

This week the BBC has joined the OpenID foundation.
BBC Internet Blog 

OK, so there are some problems but I do have faith that they know what they have to do particularly with making iPlayer Cross-Platform and stripping the DRM (I think a little wishful thinking is needed on this point)

Overall the BBC have seemed to be more than ready to jump in were the other industry giants have failed or been far too slow, obviously some people have learned from the Music industry hopeless mess. They have been willing to say most of the 15 - 25 year old market is not watching TV they consume their media online and not in the traditional linear sense like with traditional TV. Also an unexpected (at least to me) effect of iPlayer is how many ‘older’ people can and enjoy using iPlayer. I often get the comments “Wow, so I don’t need to tape anything anymore?” response, which hats of to the BBCs marketing department.

I think some good things are coming out of the BBC, I wonder if they can keep it up and appease both the techies and non-techies alike. I know its a seriously tall order.

My New Top Tip - Check Your Processes

Ok so its not that new, but my ageing iMac has been dog slow lately, the solution look in activity monitor to see the uninstalled yet still installed eyeconnect demo is running taking a constant 25% CPU and 500mb Memory.

Zapped it out there and now my iMac is back on top form. I can hold off the Macbook Pro for a couple more months

Exam Boards Lost the Plot

CCTV cameras could be used in school exam halls in an attempt to prevent cheats using increasingly high-tech devices, examiners said on Friday. Reuters

Cheating in exams no way, mobile phones in exams no way. I know lets put a camera in the room problem solved.

The simple fact is that majority of people who are taking exam at least at A-Level aren’t dim wits and don’t cheat, the ones that do are generally the stupid minority and get caught. Why is are the Exam Boards bothering with this stupid idea, make exams more relevant and interesting for the minority groups who find it difficult to make the step up to A-Level (thats not meaning making them easier)

Evolution?

In biologyevolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next - wikipedia

So I thought I would get back to my favorite subject apart weird jokes about people I know. Thats right some more Artilect goodness.

As part of my biology course we are ofcourse studying Darwinian Natural Selection (intelligent design people stop reading here) which is all well and good, but does it still hold true for our evolution now.

At its basic level Natural Selection states that:

Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.

So taking that definition we could quite easily state that the Human Population is no longer subject to the laws of natural selection, so then what are we subject to. Looking at technology we can see that the computers and electronics we are interacting with on a daily basis, are evolving in a very similar way to how we evolved. Starting with huge vacuum tubes in the 1940s to the miniscule transistors that are in everything today. The pace of the evolution is exponential growing but like most things including house prices at some point it has to stop, but its a long way off yet.

From this it could quite easily be argued that we are stagnant in our evolution and technology is not, we need to evolve to survive, so get them old transistors merged already.

 

Negroponte on the Classmate

It just made me laugh: http://blog.laptopmag.com/olpcs-negroponte-responds-to-intels-classmate-2-and-new-low-cost-laptops

Can’t take competition, I’d still take an ASUS eeePC anyday over either, and they never offered the buy-one-get one scheme in the UK (but it didn’t turn out too stellar in the USA)

O2: $15 per MB outside the UK

Well I was expecting the no easy way to upgrade to the 16gb iPhone from my 8gb. What I was not expecting is that you aren’t able to add the International Data Plan, to any iPhone tariff. So it costs a whopping £7.50 per mb thats a couple of cents shy of $15, whenever your outside the UK. The best they could come up with is leave your iPhone in Airplane mode for the duration of your trip.

Get a grip O2, even AT&T can offer Data plans for outside the US to iPhone customers.

My New iPhone Tariff

O2 LogoO2 obviously isn’t making enough money or selling enough iPhone’s to make it worth there while and they have completed re-structured there tariff plans, basically more for less. I don’t make enough calls to make it any cheaper for me anyway :-(More Details here

Good God - Redmond makes offer for Yahoo!

Yahoo Logo2008 has just got a whole lot worse if the deal comes off.

Microsoft has offered $44.6billion to buy Yahoo! At least if Microsoft does by Yahoo!, Live! search becomes half decent and there are some real brains in the web division, it could also go the other way and Yahoo! becomes what Live! is now. 

Even with the combined forces of Microsoft & Yahoo there will still be a long way to go before, they can topple the impressive lead Google has over them both. Only time will tell. 

Apple isn’t all that bad after all…

Apple LogoHaving had some issues with iTunes over the last week, nothing downloading from the store to be specific. I just got an email from a nice person at iTunes Store support, saying the problem was fixed and I got 5 Free credits to boot. My lucks in, maybe I should do a lottery this week.

The move to VMware fusion just hasn’t happened, since the new Parallels update dropped earlier this wee, I have been impressed with the increased speed and the integration with exposé a feature which windows desperately needs and not just an alt+TAB varient like that of Vista.

In other news, CommonApp.org should get a medal for being impossible to understand if your an international applicant (like I am) there’s a lot they could learn from the new UCAS website, also good help documents would make it easier for people such as my self who haven’t got a clue.

I’m jumping ship - VMware Fusion

VMwareI just installed VMware fusion on my Macbook; Parallels they crept up behind you. Don’t get me wrong I love parallels and its incarnations, but VMware has a smaller feature set and its fast.

