So here I am again, bashing Apple. In the last few days everybody and his brother was talking about how cool the iPhone is and how they can’t wait to buy one because it’s sooo hi-tech and yadda yadda yadda. Actually, you just have to look at the specs to be deluded:

• Cingular only
• no UMTS
• battery life just 5 hours talk
• 135 grams
• no camera zoom

Ok, there are nice sensors, a multi-touch screen and a neat user interface, but at the end of the day who cares? Since I have a phone in my pocket 16hours a day the most important features are small size, light weight, battery life, audio quality. I’m sorry I can’t trade my own comfort for any UI, however cool it is.

This device is going to be sub-optimal both as a phone and as a computer (no QWERTY, 3.5″ screen). It’s like a tablet: that useless mid-size that makes everybody unhappy.

Of all the spam I received in my life, this is definitely the nicest. A mere few hours after I posted Caipirinha, a cachaça producer posted a comment with their recipe and a link to their web site. They have to have a robot connected to gogle alert and automatically scanning blog posts. Since this site is mostly useless, I decided to approve that comment even if it was spam, just removing the URL to avoid google bombing. At least this blog can be useful to somebody to promote their product.

UPDATE: there was no robot, there’s real people scanning the internet and posting comments! OMG, this is a lesson on marketing 2.0!

Microsoft finally figured it out: Vista could be their last operating system, at least in the way they meant it so far. From Times Online:

Yet already the knives are out for Vista, a system that Microsoft executives admit will be the last of its kind, as their company finally gets to grips with the internet age. Vista is meant to be slicker and safer than its predecessors, but even after a two-year delay it is “not really ready”, Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner, said.

Now, this is a big step for them and for everybody (partners, customers) who accepted to be locked into their products. A very bitter medicine, but they eventually figured out there’s no choice:

The fear is that rivals will use the web to kill Windows. Google, a child of the online era, is the No 1 threat.

“Microsoft is way behind Google when it comes to the internet,” Rupert Godwins, the technology editor at ZDNet, the industry website, said. “Building Vista, Microsoft is still doing things the old way at the same time as it undergoes a big shift to catch up.”

[...]

Crucially, the Google word processor and spreadsheet package does not need Vista.

Well, it was about time they noticed. Welcome to the Internet.

Yesterday it’s been Linux Day in Italy. Open source entusiasts all over the country organized happenings, one in each city. There’s been workshops, installation parties and general outing. This was the 6th yearly edition of this event and nowadays this is considered a solid tradition. I partecipated to all of the six and still I have lots of fun with it.

This year something new happened. For the first time ever, the most popular national TV news service talked about Linux Day in prime time. Good morning italian journalists! They took only 15 years to notice the open source movement. At least now they discovered us.

They said linux users are 29 millions. I wonder what’s their source for this number, anyway according to Clickz stats internet users add up to 1.2G, therefore linux would account for 2.4% of total internet users worldwide!

Today Steve Jobs announced the new amazing features of OSX 10.5 aka Leopard.

• they can run natively on Intel hardware (wow, I stopped using Intel in favor of AMD at least 5 years ago)
• they have the Time Machine, or they can apply versioning to files and directories (wow, I’ve been using Subversion for so long…)
• they have multiple virtual desktops (wow, we have had this feature since KDE 1.0)
• they can index files according to metadata

OK, maybe Spotlight is cool, but why so much fuss for such a simple new feature? When you talk with Mac enthusiasts they seem to imply 10.5 is a revolution and nothing will be ever the same under the sun. I don’t think so.

From http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/75560

In their recent plenary session, EU parliamentarians have voiced their support for an open information society. A text adopted by a majority of the EU parliament to implement the Lisbon program of the European Community under the motto “More research and innovation – investing for growth and employment” aims, among other things, to send a signal to the EU commission, which is constantly expanding intellectual property rights to the benefit of rights holders. The parliamentarians countered that the concept of “Open Innovation” is the best way to increase investments in research and development and attain the Lisbon goals. In these goals, the EU Plans to become the most competitive, dynamic
economic area in the world by 2010. Read the rest of this entry »

Firefox is already a great web browser, and now they are very close to release the new version 2.0, expected by this fall. To celebrate this upcoming event, they decided to announce the world firefox day on September 15. If you can convince somebody to download firefox, you can have both your names listed in the next version. This is a great viral marketing campaign! Check out worldfirefoxday.com.