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 Sydney Morning Herald | Gates exits, leaving Ballmer in Microsoft spotlight Reuters - By Daisuke Wakabayashi - Analysis SEATTLE (Reuters) - Bill Gates' retirement from Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) later this week marks the end of an era for the software giant, thrusting CEO Steve Ballmer into the ... Is Ballmer the right man for Microsoft -- for another 10 years? Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Microsoft’s Unstoppable Team: until now |
 Phones Review | IPhone Costs Just $173 to Make, Guesses Analyst Wired News - By Charlie Sorrel June 25, 2008 | 4:58:36 AMCategories: iPhone You've read our in depth review of the iPhone 3G, right? No. Because we don't have one yet. New 3G IPhone Costs $173 to Make: ISuppli Virtual teardown puts Apple’s iPhone 3G profit margin at 56% |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Techtree.com | Windows XP Support Extended until 2014 Techtree.com - Microsoft has finally given in to public demand. The company has decided to offer technical support for Windows XP with updates and security patches for an extended period until April 2014. Dell Extends Windows XP Sales 'By Popular Demand' Microsoft Answers XP Fans' Outcry With Support Extension |
Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets...
Danger! Excitement! An SD Card that turns into a USB dongle! An LED Chess Set!
Rocketmen! Nazis! The Phantom Lapboard! An artifact of awesome power that reduces noise on your PC... but only if you have faith! A futuristic city made of dreams!
Babes! Floozies! Electric women on drugs bouncing around their immoral soirees, listening to LEGO synths played by devil DJs.
Passion! Drama! Romance! Caulk Singles!
Monsters! Griphons! Starving, vicious Snow Leopards! Cell-phone touting monkeys, "aping" presidential candidates!
War! Carnage! Bloodshed! A more defensible unimog! A toaster that can blow your brains out!
And video games!
What will happen in our next exciting installment? Stay tuned!
Link Jossip | Will Google Trends Decide What's Obscene? Appscout - Though Broadway's "Avenue Q" says, "The Internet is for Porn," in real life the answer is harder to come by. What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer Orgies and apple pie: Google Trends used in obscenity case |
 eFluxMedia | Nokia Throws Open Mobile Software BusinessWeek - by Jennifer L. Schenker Few companies have the heft to take on Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), and Microsoft (MSFT)—much less all three at the same time. Nokia pays 8 years' royalties in advance Symbian Shifts Mobile World to Open Source |
Reuters - Nokia Corp (NOK1V.HE) will add public
wireless LAN access to its handsets in Japan in a bid to keep
pace with smaller Japanese rivals that already provide such
network connections.
 The Money Times | T-Mobile Launches $10 Home Phone Nationwide PC World - T-Mobile will soon launch its US$10 landline phone service across the US, the company planned to announce Wednesday. Already available in Seattle and Dallas, the service will be offered to T-Mobile customers elsewhere starting July 2. Home Phone Service for $10 a Month? T-Mobile USA Expands Home-Phone Replacement Service |
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 UC Berkeley | Climate change threatens two-thirds of California's unique plants ... Los Angeles Times - Found throughout the mountains of Southern California below 5000 feet and in the central foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Woolyleaf ceanothus may be restricted to low-lying areas, most of which are highly urbanized. Grim look at state's plant life Californian Plants Threatened by Warming, Study Shows (Update1) |
 ITProPortal | Service From Google Gives Crucial Data to Ad Buyers New York Times - By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD In announcing a new service for media buyers on Tuesday, Google said that its Ad Planner was meant to make life easier for the people whose job it is to identify Web sites where their clients’ messages will have the most impact. Google Intros Ad Planner Who better (or worse) to measure online ads? |
As it happens, I actually know the guy who made this -- it's David Stutz, the former free software maven for Microsoft whose resignation letter was a brilliant work of analysis explaining just what Microsoft should be doing to co-exist with free/open source software. He was also a key developer for the NeXT, Visual Basic and a lot of other widely used technologies. These days, he has a winery and makes incredibly strange, beautiful traditional music. Link (Thanks, Al!)I’ve just listened to several of the songs on this CD and, frankly, this is some weird shit. I say this without reservation. The musical styles are all over the map except that they all only use human voices (and occasionally hands). Some of it is similar to Western, Christian, styles of chanting. Other tracks are more Classical vocal arrangements with singing. The rest of the tracks seem to be heavily influenced by Eastern, Buddhist, styles of chanting, especially Tibetan Buddhism with its use of harmonics and overlaying voices. It varies quite a bit from song to song. Additionally, when there are recognizable words, they are not in English (nor in any language that I recognize). “Celluar Automata” is the weirdest track of this sort with multiple voices weaving in and out, along with some clapping and exclamations in an unknown language. “Thousander Chant” would be at home on some of the collections of Tibetan chanting that I have and whoever is performing it is obviously trained in the throat chanting used by Tibetans and others in Asia.
