The World had another interesting story about Iraq IT today during their Iraq domain report:
As the handover of power approaches, Iraqis are seeking their own domain name. The World’s Clark Boyd reports.
Hopefully ICANN will give control of .iq to the Iraqi people in a timely manner.
SaveWonderfalls brings good news this morning:
At the Knitting Factory screening in LA on Friday, show creators Bryan Fuller and Todd Holland announced a tentative DVD release date — December 7 of this year.
Excellent, I’ll be there!
I caught a great story on Kuro5hin this morning about Total Anihilation. The game was way ahead of its time and over the years I have lost countless time to it. A year or two ago Roger and I dusted TA off for a quick game. Many hours later I decided that I was getting too old to stay up all night and I headed home to bed.
The evening reminded me of the days when TA first came out. We would all discuss strategy at work during the day and try to kick each others butts at night. Sometimes a Krogoth would be sent in to cause damage, other times it would be so many airborne units that the computer slowed to a crawl. There was always something different to try.
Whenever someone mentions TA, a little geeky tear forms in the corner of my eye. Thank you for all the years of entertainment.
The Nokia 6600 gets top billing in Cellular, a movie also starring Kim Basinger, Chris Evans, Jason Statham, and William H. Macy. It opens in theaters September 17. The plot seems a little thin, but there are lots of excuses for gratuitous car chases, gun battles, low battery warnings, and typical uses of mobiles with cameras.
The best line in the trailer is by far: “This is the single greatest phone ever made. Hold on a second, I’m emailing this video to myself.”
Does it feel a bit like the mobile phone equivalent of a BMW Film? The movie does look like a lot of fun and should be pretty entertaining.
I don’t know if they’ll honor my request, but I’ve asked that the Nokia 6600 be added to the credits:
There has been quite a bit of shuffling around in the latest edition of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. The full list has been published along with a press release covering the changes to the top 10. For a play by play report, check the highlights. Of note are the presence of two new IBM clusters in the top 10.
The Earth Simulator is still number one, though both IBM and HP have quite an impressive showing near the top. California Digital has put together an impressive cluster at #2. Missing from the list is the G5 cluster at Virginia Tech, which was offline during this survey for a hardware upgrade. Hopefully it’ll pop back on the charts next time.
Well guess what? TiVo announced today that Home Media Option is now bundled with the service, at no additional cost. For either $12.95/month or $299 lifetime, you get all of the normal TiVo functionality, along with the ability to stream MP3s over your home network (stored on your computer, played through your stereo), display digital photos on your TV (my kids’ favorite thing to do), schedule recordings over the web, and watch recordings in different rooms (with multiple TiVos in the house).
Whoa! Combine this with plummeting costs in hardware, and TiVo starts to look quite tempting to people who might otherwise not consider it.
Yesterday Gizmodo mentioned Pocketster, a program for Pocket PCs that among other things implements Rendezvous (Zeroconf). It sounds like Simedia, the company behind the product, is also working on a newer version that should iron out a few weirdnesses of the current program.
It’s a shame that there’s not more Rendezvous/Zeroconf love on the PC side. It’s an amazing thing, really, when things “just work.” Take the new Airport Express. It’s absolutely wicked!
My hat is off to Simedia and everyone else trying to spread the Rendezvous love throughout the world.
Foo
Mobiletracker reports that Verizon is excited about their new international text messaging. AT&T joined the transatlantic SMS party a few months ago, so it looks like this officially puts Verizon at the end of the line of carriers that “get it.” My advice to any carrier that does not support international SMS: quietly add the capability and pretend that you’ve been doing it for years.
I have to dump links from the tabs in Firefox, because Firefox 0.9 (One Tree Hill) is out!
The update went well. The new default theme is a little more sparse than the old one, but I think it’s growing on me. I also like the rotating dots above each tab when they reload. The rotating dots definitely give a consistent experience going between Thunderbird and Firebird. Everything seems pretty zippy.
