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Friday, August 19, 2005 |
 After my great experience with Skype, I think this is my next phone. Think about it. GSM phone, Pocket PC, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. What does that mean? It means I can use my normal phone and my Skype phone from the same device! Plus a decent way of cheking email, browsing the web etc. All the time while able to connect with my Mac through Bluetooth! Sounds too good to be true? It is! It seems the phone hangs a couple of times a day. But, hey, that's what's expected when using Windows  Isn't it?
9:14:15 PM 
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I had expounded similar reasonings about the advantage of owning music vs. renting it as Walter Mossberg does recently in the WSJ, but reading him I spotted a fatal flaw. The ownership of iTunes Music depends on the iTunes Music Store. That is if Apple crumbles or closes the iTunes Music Store (or decides to change it in any way) and you lose all authorized computers you won't be able to authorize a new one (or deathorize the old). Hence, unless you make a CD copy or use Jhymn to stripe the DRM immediately after buying (or at least before they close the iTunes Music Store) you do not own the music. Of course, it is far fetched, but it is one of the dangers of accepting DRM...
4:42:45 PM
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The iPod and the Bean. Blog: Once king of the portable music world, Sony has become a business school case study for losing its dominance so badly to Apple's... [CNET News.com]
Design is not the problem with Sony, if you look at the iPod shuffle it is not a design breakthrough. The problem is price! We have been told over and over again that the iPod is going to be killed by cheaper better products, instead what we see is more expensive about the same products. If the Bean was much cheaper than the shuffle it may be an alternative as it is buyers will have to question "Do I go with the leader? or with a more expensive gadget?" The answer is obvious. The features that have to be there are not impossible to do. Support for all the formats and at least an indication of how to get music from the iTunes Store into the gadget (using iTunes, if not you are losing clients). Part of the problem is that there seem to be a certain amount of Clueless pundits who just can't figure out the iPods or iTunes. If the competing companies are listening to them instead of to the millions buying iPods and downloading iTunes, they will certainly fail.
12:13:31 PM
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Via BoingBoing comes this wonderful annotated Mathpoem by Stanislaw Lem, The annotations are done by cheesedip. Here it is in its entirety... Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 Φ!
12:03:07 PM
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I have a theory about what Google is going to do. They are going to create a payment system, very innovative. Among the first two offerings will be a iTunes and Skype. This gives credence to some rumors we have heard lately. One central system and you'll be able to pay them all. If it includes Amazon it could be a hit. If it also is easy for common folk to become payees as well as payers, it's game over for Paypal, Digital River (Puagh!) and maybe even ebay! It has endless possibilities. Imagine if you could buy stocks (through E*trade or similar)...
11:13:42 AM
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© Copyleft 2005 Alfredo Octavio.
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