See also: Ask Neal Stephenson questions about Anathem
For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.Link (Thanks, Frances!)How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.
Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.
Mary Robinette Kowal, a current Campbell nominee, writes, "In one of the classier moves I've seen, Jon Armstrong, one of this year's nominees for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, is starting a series of interviews with his fellow nominees.
He starts with me and we talk about puppets, NASA and ballgowns. I'm looking forward to his interviews with the other nominees. He's a charming host and his book 'Grey' is well-worth reading."
Link
(Thanks, Mary!)
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
 Broadcasting & Cable | Charter drops controversial customer tracking plan CNET News - Internet service provider Charter Communications announced Tuesday that it was indefinitely suspending the use of a controversial tool to track its customers' movement on the Web. Charter suspends ad program over privacy fears Internet Provider Halts Plan to Track, Sell Users' Surfing Data |
 Washington Post | Everyone Wants a Say on Climate Change CQPolitics.com - By Emily Cadei and Coral Davenport, CQ Staff The hot-button issue of climate change is attracting a swarm of lobbyists representing virtually every major interest group, even though lawmakers say they don’t expect to move legislation this year. NASA warming scientist: 'This is the last chance' Veteran climate scientist says 'lock up the oil men' |
Humans have been attempting to send messages to the stars since ... I'm going to say the early '70s. I mean, theoretically some caveman could have yelled, "Hey! Stars! You suck!" a hundred thousand years ago, but he was an idiot.
But of all the messages sent into space, which ones are good? Which ones conform to quality standards? That's what I'm here to tell you.
These are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature a picture of the solar system, a picture of the probes and a pictorial representation of the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Ring any bells? No? Well, it also has a picture of a naked man and woman on it. Ah, yes. Now you remember.
Many people considered this nothing more than interstellar porn. Others objected to the fact that the man is the one waving his hand, presumably to give the woman time to bake the aliens a nice batch of muffins. My objection is that the people depicted have no body hair at all. Aliens are gonna come down and think we're living in symbiosis with our pubes.
Grade: C
I love that we sent an LP. It's so delightfully retro! I expect alien life forms to discover it and say, "Clearly, this is the work of a truly groovy civilization. We do not know what to expect when we visit their planet, but we should prepare ourselves for an extremely mellow experience." In actuality, the funkiest track on the album is "Johnny B. Goode," which I think is a poor choice. I mean, I'm not sure how one carries a guitar in a gunnysack, and I was born on this planet.
Grade: B
This is actually a short binary message beamed into space. When decoded, it creates an image that looks remarkably similar to an Atari 2600 videogame. The apparent object of the game is to maneuver your guy through the cavern and up the waterfall, bypass the attacking spacecraft and grab a delicious slice of cake while avoiding the evil letter M. I'd play that game.
It should be noted that the human depicted here is also naked, but he's a pixel guy so it's fine. We don't want aliens to know we have genitals, but it's OK if they mistake us for table lamps.
Grade: A
This was beamed into space in 2001. It starts with some radio-transmission Doppler-tuning boring-boring-boring thing, segues into theremin music -- THEREMIN MUSIC -- and finally ends with some more binary images, including the logo of the Teenage Message program itself. So lame.
It's called the Teenage Message because it was put together by Russian teenagers. I think that will be apparent to anyone who receives it. "Blaxnorvag! What is this tedious message from another world?" "I don't know, Jerry, but it sounds like something put together by Russian teenagers."
Grade: D
A common science fiction trope involves aliens intercepting our television shows and being so impressed that they use it as a basis for their entire civilization. That's pretty egotistical. Even human beings don't base their entire lives on one long-defunct television show. Well, except for Firefly fans.
