Windows CE – blimey these guys must be desparate

Nvidia just spoke on netbook operating systems for ARM based systems and they like … Windows CE.  They prefer it because it better suited to a netbook than ..Android.

Repeat after me 100 times.  A netbook is not a mobile phone.  A netbook is not a mobile phone. A netbook is not a mobile phone. A netbook is not a mobile phone.

Do these guys know nothing about computers and what they are used for.  Do they really think that the only use for these gadgets will only be used for browsing.  Because that is pretty much all these toy operating systems are capable of.

I dunno – I dispair. Maybe depressingly they are right.

Just because the first unix-based netbooks were a bit of a snafu it doesn’t mean that they should be written off.  Unix is the natural operating system for an ARM netbook.  No question.  If it goes the other way I will stick my head in a bucket.

How fast can Unix boot and load Firefox

My guess is that Netbooks will eventually home in on a solid state drive and Unix as the ideal combination.  If you had such a device today with a reasonable processor how long would it take you to boot up and load firefox?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GKohxZHNg4&feature=player_embedded

22 seconds!

Wave goodbye to email?

The guys in Googlewho brought you Google maps have been working on something just as revolutionary. A complete rethink of he email concept.  The email is out, the ‘wave’ is in. 

A wave is a bit like a cross between an email, a shared document and a forum post.  Everyone who ‘receives’ the wave looks at the same document.   Anyone on that recipient list can add to it, much as you would add comments to an email and then ‘reply-all’ to update everyone.  The big difference is that there is only one copy of the wave and everyone is looking at the same thing.  So when you update the wave everyone sees your update – in real time to it replaces email and messenger.

When you add to a wave you are clearly identified, and you can add semi-private updates.  You can even replay the wave and see the additions made in the order they were added.

Anyone who sees the presentation at http://wave.google.comis going to see how much better this all works than regular email.  There are other clever things like dragging and dropping images, a smart API, spell checker that seems to be more intelligent than most, real-time translation into other languages, a serious API and so on…  However there are  few issues:

During the presentation their network went down.  No network no wave.  However Google Gears has the possibility of creating local copies of things like this so this may not be such a big issue. 

This is a hosted application and no corporate is going to allow its precious data to be held or even accessed externally.  So email is likely to remain.  Is there going to be a clever way of integrating wave with email?  My brain hurts when I try and figure that out. 

This is an exciting product.   Forget messenger applications because this one is messnger on steroids.  Will it replace email? I doubt it – sadly.

Visualisation methods

Here is a site I came acrosss by change.  A periodic table of visualisation methods. 

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

The periodic table of elements lists the elements in nature and they show elements properties are repetative.  I am not sure this table does exactly show that for visualisation methods, but if you need to make numbers or concepts understandable then these examples may help.

Bluetooth 3.0 announced

A new version of bluetooth was launched last month.  It will be a while before we see products in the shops of course.    It uses the same communications protocol as your wi fi, so Bluetooth 3 will be much faster than version 2 and can be used for bulk transfers of data or for video.  It will allow for mobile phones and for that matter netbooks to interface wirelessly with a wider range of external devices - see this Nokia video to se how this might work.

The world according to twitter

David Pogue is writing a book.  Well actually he is not writing the book as such, he is compiling it from twitter posts.  It actually sounds quite feasible. 

Post a tweet and if included you get a copy of the book. 

http://davidpogue.com/bio_photos/twitter.html

More on PPT

Pay Per Tweet was an April Fool joke only a year ago.  Now it is a business.  Isn’t the Internet wunnerful.

PPT – Pay per tweet

With a blindingly simple idea Magpie are doing something with twitter, that twitter are not – making money.

Sign up with them, and they insert an ad in your twitter stream – say 1 in 10.  You choose the frequency and get paid something. They are a bit vague about how much.

The emporers new cloud

I just sent out a newsletter coving the jargon du jour – Cloud Computing.  I missed this classic for inclusion in the mailout.  It is Larry Ellison on the subject.  Quote

” The interesting thing about cloud computing – it is either going to be or already is the most important computing architecture in the world because we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we currently do. So it has already achieved dominance in the industry – I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements.

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

Go Larry!

What happened to Firefox?

Kier Thomas took a good shot at Firefox in his blog last month.  I agree with him.  Firefox has turned into bloatware and Google Chrome has taken over as the browser I reach for if I want results fast.

The main problem I have with chrome is that the view-source actually reloads the page.  This may be fine, but sometimes you want to see the real source code not the code you get when you do a reload (which might be different). 

Other than that it is lightning fast and clutter-free.