I recently bought a
Samsung
Chromebook (Wi-Fi, 11.6-Inch). I am fascinated by living tied to the web,
indeed my honours computer science thesis deals with this in relation to mobile
applications (and hybrid half-app/ half-website). Spurred on by the excellent
reviews this Chromebook has gotten ("It’s $1,000 worth of design made with
$100 worth of materials" -
The
Verge and “You simply won’t find a netbook this nice for that little
money.” -
Engadget).
Lately both Google and Microsoft have been advertising their respective browsers on British Television (received in Ireland by the vast majority of the population). It’s interesting the different approach each company is taking.
Chrome ad:
To me the Chrome ad is very family oriented, stressing the utility of the web
and the ease of reaching people and staying in touch. No surprise they
didn’t feature Facebook, which is what the vast majority use to keep in
touch.
tl;dr It’s because LTE chipsets are very large and power hungry right now.
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Download Link: Technology Slot Dec 19 11
If your passion is in technology, you often sigh with the marketing buzzwords used in sales. Cloud Computing doesn’t actually mean anything specific (or could mean a lot of things). It’s that a lot of things to a lot of people who makes it useful as a term, an ideology, a way of explaining why you-oh-so-need-to-do-this-now. Cloud computing for me is a platform description. I think of the myriad of hosting companies who offer a platform to build your service atop.
Below I present some very useful extensions I use while using Google Chrome, in no particular order.
I’ve written about my desire for open web video before, and now it looks as if it’s finally going to happen. Lead by Google’s acquisition of On2 technologies, the VP8 codec has been renamed as “WebM” and open sourced. Vorbis will be the audio. Matroska the container for the new format. An Open Source developer for x264 does a great teardown of the format vs. h.264 here. The patent minefield stateside is still not clear by any means, but with a strong backer like Google, it’s probably the best protection your going to get. Announcements, including links to nightlies, dev and beta channel browsers with WebM support are below:<
I am an avid Gmail user through Google Apps. I use
the calender, chat, code, sites, pages, docs the whole lot. One of my friends
even jokes “You should just work at Google Marketing”. Yes I like most of
Google’s products; but I am a products guy; I use whats good, cheap and fast
(pick two). Google has the cheap down due to ad-revenue; for the moment anyways
in the current financial turmoil.
It’s been all over the tech news world lately; apparently
Google is muling over taking Skype off of Ebay’s hands.
Ebay has already written down the value of
Skype as a large loss on their purchase
price of $2.6 billion in stock and cash. But
w
ould
Skype’s G-branded future be any better?
I think it would be. Skype is a strong international brand for voice calls, instant messaging and video calls; but of course it competes directly with Google Talk. Skype as a company has made a lot of mistakes; but they actually produces some of the best technology for p2p VOIP out there in the marketplace. Skype is particularly strong in redundancy, cost of network operation (since it’s p2p every user carries’ each others traffic; most people have no idea of this fact) and routing around the most draconian network admins out their through their routers.
AOL, the longtime dialup king, who esperate to keep customers at its’ site who have switched to broadband, is offering free dot com and dot net domains. There are a few caches however, one must be in possession of a US mobile phone (cell) number. Luckily I have a cousin stateside willing to help out ;-) . I got to register NeilGrogan.com (My actual name) which I hadn’t bothered with before. AOL is the legal owner however, so has all the say legally to the name. At the minute it provides 100 2GB email accounts with the free domain, and if you visit the address online, it redirects to an AIM Pages profile of the owner (for all intents and purposes, it’s another social networking site). Its a good way to drum up interest in its online offerings, but they should be more flexible. If anyone is in any doubt, this is just an ‘alright’ kind of deal, AOL say they will give you the option to buy the name back in the future, but I won’t hold my breath.
