Yea, I know everyone is tired of hearing about the new iPhone to be released on Friday July 11. What I am looking forward to is the new firmware 2.0 that I can download into my existing iPhone and being able to run applications. Finally I will be able to SSH, send an MMS message and get pushed events to my iPhone real time.
A few things about Cell Phone companies, as a consumer they are the biggest bait and switch artists in the world. The government should stop going after Microsoft and start attacking the cell phone companies, but that will never happen because of the billions of dollars the cell phone companies spend in Washington D.C. every year. I was taking my daughter to the local Verizon store this weekend, she kept picking out $50 phones, I kept telling her that that is not the REAL price, that is for someone who is a new customer, who has never signed on yet, has one arm shorted than the other, and can speak Esperanto. Then she looked at another phone that was listed as $79.99, I told her the same thing, she did not believe me so I asked the sales guy and of course, the listed price was for new customers only. Being a tried and true customer for the past eight years, they felt they can jerk me around. Nobody seems to care that the United States lags behind the rest of the world for cell phone coverage, speed, reliability and compatibility.
As a developer its even worse, look at AT&T pushing Apple around on this new iPhone release. There is no revenue sharing anymore and AT&T pre-announced stuff before Apple (which drives the tight lip Apple crazy), pricing their iPhone cell phone plans more expensive with less features with no Text message included in the plan anymore. What chance does the normal company have of putting their Application on a Verizon Cell phone ? Less than none, well of course you can pay the $5000 (USD) entrance fee to get someone to talk to you and keep paying or they can tell you to take a hike.
A scary thing has happened the past week, a judge has ordered that YouTube has to hand over their logs of all the user activity to the mega media corporation Viacom, this fly’s in the face of all the other rulings and can spread through the web to have scary consequences.
The lip service “Take you laptop out of the bag” may go away. Remember a few years back when they actually made you turn it on. This is about as useless as taking your shoes off. What they really need to do is to just profile people with beards, but that would be illegal. Cost effective and right, but illegal.
How many countries can tell their biggest exporting companies to shutdown for a few months to make the air cleaner for the Olympics?
Couple of cool programs this week. TrueCrypt released a new version this week. It encrypts your USB key or a piece of your hard drive, keeping prying eyes away for Windows, Mac and Linux.
This other one I am still goofing with, its called Format Factory for Windows. You can tell its from Asia from their font choices, but it converts different video, audio and images type to other types. It works ok and its free. Good to use in a pinch.
Finally a free font site, that was recommended to me from a content editor in Gateway computer.
Why does Adobe always bug me about upgrading, all I want to do is display a document, every week it seems to want to install an upgrade, leave me a alone already. Forget about it, I will use Foxit PDF viewer, lightweight and is not as annoying.
This article is funny (read the comments), they forgot to mention that library DVD borrowing is also cutting into profits. They should stop that also.
Later
Interesting but outdated, theres better choices around now