Presumably aliens who can detect our faint signals can get any channel on any planet, and I hear Canopus has some pretty compelling public-access shows. Still, we should use this to our advantage. We need to immediately produce a television show about benevolent aliens who come to Earth and give human beings candy and hugs and play Super Smash Brothers Brawl with them, but don't use Pit because he's cheap.
Grade: C-
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a futurist, a futurologist and a futilitarian.
1867: Lucien B. Smith patents barbed wire, an artificial "thorn hedge." It's an idea whose time clearly has come, but not quite in this form.
Smith's design called for spools of four short, sharp metal spikes at right angles. The spools would revolve loosely and be set every 2 to 3 feet along the fence wire.
William D. Hunt patented a similar design that year, and Michael D. Kelly did so the next. A patent battle was sure to follow, but none of these guys would win.
The great need was the Great Plains. As American settlement moved West in earnest, the spaces to enclose got bigger, while nearby materials for building fences -- wood and stones -- got scarcer. Growing hedgerows took time ... and water, also scarce. Shipping in materials for fencing got more expensive the farther you got from their source.
The fencing wire fence available at the time was brittle, and cattle could rub against the smooth wire with impunity until it broke or the fence posts loosened. Then the critters could wander into your kitchen garden, your cash crops, your neighbor's ranch or the wide open spaces where the deer and the antelope roamed.
Joseph F. Glidden got his idea for barbed wire when he saw Henry M. Rose's invention at a county fair: boards with sharp nails hanging from a smooth-wire fence. Glidden thought the board unnecessary and expensive: Why not put the barbs directly in the wire?
He rigged the crank of household coffee-bean grinder -- his wife's suggestion, the legend goes -- to twist the wire into loops that were then clipped off into sharp points. Irritating.
Glidden patented his version in 1874, then sold half his patent rights to hardware merchant Isaac Ellwood for $265 ($4,500 in today's money). Together they formed the Barb Fence Co. and started making and selling the stuff.
Soon there were 570 different patents for different types of wire, twists and barbs. A three-year legal battle ensued, but Glidden triumphed over all. By the time of his death in 1906, he was one of America's richest men.
Some people objected to the "devil's rope" as cruel to livestock, and they formed anti-barbed-wire associations. They initially got legislation passed in some states to ban barbed wire or at least hold fencers responsible for any damages they caused. But barbed wire caught on, as it were, because it was more effective and less expensive than other cattle fences. By the early 1880s, U.S. manufacturers were turning out half a million miles of barbed wire every year.
Railroads used prodigious amounts of the stuff to protect their rights-of-way livestock and livestock from their locomotives. Ranchers put up more thousands of miles on their own lands and sometimes, perhaps not legally, on public lands.
Herding livestock across the range to a distant market was no longer practical, and the era of cattle drives came to an end. Barbed wire fenced off much of the prairie, and the deer and the antelope roamed no more.
Barbed wire, of course, also works to deter humans and soon found uses protecting land and buildings against trespassers and burglars, and battlefield turf against enemy troops. British military manuals were already recommending its use by 1888, and it played a key role in the Spanish-American War, the Boer Wars in South Africa, and of course the extended trench warfare of World War I.
Source: Various
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I blogged yesterday about chatter throughout the 'web surrounding plans by Virgin America and American Airlines to offer wireless broadband on domestic flights.
Included in that post were comments from a Virgin America spokesperson, and a promise from me that we'd speak to American Airlines and follow up with details soonest (American launches their WiFi this week, Virgin's waiting a bit longer).
Today I joined wireless tech journalist Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News for a conversation with representatives from both AA and AirCell, the wireless provider behind the "Gogo" inflight internet which both VA and AA will offer.
