If you can understand portuguese, there is this new podcast TickTack about technology, it still in beta, but it’s worth it.
Software
19
jul 08
Mandriva is lost
“Lately it’s hard to avoid the buzz about netbooks — the small, cheap laptop systems that were popularized by the Asus Eee PC. Mandriva is providing the innovative operating system for the upcoming GDium netbook system, produced by Emtec. The first GDium will be a netbook with a 10″, 1024×600 resolution display and a battery life of four hours, weighing in at 1.1kg. The innovative G-Key system stores the Mandriva operating system and all the user data on a USB key — nothing is permanently stored inside the GDium. You can use your own desktop and data by plugging the G-Key into any GDium.”
From: http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/19/1750243&from=rss
It’s really sad for me to read this, Mandriva few years ago changed it’s name from Mandrake after buying the leader in Brazil, Conectiva, a company that made an impossible mission in an environment with deep complexities, showing strenght, leadership, innovation and positive will.
Mandriva is doing totally the opposite, clearly lost, nobody really knows what it’s doing and not even them when I read news like this, it should be working hard to do what they proposed, Linux. There are so many points to be improved that could make their market share increase, how it’s possible to see RedHat, OpenSuse far away and they doing nothing about it?
They have been still for a long time now and when you think they will do something innovative to shake the market, they present an OEM machine from Taiwan/China/Whatever and expect what? To be another Sun? valinux?
17
jul 08
Jaiku
“Jaiku is now a part of Google. For more details about Jaiku and Google, see the Q&A about the acquisition.
Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken – anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS – as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API.”
Anyways, it’s a micro blogging tool I’ve been trying lately, it’s still closed and I have a few invites, if anyone is interested, mail me.
30
jun 08
No more OS monopoly
I remember the first time I wanted to install Linux, 15 years ago, I had a Compaq laptop where Linux would never work, but I didn’t know that, so I tried over and over again, I knew so much the slackware installer steps that I could do it without looking at the screen.
One day I got tired and changed the approach, sold my laptop and built my desktop computer with the pieces I knew would work, it was the fastest computer I ever saw with Linux working like a charm. After this day, I never stopped using Linux.
And that’s how the market share for Linux started growing. Prior this I used windows and it was funny how people made fun of it, everybody used, but looked like everybody hated, something was wrong.
We all hoped with the time Microsoft fixed all those problems and worked on making our life easier and not boring, but for some reason it simply didn’t, they committed serious mistakes year after year, and this ain’t new, read this email sent by Bill Gates, what they did after 2003?
Now Apple is being recognized for it’s operating system and graphical interface that just works, makes our life much easier then anything available in the market, any person that try it, will be happier.
Being in the market committing mistakes after mistakes without a competitor to take advantage of it was easy, now we’ll see some action!
25
mai 08
Offline searchable information
You have no internet and you need to find out what is the closest hotspot. What do you do? Imagine an offline hotspot locator, a simple application that will provide fields for searching and a grid to display the results. No matter where you are, if you need to know where is the closest hotspot, just open the application, filter a little bit and voila!
If you think deeper about this, you’ll see that it can be used in many situations, so making it a rock would be a waste of time, latest couple hours I’ve been writing the initial spec of this project, which must be flexible enough to be useful for anyone interested in providing up to date offline content to the user.
Resources:
- Multi-platform (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, Linux, Phones, PDAs, …)
- Display/Search fields customizable
- Everything is remotely updatable, information never gets old
- Easy to whitelabel and release for your business
- Free Software
If you have comments, please email me.