On to the post-update links:
Even more links from just before bed:
I’m up for the Nokia press conference. Yes, it’s 9am in Helsinki, but it’s 2am in DC. I already know what they’re going to talk about, but I want to hear what they have to say and see the phones.
With some URL hacking, we have found some pics before the press conference started. The press conferences has just started and we’re reviewing the entire presentation.
And some more from thenewsmarket (I’m still waiting to view the full-size videos):
Last week Reuters ran a story about there being “no buzz” about the announcement of a few new phones from some company from Finland that nobody cares about anymore. I’ve seen the lineup, and I think that there’s going to be a ton of buzz. Nokia has pushed the rez on their Series 60 phones, embraced WCDMA, VPNs, Push-to-Talk, embraced the flip phone and low-end market, and they plan to have all of this on the streets by Q3 and Q4 2004.
That’s not to say all is well and good in the Nokia camp. A lot of analysts have all but given up on the company, citing a slide in market share while the “other guys” pick up the slack. If Nokia can ship enough units quickly, get the pricing on the 2600/2650 right, stay agile, focused and balanced, we could be looking at the Nokia Renaissance unfolding before our very eyes.
Oh yeah. Russ and I broke the story tonight a few minutes before Reuters and others. The clock on my server is a few minutes fast, but my story was online a few minutes before Russ’ which we clocked at 7:53:45PDT. Take that!
On a whim, I thought I’d take a look at the Nokia press site to see if there would be a webcast for the new phones. Lo and behold there is already information up about them:
Also of note:
I love it when random stories about hotspots like this one at netstumbler are local for me:
The state of Maryland is launching “hot spots” at two of its welcome centers on Interstate 95 so motorists can access the Internet wirelessly.
More information can be found at Baltimore Bizjournals. I’ll be sure to have live coverage via my laptop the next time I’m able to stop by the rest stop.
Gizmodo mentions Bluetooth EDR, or Enhanced Data Rate. It is supposed to be faster than but backward compatible with plain old Bluetooth (or is it Bluetooth Classic now?).
I’m glad that it’s going to be backwards compatible with oldskool Bluetooth, though honestly I’ve never had an issue with the speed of it. Sure, I’ll have to wait if I’m transfering a multi-meg file to or from my phone. For most things Bluetooth seems to be fast enough. I’m sure that for more advanced uses more bandwidth would be great, but it’s not a deal breaker for me.
I would use a slower Bluetooth device if it connected more reliably and didn’t do the random weird things that Bluetooth devices seem to do at one time or another.
Bluetooth EDR Roundup:
Things are finally starting to settle down after a few hectic days. We’re almost done with leftovers and are finally starting to get back to our regular schedules. Thanks again to the guys, Martin, Eric and his parents for mobilizing the champagne.
In other news, we ramped up the wireless infrastructure with a Linksys WRT54G on sale for $69 before rebates and $59 after. That’s about $40 off what I’d expect to pay normally, $30 off the normal “sale” price, and below my “buy it” threshold. I know that Linksys is pushing the SpeedBooster versions of their hardware, but 802.11g/b is faster than my internet pipes, and if I need to transfer anything faster, I’ll plug the thing in. You know, with wires. (Grandpa, tell us about when computers had wires!)
I picked the WRT54G because of an array of flashable Linux distros that I can put on it. I’m going to run the stock firmware for a bit until I get things sorted out, but I’ll be shopping around for the best firmware for it.
I’m still way behind on my aggregating. I should have a linkdump ready in the morning.
Special thanks to the mobitopians who sent along a bottle of chapagne. You guys rock! Yes, Erik, my parents are ecstatic.
All the little details have been filled in and everything is set for tomorrow. Until then, here are some links for you. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to read them in depth during the week.
Expect things to be rather slow around these parts over the next few days. I’m getting married on Sunday. I will however do my best to moblog over the weekend, probably until someone confiscates the cameraphone from me.