Glenn kindly offered to contribute a guest post to Boing Boing with his analysis of American Airlines' plans. Here's his report (continues after the jump):
Lucky passengers on an American Airlines flight from JFK to Los Angeles tomorrow (Wednesday, June 25, 2008) will be the first commercial flyers to access high-speed, in-flight Internet service since the shutdown of Boeing's Connexion service in 2006. Tomorrow's flight is a round-trip test before a full-blown pilot program starts up and runs 3 to 6 months on all of American's 767-200 equipment -- 15 aircraft in total -- wending their way from JFK to SFO, LAX, and Miami.The flight tomorrow is likely to put much more stress on the "Gogo" air-to-ground system built by Aircell, after their 2006 win in an FCC auction of a thin sliver of spectrum -- just 3 megahertz split between up and down directions, capable of carrying perhaps up to 2 or 3 Mbps. Doug Backelin, American's inflight communications and technology manager, said in an interview today with Xeni and me that, "We're going to do a dress rehearsal."
Gogo will be available at no costs to Wednesday's passengers, and that lets American and Aircell "see how the service performs on a full planeload of people, get their feedback, test our streaming video," and help "fine tune some things before our actual launch."
The full-on launch, slated for "the next couple of weeks," Backelin said, will involve charging for service: $12.95 for flights over 3 hours, Aircell's airline solutions director Dave Bijur said. "Eventually, when we have flights that operate shorter segments, as we will later this year when we launch with Virgin America," they'll also have a $9.95 plan for 3 hour or shorter segments.
To use the service, passengers will fire up a browser on a mobile device with Wi-Fi or a laptop, connect to a portal, and pay a fee after tomorrow's test. Some walled-garden content is available through the portal at no cost: all of American's AA.com site, as well as Wall Street Journal headlines and Frommers' travel information about the flight's destination. There are separate tailored portals for laptops and mobile devices.
BoingBoing readers will likely be ecstatic to hear that Aircell and American are entirely clueful when it comes to filtering for content. American's Backlein said the airline will "not block or filter content, and we're going to rely on the good judgement of our passengers, and also our flight crew do have polciies and procedures on inappropriate behavior." The crew already have to deal with people bringing on magazines and DVDs, and this falls into the same category.
More on American Airlines' WiFi offering: aa.com/gogoBackelin noted that with the Connexion service, only Lufthansa requested content filtering, and turned that option off after a day. "They had so many complaints about customers not being able to reach legitimate Web sites; and, quite frankly, they had no complaints after doing that," he said.
Aircell and American won't filter for purpose, although they emphasized that the service is intended mostly for Web browsing, email transfer, and corporate network access via a virtual private network (VPN) connection. Aircell can prioritize data packets as needed to level out every passengers' experience.
The service is designed to work continuously handing off among towers that Aircell has equipped across the country. Bijur said that there may be moments, just like with ground service, when a connection might dip a bit, but the goal is for continuous and seamless service.
Where American is firm, however, is about VoIP: no phone calls from the plane! Backelin said, "For VoIP, Aircell is going essentially make VoIP unusable; we are focusing on a data-only service." While some folks have laughed at the notion that Aircell could entirely suppress voice, I have noted in the past that introducing jitter, dropping packets, and suppressing known forms of VoIP data based on scheduling and frequency would go a long way to making real-time communication impossible without affecting downloads and streaming video.
(It's useful to note that while Aircell has chosen to use a cellular standard for its air-to-ground communication -- EVDO Rev. A, the same as used on Verizon and Sprint's terrestrial networks -- that's just the protocol. There's no cellular "picocell" on board, and no cell component for this service unless your phone has a Wi-Fi mode.)
It's likely that any passenger trying to circumvent the limit will face other passengers' ill will and enforcement of American's ban by cabin crew, as well as technical difficulties. Backelin noted, "I don't think the US public wants that [voice calling] on aircraft." The FCC received several thousands of negative comments about in-flight calling over a few years when they solicited public input on the idea.
In Europe, Air France is testing a different system from OnAir on a single aircraft that allows text messages, GRPS data, and voice calls, although voice calling can be disabled. RyanAir is slated any time now to launch OnAir's satellite-based service, too, with voice calling at rates of $2.50 per minute or more that complement their no-frills, low-cost flights.
The service initially won't have any cached content on board, although Aircell's Bijur said that the company built an 800 gigabyte server into their offering. FAA airworthiness certification is rather elaborate, and it's far easier to build what you don't need into a system before it gets certified than modify it later. (That's also why the 767-200 fleet at American gets this service first: the Wi-Fi offering is approved on a model-by-model basis for aircraft.)
The 800 GB will likely be used for something. American's Backelin said that they were looking at putting media on board, and Bijur noted that they want to conquer offering Internet service from, but it's an obvious future part of their plans; he suggested an on-demand service could be one offering.