I have been running Fedora 7 through VMware, with it emulating to cores thats right you can virtulise stuff on multiple cores. It screams. I had a little trouble getting the resolutions right (this is because Fedora isn’t a supported OS) but a bit of googling (who knew this was now a verb) and I got it going.

I now have a fully operational Death Star, for use with my many future Ruby on Rails Projects. I am really looking forward to seeing what Parallels comes up with in there next version, all it really needs is more performance and I will have a dilemma which to use?

Trixbox Pro Released

TrixboxToday marks the release of Trixbox Pro, a more business orientated version of my favorite VOIP system asterisk. Fonality are doing some clever stuff with Pro and its great that I can use it without paying mega money (in fact not a penny)

It looks exactly what I have been looking for, Asterisk based, but stupidly simple to manage, and no editing the conf files manually. I just want something that doesn’t take forever to learn and make work. I am running Trixbox CE at the moment and its one update away from reinstall so it looks like a perfect opportunity to change to Trixbox Pro.

I will have a review posted as soon as I get Trixbox Pro Installed and running.

Trixbox CE - Community Edition

Trixbox Pro

Safari 3 Check, Leopard Check

Apple Mac OS X - LeopardI always pick the best days to go to the Cinema after exams. I got in and the World of Apple has turned to jelly (at least mine anyway). Leopard = Yes! There is anything really revolutionary, but it doesn’t need a fancy new pair of Interface trousers, Finder looks fantastic, stacks (I have already being using folders to do this) Generally Leopard looks like a solid update, and as I said a long time ago, Leopard need not be singing and dancing upgrade. Just fix the quirks and add some useful features, also make sure the install takes less than 3-hours unlike the last 3 times I have set up Vista.

As for safari, I have switched back. First impressions, its polished and fast. Google Reader now no longer has the weird beach ball effect when loading the next lot of stories, its also a lot faster than Firefox loading, Visual Rich Editor in Wordpress works (although it has its quirks). It also has the Element Inspector from WebKit which is incredibly useful to me making sure websites work. It also just seems to feel better, nothing much has changed but it seems to run more smoothly even load web pages faster?

In the process of making this post I have corrected 4 errors, on the website. Due to Safari 3 not liking certain elements. 

The Most Helpful Applescript Ever.

iTunes LogoI have a ever growing iTunes library, but sometimes when importing stuff, the ID3 tags go all wrong, or in the in Japanese/Non-English Characters. So like many geeks I hate having to mess with each ID3 tag individualy even if iTunes makes it easy. Solution CDDB and a little script from dougscripts.co. You simply go to the playlist, run the first script which searches CDDB to find the album your playing, then you run the second script that then copies the page details and puts them in your ID3 tags. Voila! your library is nice and perfectly formed.

Piracy: The Loss of Objectivity and Intelligence

“Unfortunately, many schools have turned a blind eye to piracy,” Berman said. “I don’t doubt that there are legitimate issues that universities must grapple with, including privacy and cost concerns. However, when a university such as Purdue tells the AP that it rarely even notifies students accused by the RIAA because it is too much trouble to track down alleged offenders—such inaction is unacceptable.”Congressman Hollywood: Universities a wretched hive of scum and villainy

This is what happens when a person in power, brains’ get turned to jelly and is spat out by the cat. It never occurs to these people funding researching and going around screaming disaster and catastrophe from the hill tops, to actually look what is right in front of them.

The Music/Movie Industries is Inherently, poor at adapting
So what exactly does this mean well its quite simple. When Napster came along the Music industry looked at it and said “We still good it will all blow over in a couple of months” Then a couple of months later they had a problem. The same goes for the Movie industry. They are arrogant enough to dimiss a technology that will quite clearly effect them in the money making department and try to place the sole blame on the cosumer. The consumers pay them money in the first Place

Solve not Sue
Anyone with a slight business interlect and brain cell(s) would look at the current situation within the Music/Movie industry and start working on solutions, put the money were it is well spent. The industry will never change the habits of the youth of today, they have spent to long in the courts increasing the resentment for that. They need to start working to give the consumer product they want in the form they want, this by no means free.

The idea that forcing your consumers to do something because the man companies say it should be is completly stupid and cause more illegal downloading, just so you as a consumer feel happy your pissing the said companies off. Everybody knows that downloading music and not paying for it is wrong, but when the labels offer no better alternatives, what else are your options.

The Other Options
iTunes Store, has a big market share and a big catalog of major labels and indie music, look deeply at the  Store and you see just what a miracle it is, its there, and in the same moment why it doesn’t give what a p2p client gives. The simple matter of choice is what it now starts to boil down to, what could be classed as the catalyst to this whole thing in the first place.

People want choice they want to choose how they consume media and where, iTunes limits you to the iPod and your PC/Mac, there is a simple solution get rid of DRM and completely and open the whole thing up, and I would never illegally download again.

However, there is one place that iTunes excells at apart from providing a seamless UI experience. Our friend the Longtail, p2p only really is a good distribution system for popular tracks, when you get to less popular tracks you quickly find nobody sharing things.

To cut a long story short we need a solution, that the consumer is happy with and we need it fast else we could see everybody going down to court.