Martin @ Blog

Column over auteurrsrecht door saxofonist Hans Dulfer op Xs4all. Uiteraard heeft hij volgens mij helemaal gelijk. Ik ga never nooit betalen voor drm-muziek; zelfs als platenmaatschappijen niet anders meer zouden uitbrengen (maar dat doen ze toch niet, want dan verkopen ze niets meer).

Yesterday, Apple finally introduced the iPhone. This new telephone integrates an iPod, internet tablet and telephone in one. Apple claims that this new telephone is ahead of the competition, and I think they are very right. Taking the video’s on the web site as a reference, it seems the usability of the iPhone is very good. Almost every cell phone I have used has major flaws in usability, and it is not a second to early that a company is going to improve this.
Obviously, a very large touchscreen makes it easier to create a nice user interface, but other phone companies could have done this as well. I think this is also the first telefphone which can function normally as a music player. My current telefphone, a Nokia 6230, has also the capability to play music, but the user interface is impossible to use. The same holds for my Palm Tungsten E2 (but this can be solved by installing other music player software). I predict that the iPhone is going to be a huge success.
Other strong features of the phone are the possibility to install other applications (widgets), browse the internet in a normal way (using 802.11a/b/g technology) and obviously integration with the Apple Mac. The touchscreen is also nice, because it doesn’t require the use of a seperate pen to use it; you can just use your finger to control it. The motion sensor is a nice feature, but not essential I think.

There are already people saying that this product isn’t innovative (but at the same time says Windows Vista is innovative, to I doubt I should take these people serious anyway). I do not agree with these statements. This telephone is definitely innovative because of the previous mentioned points. Current smartphones are just a collection of hardware and a bunch of software, creating the feel of a collection of stuff grabbed together instead of a integrated device. This latter is caused by the fact that telefphone companies think they should introduce a new model every three months (or something) which is in no way enough time to engineer a decent product. Even Motorola with the RAZR phone included iTunes support, but the user interface was very crappy. This caused that the phone was not a success and resulted in a missed oportunity by Motorola. I think Apple is going to make a lot of money on the iPhone, and they deserve it, because it is the first company spending time on designing a good user interface for a mobile phone. I think that I may buy an iPhone when it is available in the Netherlands and the price is not unreasonable high.

Nokia introduced earlier this week the N800, a successor to the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. With the N800 it is not possible to make telephone calls (because it has no GSM modele). The device is designed to use as a portable internet device and music player. The nice part on the N800 is that it runs Linux and uses GTK+ as the toolkit for its user interface. This is the same toolkit used by Gnome, and a lot of developers working on Gnome are also working on this Nokia device. Unfortunately, I think the Apple iPhone is more useable than the Nokia, because it has also the possibility to be used as telephone and doesn’t require a Wifi-network for using the internet part of the device.

Zojuist op de radio bij het journaal: Geenstijl verklaard Felix Meurders dood. Lekker boeiend ook, weblogs zoals Geenstijl zijn leuk entertainment, maar moeten vooral niet serieus genomen worden.. Het probleem is dat de ‘journalisten’ die daar schrijven dat wel zo graag willen. Daardoor is Geenstijl een kansloos geheel en denk ik niet dat het nog lang zal voortbestaan.
Sowieso is het doodverklaren van iemand helemaal niet grappig of zo. Blijkbaar kunnen ze niet zo goed tegen kritiek, terwijl ze zelf niets anders doen.

Interessant stuk: Vrijschrift.nl

Today, VNU announced that Business Media Europe has been sold to a British company called 3i. Since my employer, Tweakers.net, is part of VNU Business Publications Benelux, which on its turn is part of VNU Business Media, this means that Tweakers.net is also sold. Interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

This article is about the ‘vapour ware’ strategie Microsoft uses in order to push products from other companies of the radar. The article specifically tells the story on Microsoft’s Cairo, a product which never appears on the market. The article describes how this story resemble the current marketing buzz Microsoft is generating around Vista. Interestingly, it seems that Microsoft promised a ‘object oriented filesystem’ already back in 1993, but seems to be incapable of delevering such a filesystem even now in Vista (WinFS would be a part of Vista, but eventually was not of high enough quality to be shipped with Vitsta, according to Microsoft). When you read such an article, you’ll be almost ashamed for believing all the articles an publications on Microsoft products in the early nineties.