Bijur cautioned that tomorrow's test will provide the airline and his firm with lots of feedback, but wouldn't reflect real usage patterns when people start paying. "We're excited to see exactly what the results will look like when we go flying tomorrow," he said, but, "Everybody likes free ice cream."
The initial pricing could be mitigated through roaming partners, such as iPass, which resells worldwide hotspot and dial-up access to corporate customers and individuals, and has a deal in place with Aircell's Gogo; roaming pricing hasn't been set yet, however. American's Backelin said that the company would likely start tinkering with offerings towards the end of their pilot phase, which could include special deals for frequent flyers.
Smartphone users might hit a quandary with Gogo: many but not all phones that include both cellular and Wi-Fi radios let you turn off the cell part, but leave Wi-Fi enabled. The current iPhone 1.x software does not, but Apple told me in a briefing at the iPhone 3G announcement that the iPhone 2 software would include a way to disable everything but the Wi-Fi service.
Xeni noted in the interview that on an airline -- not American -- she "tried to do something with my iPhone while it was in airplane mode, and got into a fight" with a crew member over whether such a mode existed. The iPhone and other smartphones typically show a small plane or radio logo when they're in such a mode.
Backelin agreed that it would be an education process for flight crew, made harder by the "plethora of devices out there with a plethora of means to turn on various aspects or not."
When all 15 Boeing 767-200s are pressed into service, American's JFK/LAX route will have Gogo on every plane, as they only fly that equipment. The JFK/SFO and JFK/MIA routes have multiple aircraft types, and you'll need to check whether a 767-200 is in use for the flight you want. And be disappointed if there's an equipment swap after you book, as sometimes happens.
This model of plane has an Empower DC power port at every seat in first-class and business, and in a "scatter pattern" throughout coach. The airline has a schematic of the plane and where power is located if you want to book seats for that reason. Laptops and mobiles require an adapter, which costs from $30 to $50, often as part of a universal car and plane kit.
Scatter diagram: Link.
The two folks Xeni and I spoke with had a genuine attitude of excitement about the launch. I've been talking to Aircell for years about their service, and it must be rather neat to be this close to making it happen. And American's Backelin confessed that he and a colleague in engineering "have been working on this since 1999."
Ladies and gentleman, start your connections!
More on Gogo (the consumer brand for AirCell's in-flight internet product: gogoinflight.com
Previously:
American and Virgin America to launch in-flight WiFi soon
(Thanks, Glenn Fleishman!)
The mobile software age is here.
Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.
With that move, Symbian joins two other major platforms -- the Google-backed Android operating system and Apple's OS X iPhone -- that give programmers tools for creating and deploying software for smartphones.
The Symbian OS dominates the world market, with about 60 percent of the installed base among smartphones. According to Nokia, more than 200 million phones currently in use worldwide are running Symbian software. But Symbian trails in the United States, where Research in Motion, Palm, Windows Mobile -- and now the iPhone -- are the major players.
Nokia uses Symbian software across its range of mobile devices, primarily with the extremely popular S60 interface. Other handset companies also use some variety of the Symbian operating system, including Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo.
"Nokia could, if they found inside the corporation the resolve to do so, come out with the definitive open platform," said Bruce Perens, an open source advocate and CEO of Kiloboot. "They would have a platform of the type we haven't seen since the original Palm. When that was dominant, there were 16,000 applications available to install. The question is, can they find the corporate resolve?"
The prospect of thousands of mobile apps -- instead of the few dozen typically available through most wireless carriers -- is something new in the wireless world. And the 6 million iPhones sold to date show that mobile users like having open, unfettered access to web applications and online content.
In short, what matters to handsets now is not so much features, graphics chips and innovative interfaces -- though those do help. What's critical is an easy-to-use development platform that enables programmers to create a wide range of software quickly and easily, so that they can give consumers the content and the software they demand.
Android (whose first handsets are expected later this year) is clearly aimed at that goal. And while it's not open source, Apple has built a complete developer ecosystem around the iPhone, including everything from development tools to a store (which will open next month) for selling finished applications.
That's a significant shift from just a year ago, when programming tools for handsets were specialized and difficult to use, and carriers and handset manufacturers alike kept a tight rein on mobile application deployment.
