— An iTimely prayer
— Do androids queue up for positronic phones?
— The vaguely husky and feminine voice of defamation
MalaMala
Lovely Intarweb meme music video, this.
An iTimely prayer
Blessed is The iJobs, for He hath delivered unto us a Device.
Arise, ye faithful and queue up for it is awfully nice.
Hark! The Great Satan, Vodafone, has the Device and awaits you with its many tills with ringers.
You must fight The Great Satan with barrow-loads of silver, online petitions and a show of fingers.
Blissful are those who possess the Device.
They will know no fear, only joy and happiness for the next twenty-four moons.
For theirs is the Device with 3G radiating the pockets of their pantaloons.
Thank you, oh iJobs. We forgive you the US$199 lies.
Amen.
— American ready to rip iPhone 3G apart
— Herald, PC World readers call iPhone pricing an 'iRipoff"
— The Inq: Apple calls in tame journalists
Do androids queue up for positronic phones?
Even though iPhone fanbois are desperately uncool, Apple deserves props for roundhouse kicking the stodgy mobile phone industry and carriers into submission. What will the response from the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC, etc be to the iPhone?
Increased storage, HSPA/LTE, multi-megapixel cameras seem to be what the mobile phone makers intended take on the iPhone with, but will that be enough? Probably not, as techie features don't usually rate as being cool with mobile phone customers.
The design of the iPhone rocks, but importantly, the phone runs an operating system based on Open Source components (Darwin UNIX) and a "touch layer" that allows people to use the device with their fingers. Touch screens are nothing new of course, but the iPhone (and that in other Apple devices) implementation works rather nicely and intuitively unlike say Windows Mobile 6.x. This by itself attracts developers because they know customers will find it easier to get going with their applications on iPhone OS than on other platforms.
Being Open Source is no guarantee of success of course. I don't think we'll see much happening with OpenMoko for instance. Even Symbian needs to find some cool despite being Open Source and royalty-free for the foundation members backing it after Nokia bought the lot.
Where could that cool come from? Possibly Google, with Android. This is a Linux-based operating system for mobile phones that's nearing completion. It looks very good indeed, is touchy-feely and appears to run on existing hardware. Furthermore, Google has the online properties like YouTube, Maps and of course, search, to back it up.
The main problem with Android is that neither Larry Page nor Sergey Brin at Google is a Steve Jobs... they'll fire up the developers all right, but can he stand on stage and convince the world to queue up for days just to buy Android phones?
Either way, Apple's vastly profitable and popular iPhone has booted up the mobile space well and truly so expect more action there soon.
— Nguyen from phonemag.com checks out Android's touch screen (embedded below)
The vaguely husky and feminine voice of defamation
Male/female confusion, board election tampering, conspiracy and data theft; and here we thought IT service management was as dull as ditch water.
The main product of ITSMF is ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which is something like a set of best practices when it comes to IT services. ITIL deserves many stories on its own, as we're told by industry sources having to implement it, "it's applicable for big enterprises with infinite budgets and ridiculous headcounts".
Apparently, ITIL needs lots of staff, all of whom need training. Since specific roles and responsibilities are delegated, ITIL kills cross-skilling. The industry source thought "for anyone actually doing things, ITIL is a disaster" as it takes forever to implement and kills a company's business in the process.
— Mystery NZ blog accuser faces defamation case
XKCD
Too old for this shit
Cartoon: www.xkcd.com
Robert X Cringely
Everybody's got something to hide (except for me and my YouTube)
So a New York judge last week ordered Google to hand over 12 terabytes of YouTube user information to Viacom. Yes, we know what you watched last summer, or at least Viacom's attorneys soon will. The owners of Comedy Central and VH1 are attempting to prove that more people watch pirated clips of John Stewart and Behind The Music than, say, the Wii Fit Girl or that goofy guy dancing his way around the globe (video). In the aggregate, maybe more people are watching clips of The Daily Show on them Internets. But a viral video will still draw more eyeballs than any single thing the mainstream media can belch out, regardless of how clever Stewart is. Partly that's because most people who'd want to see it already have, for free, over the airwaves. (Which makes YouTube's harm to Viacom exactly bupkis.) Trouble is, our video viewing habits are supposed to be protected by federal law. After a reporter went dumpster diving on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in 1987 and came up with Blockbuster rental receipts (he was looking for porn, but mostly he found Hitchcock and Fellini) Congress passed a law explicitly protecting the privacy of movie rentals. The judge in the Viacom case, Louis Stanton, decided that watching a YouTube video somehow qualified as less worthy of protection than Bork's VCR. (I'd like to see what's in Stanton's NetFlix queue -- or maybe he's a SugarDVD fan.) The usual answer from people who claim to be perfectly happy having attorneys rooting around their private lives like squirrels in a nuthouse is that they've "got nothing to hide." To which I usually say, "terrific, now drop your pants." Everybody's got something to hide, even if it probably isn't what they watched on YouTube. Even the Transparent Society geeks who believe the path to total freedom lies in having everything exposed in plain view still wear clothes and keep their Social Security cards in their pockets. The right to keep one's thoughts and interests private -- and by extension, things that indicate thoughts and interests, like books and movies -- is one of the keys to democracy. Nobody can demand to know what's going on between my ears (and trust me, you don't want to know). That's the way I like it. The real problem here is the obsession with data collection that infects Google, Microsoft, and other major service providers. If there's a reason to keep a running record of every YouTube video I've watched or Web search I've run over the last 18 months, I can't see it -- and Google has done a p*** poor job of explaining why they need it. Because if a record is out there, you're almost guaranteed that some day a lawyer with a subpoena (or a spook with an electronic back door) may come looking for it. And there will be nothing you can do about it.