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2005

  • 1 min read

Treo 700!

I'd heard about it but had not seen a picture. This from Ray Ozzie's blog: "As of last week I'm now using/testing the upcoming Treo 700w, and it's great! The pipeline of cool devices about to emerge is stunning, and the software platform incomparable. Much to look forward to, and many new ideas for Jack as to what we might do with these devices' capabilities…" (from Ray Ozzie's Blog) Check out the Treo 700 here! Technorati Tags: treo

  • 1 min read

Netherlands Antilles set to be dissolved

I don't know how I missed this article, but it sure is an interesting and significant development for one, like me, who was born and grew up in Curacao.

"Under the new structure, the Netherlands Antilles will be dissolved and Curacao and St. Maarten will become separate, autonomous members of the kingdom, according to the agreement signed by the leaders Saturday night in Curacao." (from Miami Herald)

Technorati Tags: curacao, netherlandsantilles

  • 1 min read

Load one physical CD, get two icons on my desktop

Picture 1-24 I know all this Sony rootkit/DRM stuff has made me paranoid. I loaded my Sarah McLachlan CD into my Mac (a single CD), and two different CDs appear on my desktop (see the screenshot on the left.) One apparently is the music aspect of the CD and the other is the computer aspect of the CD. Look inside the former, and you see a bunch of AIFF files. Look inside the latter and you see a folder structure, including two executables! Probably totally innocuous, right? Wait the CD is from Arista records. Any connection to Sony? Is it loading a rootkit?I dunno. Paranoid. Technorati Tags: mac, sony, rootkit

  • 2 min read

Why is everything free?

Have you noticed how man how many new apps that have appeared of late are available free of charge? Web 2.0 services like gada.be or flickr or del.icio.us. And more conventional client apps like Firefox? The list is approximately infinite. They come and go at an amazing rate. And they are all free. Not only are they free, users seem to expect them to be free. I am not sure how this came to be… Is it a unintended consequence of the open source philosophy? Is it a incorrect reframing of the fact that major and well known services like google and yahoo are (apparently) free (although ad supported?) Whatever the reason, I worry about the chilling effect this can have on innovation in our industry. How many great new innovations have died on the vine because there was just no way for the creators to pay the rent while building the Next Big Thing? Even after a year, two years of development, the prospects for getting users to somehow compensate for the value delivered were small to none. Is there another explanation? What if this was a pure supply-demand invisible hand phenomenon? What if the platforms on which these systems are built (Apache, Tomcat, PHP, MYSql, Java, and so on) have become so rich and so powerful that it has become comparatively very cheap to build wonderful innovative systems like Furl, Rollyo or Reddit, and therefore the market was valuing them correctly at zero dollars. (My friend Shimon Rura put forth a case along those lines the other day. ) While there's an element of truth in this second explanation, I believe it is only a small part of the story. I continue to believe that this tendency to expect stuff to be free has had a chilling effect on innovation in our industry. <!-

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