Status-Q

John Naughton’s column in the Observer is particularly good this week.
“How is it possible to make money from the internet?’. It’s the wrong question, because it’s based on a fundamental misconception.”

Expensive Bytes. There’s a new marketplace in cyberspace. Virtual Game Weapons Bought With Real Money (NY Times)

osOpinion: “Bluetooth has been touted as ‘the next big thing’ for three years now and has consistently failed to live up to its hype. More accurately, it has consistently failed to live, period. …802.11b wireless networking… has already taken any corporate role Bluetooth aimed at, relegating it to road warriors and tech-toy junkies. “

John Naughton - “Why shouldn’t ministers change their minds? …The really stupid people are those who refuse to countenance changing their minds, no matter what happens. ”

Agreed. My father says he’ll vote for the first politician who says, “I’m sorry - we made a mistake. We’ll try and get it right next time.”

jEdit is becoming really rather a good text editor. It’s a while since I’ve looked at it, but it now has a lot of nice features, and a large number of plugins with which you can extend it. Being Java-based, you can use it on a wide variety of platforms.

It takes some time to get into, customize, etc but I can see it might be worth persevering. Nothing worthwhile, as they say, was ever achieved without hard work. (Who said that, besides my mother? Albert Schweitzer? It’s his sort of thing, but it probably predates him)

Good quote from Jamie Zawinski - “Linux is only free if your time has no value” - He’s quite right. That doesn’t denigrate it, but for most situations, cost is not the best reason for choosing Linux.

Apple releases a new iPod with twice the storage space, and software to allow iPods to store contact lists.
I predict the next step will be calendars, and this thing will gradually evolve into a PDA. No easy route for text entry on the device, though. They’ll just have to build in a microphone and use speeach recognition…

Re Bluetooth and Macs: I spoke too soon.

Apple’s Bluetooth Cavity. [osOpinion] Apple led the world with USB support and is still well ahead of PCs when it comes to Firewire. It’s interesting that they haven’t yet jumped on the Bluetooth bandwagon.

VNC problems. There was an article on Slashdot recently about how the Windows XP licence prohibits the use of VNC. We knew that already; the Windows 98 licence basically prohibits it too.

Apple have released their own remote desktop system for OS X, at a price. But there are good versions of VNC for it too.

Wireless ‘HotZone’ network comes to downtown Palo Alto. Six blocks of the downtown area are now covered by WiFi.

This is the first post to my AT&T intranet weblog. I’ve created this as part of my experiments with the Radio Userland software.

Some things here (such as the earlier postings below) will be cross-postings which also appear on my main weblog at Status-Q. Others will be AT&T-only stuff. This page is on the intranet and so only accessible within the lab.