A ‘must read’ for Microsoft lovers and haters (I hope the first group will get to its senses after reading this 🙂 ):
link

I’ve used Mac OS X almost exclusively for about 1,5 year. I especially liked the nice effects and the fact that things ‘just work’. Now, since a few weeks, I’m using Ubuntu Edgy Eft on my laptop and this week installed it on my old Athlon PC with Nvidia GeForce 4 graphics board. I enabled Compiz this week (see previous post) and now installed Beryl. This last engine is even nicer than Compiz (but according to the changelog of Compiz, a lot of the features of Beryl are also available in the latest development versions of Compiz). Beryl makes Linux almost as usable als Mac OS X. The software was already available (Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, Gvim, The Gimp, Inkscape and Xchat are the programs I use the most) but with Beryl the usability and visual effects are almost as good, and sometimes even better. Especially the Exposé emulation and the trailfocus is very nice and actually improves the usability. I also installed Beagle and Deskbar. I have Beagle installed because of the engine, and use Deskbar as my main search program. This way, the functionality of Deskbar is similar to Spotlight on the Mac, and allows you to search for documents, e-mails, programs, chatlogs, webpages and much more. Finally, there is Network-manager which makes it easier to configure your network and especially makes it a lot easier to use wireless networks with WPA en WEP encryption.

Unfortunately, most of these tools are not installed by default on Ubuntu Edgy Eft, however, Feisty Feist (version 7.04) of Ubuntu, will include most of the stuff I mentioned in this post. At least there will be 3d desktop acceleration, beagle, network-manager and (I assume) Deskbar. As a bonus, the Ubuntu developers aim to improve the multimedia support in Ubuntu. I think this last point will make Linux even more usable for the average person than ever.

Ironically, I stumble across the news that Gartner thinks that Mac OS X is more attractive for businesses as a desktop operating system than desktop Linux. While I have the opinion that both Mac OS X and Linux are more usable than Windows as desktop operating system, I’m not sure that one of them is better than the other. Both are based on Unix, and as such have some obvious advantages over Windows (most notably a better command line shell and better security model), but I think they have both their specialties. Mac OS X is more suited for people who work with proprietary software, such as Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and MS Office, while Linux is a better platform for developers (although Mac OS X could be used for this as well, but requires some more fiddling because of the lack of an integrated package manager such as RPM/Yum or dpkg/Apt/Synaptic.

Today I managed to get Compiz working on my computer. Compiz makes it possible to use OpenGL for rendering your desktop, which makes it possible to add all kind of cool effects. It didn’t take very much time, but some driver troubles made it a little more difficult then expected. I have a nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 videocard in this computer, so it was required to install the binary nVidia driver. While this driver is shipped with Ubuntu Edgy Eft, it is necessary to install a newer version. Using this topic at the Ubuntu Forum, this was not very difficult. After some minor modifications of /etc/X11/xorg.conf (enabling Composition and adding Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True", see this topic) everything works. Since the last time I tried AIGLX, there is a lot improved. The speed is much better and there are a lot more nice plugins, like wobbly windows, a rotating cube (for desktop switching), easy to configure transparent windows, a cool alt-tab window switch effect and an Exposé clone.

On Slashdot and Groklaw, there is a news item about forking of OpenOffice.org by Novell. When reading an article, there is no prove for an actual fork, an as is pointed out by Jono Bacon, it seems that Groklaw is just using a sensational heading. As Andries Brouwer points out, the news at Groklaw is probably inspired by the disklike of Microsoft by PF.

For the third time within three months, my laptop is broken again. This time it seems there is something wrong with the memory of the system, because the beep-code (1-3-4-3) means ‘error while checking 512KB base memory’. So, tomorrow morning I can visit the Notebook Service Center again and hopefully get my laptop repaired again in approximately a week. The downside is that I have to install everything I use for my graduation project on another system, which takes quite some time..
While I was already convinced that NEC laptops are just garbage, this problem confirms this again. I think the mainboard is broken again, as it was the last time. If I’m right, this will be the third time the mainboard is broken. Besides from the mainboard, also the modem, harddisk and display are already replaced. There is still a problem with the bios, which makes it not possible to get X.org working at 1400×1050 without ugly patch and there are black spots on the display which are caused by the mousepad not fitted nicely in the housing.
The only thing I can do is advice everybody to never buy a NEC-laptop (or any other hardware from that company). A company which releases such a piece of crap as a ‘business laptop’ can never be able to produce anything decent.