To support the new open source project, Nokia is establishing the Symbian Foundation, a collective of hardware and software companies that have pledged to donate code and resources to Symbian's development. Phone makers Motorola and Sony Ericsson are on board, contributing software from their UIQ project, a touchscreen interface for Symbian. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has pledged support and is contributing its Symbian interface, MOAP(S). Other supporters include AT&T, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
"Establishing the foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, somewhat hyperbolically. But it is true that Nokia has, at one stroke, created an enormous open-source ecosystem, thanks to the huge number of Symbian phones already in use.
Nokia's move is a defensive one, of course. The Symbian Foundation plan is strikingly similar to Google's plan with the Open Handset Alliance, a collective of industry players who have come together to build and nurture the Android open source mobile operating system. On the carrier side, Google has NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile on board. On the hardware side, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have signed on to support Android.
Nokia says it is even taking a Google-like approach to rolling out the open source code. It will release components of its code under an open source license at first, with the full OS to follow "over the next two years." Right now, Nokia says, it intends to release Symbian under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.
But not everyone is convinced that open source operating systems are the way to go.
"With the success of Apple's and RIM's models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models," said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. "We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm)."
And it's still too soon to tell which mobile platform will win out. Symbian has the advantage of a large installed base; Android will benefit from the pure innovation seen when developers take a "sky's the limit" approach to building a new OS. And Apple provides a complete, turnkey approach to software sales via its iTunes App Store, which may appeal to consumers.
One thing's for sure: The floodgates are opening, and the coming year will see an explosion of mobile software for a wide range of smartphones.
Additional reporting by Betsy Schiffman.
The mobile software age is here.
Symbian co-founder Nokia announced Monday night that it is buying the 52 percent of the software maker that it doesn’t already own and releasing its mobile operating system under an open source license.
With that move, Symbian joins two other major platforms -- the Google-backed Android operating system and Apple's OS X iPhone -- that give programmers tools for creating and deploying software for smartphones.
The Symbian OS dominates the world market, with about 60 percent of the installed base among smartphones. According to Nokia, more than 200 million phones currently in use worldwide are running Symbian software. But Symbian trails in the United States, where Research in Motion, Palm, Windows Mobile -- and now the iPhone -- are the major players.
Nokia uses Symbian software across its range of mobile devices, primarily with the extremely popular S60 interface. Other handset companies also use some variety of the Symbian operating system, including Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo.
"Nokia could, if they found inside the corporation the resolve to do so, come out with the definitive open platform," said Bruce Perens, an open source advocate and CEO of Kiloboot. "They would have a platform of the type we haven't seen since the original Palm. When that was dominant, there were 16,000 applications available to install. The question is, can they find the corporate resolve?"
The prospect of thousands of mobile apps -- instead of the few dozen typically available through most wireless carriers -- is something new in the wireless world. And the 6 million iPhones sold to date show that mobile users like having open, unfettered access to web applications and online content.
In short, what matters to handsets now is not so much features, graphics chips and innovative interfaces -- though those do help. What's critical is an easy-to-use development platform that enables programmers to create a wide range of software quickly and easily, so that they can give consumers the content and the software they demand.
Android (whose first handsets are expected later this year) is clearly aimed at that goal. And while it's not open source, Apple has built a complete developer ecosystem around the iPhone, including everything from development tools to a store (which will open next month) for selling finished applications.
That's a significant shift from just a year ago, when programming tools for handsets were specialized and difficult to use, and carriers and handset manufacturers alike kept a tight rein on mobile application deployment.
To support the new open source project, Nokia is establishing the Symbian Foundation, a collective of hardware and software companies that have pledged to donate code and resources to Symbian's development. Phone makers Motorola and Sony Ericsson are on board, contributing software from their UIQ project, a touchscreen interface for Symbian. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has pledged support and is contributing its Symbian interface, MOAP(S). Other supporters include AT&T, Samsung and Texas Instruments.
"Establishing the foundation is one of the biggest contributions to an open community ever made," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO of Nokia, somewhat hyperbolically. But it is true that Nokia has, at one stroke, created an enormous open-source ecosystem, thanks to the huge number of Symbian phones already in use.