I haven’t posted in a while :-( Ah well here it goes: Well we’ve all seen the news Google has bought YouTube for a reported 1.65 Billion US dollars, the deal was reportedly sealed at at Dennys in California (gotta admire that style and sophistication). I think its way overvalued Youtube, at 24m per employee! We all know it serves 100m videos a day, but it has been living off measly venture capital and hasn’t got a verifiable steady income stream, which I guess is where Google enter with Adwords….
Hope you like the new look Duey Finsters. Like Google style hoo-pah, we are still in “Beta” mode (or is it “Alpha”? Depends on who you ask!). I would be extremely grateful for people to report issues, with the folloxing browsers IE 5.5, 6 & 7, Opera 9, Firefox 1.5.X , Mozilla 1.X , Safari on all platforms Windows, Linux and Mac (BSD if you want!). Great news also in ranking, the site has gone from 8.5 millionth, to just under 4 million (#3,945,836 to be exact) in three and a half months! I am working on releasing the design to OSWD and in Wordpress theme format, for others to extend and enjoy (If you feel like helping out, contact me).
Google have released a calendar, as part of their mission to “Organise the Worlds Information”. While it is what you expect from Google, the Calendar did not impress me a whole lot. It does have an intuitive interface, that is easy to use. It does integrate with Gmail, although the full extent has yet to be seen, as they fall short of mentioning it in Gmail at all, but I would expect this to change. I see great potential for users though, and where Google is heading. They will eventually integrate it with GoogleTalk and Gmail, producing a hybrid interface where you can organise a conference on GoogleTalk, schedule it on your calendar (which is syncronised with your PC and your workgroup server [therby informing fellow employees]), submit video of it to Google Video, write minutes with writely, email minutes with Gmail, that mail (with document and video) being attached to the meeting on the Calendar, which is in turn archived on your PC in Google Desktop and your Gmail Drive. While that is only one scenario, it is very possible. Google have already leaked information on their eagerness to hold the entire contents of ones’ hard drive on the internet.
I am all for open standards, but they face huge problems. Not least is lack of intergration between them. Take SIP used by VOIP providers, such as OpenWengo. While OpenWengo is open source, and it is SIP, they are not helpful in informing you how to use other clients, or dial other OpenWengo users from other networks.
What I am really talking about is the need for an all-in-one communications program, that is multi-platform. Their is already open source code for: Google Talk (aka Jabber), MSN, AOL, ICQ, SIP, H.323, Yahoo! but why isn’t their an all-in-one client? Surely it would be easy to reimplement some code from other programs into Ekiga (SIP, H.323) , Kopete or Gaim (both Jabber, MSN, Yahoo, AOL and ICQ)? I know GoogleTalk is based on SIP, so why not SIP compatability? That is poor implementation which is fragmenting the Open Source community, how are we going to challenge MSN’s userbase with this sort of fragmentation? That said I like Google Talk and its way of doing things. Also it is rumoured GoogleTalk will be interoperable with AOL at protocol level, since Google owns 5% of AOL.
What a fantastic service Google now offer with their Google Video platform. There are a couple of reasons why I like it, mainly because it is available to upload your videos on all platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac) and is available on Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox, Netscape), Opera and Internet Explorer.This is important in creating a better all round user experience. If only Yahoo! would follow Googles example and open up Launch Cast to other browsers besides an outdated version of Netscape and Internet Explorer.
While using instant messenger I had a brainwave, what will the tech landscape look like in the future? So here is What I think could happen: IBM will buy Sun MicroSystems and make a new opensource OS, it will be based on Ubuntu. Microsoft will purchase AOL and roll out its products on the Web, such as MS Office, it will have a slow start to Vista, but it will pick up through peoples eagerness to buy the latest hardware. Google will buy Opera, invest in Mozilla and consolidate Opera into Mozilla, it will also buy Adobe (for their PDF format), get its way to publish an online bookstore through Google Book Search. Yahoo will continue to buy extra companies to add to its list of a zillion services, such as Flickr and Del.icio.us.
Awake Mornin at nearly six am I am writing this at six am in my cousins home because I heard this is a good way to get a gmail invite!
