LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Online DVD renter Netflix Inc. on Wednesday said during the third-quarter it boosted subscribers by 74 percent even as it faced competition from retail heavyweights like Wal-Mart entering its business.
“Hi, my name is Matt, and I’m a Netflix subscriber.”
Leigh Dodds has released FOAF-a-matic Mark 2 Beta 2 today. I must say that it is quite beautiful. I haven’t looked at the FOAF that it produces, but like many, I started my FOAF file with the original FOAF-a-matic. FOAF-a-matic was definately a good base, as my FOAF doesn’t piss off Rosco even after tons of hacking in a text editor.
Cheers Leigh!
Dealmac links to the BlueTrek Bluetooth headset, which is currently $40US after rebates ($100US before). Erik managed to find a favorable review of it at MobileBurn. You can also pick up the JibberJim approved Jabra model for $75US.
Now we’re talking!
My laptop was last spotted near Memphis, TN.
Go FedEx, go!
Update: Dulles, baby!
CNet reports that Sun announced heavy losses today. In a seperate report, CNN Tech reports that Sun is ready to announce a new breed of processors that could be up to 100 times faster than current chips. The article is not technical, but promises major improvements of semiconductor to chip and chip to chip communications.
Sun might be able to recoup some money by renting out their IP:
Sun already holds seven patents on the new design and will seek to capitalize on them commercially, a Sun spokesman said.
If they take the IP rental route, they won’t even have to manufacture chips in order to make money. They could definately use a fincancial breakthrough, and this might be it.
Mobiletracker confirms rumors from Mobile Burn (as much as said rumors can be confirmed). The Nokia 3660 is possibly on its way, replacing the 3650. There will also be a gimpy version for the US called the 3620.
The only obvious difference is the still funky yet closer to normal keypad.
Users can only hope for MIDP 2.0 and sockets that work. I’ll be crossing my fingers.
Alan Green has to watch what he downloads each month. Luckily he has a couple of gigs left over at the end of this month so he can download a few extra things. I downloaded The Fanimatrix without a second thought this morning (using BitTorrent of course). It’s not uncommon for me to download the latest release of a bootable Linux distro and not checking it out until the next release is out. Of course I can’t use the old version, I’ve got to download the new ISO!
In the land where SUVs rule, we take unlimited banwidth over broadband for granted. How much longer is it going to last?
Last night I ordered a new laptop from HP. Erik was hoping that I’d pick up the widescreen eMachines M5312, but after playing with it in the store, something just didn’t feel right about it to me.
I picked up the HP ze4430us, which is toward the higher end of HP’s ‘just around $1000’ range of notebooks. It has a Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ (1.8GHz) processor with 512k of cache (Barton, baby!). I’m an AMD guy at heart (though I’ve got a good bit of Intel gear), so I went for the Mobile Athlon over the Celeron 2GHz that seemed to be in most of the laptops in my price range.
It’s really amazing how much laptop you can get for just over a grand nowadays.
Rounding out the specs, it’s got a non-widescreen 15 inch display, 512 megs of RAM (2×256 of course), an ATI Mobility chipset with 64 megs of shares memory, a 40 gig drive (perfect for running multiple operating systems) and built-in 802.11g (Broadcomm chip) with a little button to turn it on and off. It’s only got one PCMCIA/Cardbus slot, but it seems like that’s the way budget notebooks are heading. It’s got the usual required USB ports (for my bluetooth dongle!) as well as a firewire port, along with various other connections.
I have not found any showstoppers about this model yet, though in an ideal world my laptop would have built in Bluetooth. Until Broadcomm 802.11g support is added to Linux, I’m going to have to use a PCMCIA card for Wi-Fi under Linux. Wide screens are the new geek chic, but besides the eMachines laptop, most of the widescreens cost at least a little bit more.
From a quick search, it looks like at least SuSE will run on this particular model, and once the laptop arrives (hopefully Wednesday) I’ll see which distros will take.
My box at home was down from Thursday afternoon until late yesterday evening due to a power outage.
Janak Parekh at PocketPC Thoughts went to PC Expo at the Javits Center in New York.
Janak took some pictures to show exactly how little of the show floor was occupied. It’s pathetic.
It’s sad, really. I used to enjoy a quick roadtrip up to New York City in order to fondle the latest gadgets and tech. I’m really glad that I decided not to go this year.
Update: PCWorld has a brief roundup of mobile tech.
From the 11pm public advisory:
ALL PREPARATIONS TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY SHOULD BE RUSHED TO COMPLETION IN THE HURRICANE WARNING AREA.
It’s going to be a long couple of days. More information can be found at NOAA‘s National Hurricane Center.
According to Imaging Resource, Ritz Camera has Digital Rebel SLRs in stock.
I knew that Canon had ramped up to get the Digital Rebel out the door as quick as possible, but this is impressive. They’re set up to slaughter the holliday digital-SLR market. There really isn’t anything out in the same price range. The closest you can get are cameras like the Nikon D100, Fuji FinePix S2, or Pentax *ist D, but these are professional-level models. The Digital Rebel is for soccer moms and dads.