Nokia's move is a defensive one, of course. The Symbian Foundation plan is strikingly similar to Google's plan with the Open Handset Alliance, a collective of industry players who have come together to build and nurture the Android open source mobile operating system. On the carrier side, Google has NTT DoCoMo, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile on board. On the hardware side, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung have signed on to support Android.
Nokia says it is even taking a Google-like approach to rolling out the open source code. It will release components of its code under an open source license at first, with the full OS to follow "over the next two years." Right now, Nokia says, it intends to release Symbian under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.
But not everyone is convinced that open source operating systems are the way to go.
"With the success of Apple's and RIM's models, we would have thought traditional handset vendors would develop and maintain similar proprietary OS models," said Tavis McCourt, a Morgan Keegan analyst. "We view this move as a long-term positive for the smartphone vendors that own their own OS (RIM, Apple and, soon, Palm)."
And it's still too soon to tell which mobile platform will win out. Symbian has the advantage of a large installed base; Android will benefit from the pure innovation seen when developers take a "sky's the limit" approach to building a new OS. And Apple provides a complete, turnkey approach to software sales via its iTunes App Store, which may appeal to consumers.
One thing's for sure: The floodgates are opening, and the coming year will see an explosion of mobile software for a wide range of smartphones.
Additional reporting by Betsy Schiffman.
It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.LinkThe ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President's power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it "fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home" because "the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power." Rep. Rush Holt -- who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers -- condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the "bad guys" in the very people who do the spying.
...
In comments, Hume's Ghost wrote:
What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I'll use them responsibly.
Nope.
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty." - John Adams [1772].
In 1799, Thomas Jefferson echoed that: "Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence . . . . Let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitutions." Between (a) relying on the limitations imposed by the Constitution or (b) placing faith in the promises of a political leader not to abuse his unchecked power, it isn't really a difficult choice -- at least it ought not to be, no matter who the political leader in question happens to be.
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Lisa Katayama says: Here's an interview I did with the Dalai Lama's youngest brother -- he's bipolar and has anger management problems. Nobody's interviewed him at length before.
Tendzin Choegyal is the Dalai Lama’s youngest brother. Aside from being related to one of the holiest persons alive, TC is a rebellious soul who dropped out of college, spent a couple of years as a paratrooper in the Tibetan contingency of the Indian army, survived alcoholism,and found peace through a blend of Buddhism, lithium, and reading the news on the Internet. When I met him at his home in Dharamsala, India—the Himalayan town that houses the Tibetan government-in-exile—we talked about reincarnation, war movies, Steven Seagal’s crazy outfits, and the preservation of Tibetan culture.LinkThe following is a reprint of my interview with Choegyal, published in Issue 52 of Giant Robot magazine. A feature-length profile will be in the Fall issue of Buddhadharma, which goes to press in July.
GR: At a young age, you, too, were recognized as a reincarnate of an important man, right?
TC: Oh, that’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. From a Buddhist perspective, we are all reborn. But choosing a particular person as someone special and saying he’s a reincarnation of so-and-so is bullshit. I don’t consider myself special. I’m just like you. I want happiness, and I don’t want suffering. I think it’s just a sheer accident that I was chosen.
GR: What about your brother?
TC: Ah, that’s different. He is on a completely different level—a much higher caliber, and a lot of tests were done. It may be true for others, but as far as I’m concerned, this is the greatest mistake of the century.
Plan your route, and — this is going to sound crazy — assume you’ll go a mile or maybe two an hour. With a group, you’ll move a lot more slowly than you expect. We usually aim for about five miles (www.gmap-pedometer.com is good for figuring out distances) and include about six points of interest and two takeout food stops. To allow for lots of conversation, keep your highlights farther apart than the typical walking tour and mostly brief. (If your group includes strollers and dogs, don’t forget to plan a route that will work for them.)Link
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AP - Yahoo Inc.'s steadily sinking stock pulled out of its descent Tuesday on reports that the Internet pioneer is reconsidering its recent decision to fall into the arms of online search leader Google Inc. instead of Microsoft Corp.
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AP - The cheapest model of Apple Inc.'s new iPhone, which is about to go on sale for $199 in the U.S., costs about $173 to make, according to an estimate by research firm iSuppli Corp.
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