Jabber, Inc., the leading developer of open architecture for enterprise-and carrier-class presence-enabled communications, including instant messaging (IM), today announced the general availability of the 2.7 release of Jabber™ XCP (eXtensible Communications Platform), Jabber™ Messenger, and Jabber™ WebClient.
I’ve used the free Jabber client since I started dabbling in XMPP. The version I used was not quite as complete as others, but it was clean, solid, and “just worked.” I’ll definately be taking a look at the new client.
It looks like 2.7 has some major improvements on the server side too, catering mostly to corporate clients. If you’d just like to tinker with a Jabber/XMPP server, jabber.org has an excellent list of open source server implementations.
Pertinent links: Jabber Messenger client, Jabber Platform, Extensible IM and Jabber Web Client.
Wow, we’re flipping channels, and we can choose from THREE Crichton movies:
Geekzone.co.nz has a series of useful end-user guides on using Bluetooth in various ways. There are guides for desktops, laptops, mobiles, and for various ways of connecting them.
I received an email this afternoon from Altova, announcing the release of XMLSpy 2004. I evaluated the previous version, which seemed to make dealing with XML on win32 much easier. It was also quite useful for evaluating XSLT.
It looks like XMLSpy 2004 has support for editing WSDL, which could be quite useful if applied to platforms with limited or nonexistant WSDL support.
Along those same lines, xmlhack (via Mark) mentions nXML. nXML is an open source mode for Emacs that allows “context-sensitive validated editing against Relax NG schemas.”
The introduction of the 802.11a version of Intel Corp.’s wireless chip, part of its Centrino mobile package, will be delayed past its expected arrival at the end of the third quarter, an Intel spokesman said Thursday.
Call me crazy, but 802.11a seemed to be desirable for about 20 minutes.
Can you use 802.11a at a Starbucks? What about the thousands of other for-fee access points throughout the world? How many 802.11a community (read: free) access points are there in the wild? Does it interoperate With 802.11b or 802.11g?
I honestly think that Intel would be better off spending their time and money elsewhere, preferably in ramping up their 802.11g efforts. True, the 5GHz spectrum is a lot less crowded. However, 802.11a is going to be in competition with the newest cordless phones as 5GHz cordless phones become the next chic tech. I’m sure other gadgets will find use for the somewhat lonely 5GHz spectrum in the near future.
This move (and plans to add 802.11g to the chipset) is also seriously diluting the Centrino brand that Intel has spent so much money on creating. Last week, Centrino meant 802.11b (along with the required audio chipset and other baggage). This week the wireless portion of Centrino means 802.11b + 802.11a. Later this year, it is going to mean 802.11b + 802.11a + 802.11g.
Is anyone else confused?
I caught a few minutes of the Jim Lehrer News Hour last night on the radio. They happened to be discussing the RIAA and music downloaders when I scanned by, so I stayed for awhile.
What disturbed me is that the arguments do not seem to have changed a bit since I attended a Cato Institute debate on the subject. On one side of the argument was John Flansburgh (of TMBG). They’ve been giving away music for free since before mp3’s existed. On the other side was Chuck Cannon of the Nashville Underground. He writes music for a living. He doesn’t tour, so he really can’t afford to give away his music for free.
Let’s talk about those eight cents for a bit, shall we?
Did you know that every time a record is sold, the person who wrote it is entitled to eight cents. If they cowrote it, they are due four cents. If the song gets published, they get two cents. I already knew this, because those eight cents were invoked extensively at the Cato debate. Now you know about those eight cents.
12 year olds are stealing Mr. Cannon’s eight cents by downloading his music for free rather than paying for it. We’re going to ignore for a second that music downloaders also tend to purchase more music. That must not happen in real life, it certainly cannot.
Eight cents! Eight cents!
I’ll admit that it’s at least a halfway valid argument. Mr. Cannon has got a mortgage to pay. If I ran into him on the street and heard his eight cent story, I’d probably feel pretty bad for him. Unfortunately, I’ve heard the eight cent story before, and I’m rather bored of it. The argument isn’t working, can we move on?
I’m definitely interested in a business model that competes with free. That would be really interesting. I’d like to hear John address that.
Wait, I’ve heard this one before too. How the heck are you going to compete with free? 99 cents a song seems to work pretty well. I hear that they sold over 10 million songs in about 4 months. The legit way. The songwriter gets their eight cents.
As consumers, we’re dying to download music in a legitimate way. We dislike the RIAA and the recording industry. We’d like a better way to get straight to the music that we’d like to hear. We don’t like your many middleman business model. We don’t like getting ripped off. We know that downloading is probably the business model of the future, we’re just waiting for you to catch up so we can give you our money. We’re not going to give you as much money as before, but if you figure out what’s going on, we’d love to give you some.
I’m actually quite suprised that the debate seems to be almost identical to a year ago, yet the landscape has changed significantly. It seems to have degraded into your typical Mac vs. PC, nobody is ever going to budge type of argument.
Well, that’s just my eight cents.
Creative Commons has made their license selection process even easier.
It must be Monday again. Here’s a collection of links from the weekend: