ɔimoɈɒ – Page 189 – Just another WordPress site

Rickshaw. Golly, Oh Gosh, Oh Wow.

Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because … Continue reading “Rickshaw. Golly, Oh Gosh, Oh Wow.”

But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.

For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!

Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.

Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?

Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.

Health care: a basic human right

Neil Gaiman writes about healthcare: I was born and spent the first 2/3rds of my life in the UK, in a world in which health care was simply a human right. You got it, like an education, by virtue of being alive. And then I came to America and simply it isn’t that way here, … Continue reading “Health care: a basic human right”

Neil Gaiman writes about healthcare:

I was born and spent the first 2/3rds of my life in the UK, in a world in which health care was simply a human right. You got it, like an education, by virtue of being alive. And then I came to America and simply it isn’t that way here, and, even after 16 years, that still keeps surprising me.

He also sends a link to CaitlÃn R. Kiernan‘s blog. She’s not very well.

Encyclopedia Britannica on iPhone.

Britannica Mobile – iPhone Edition In order to ensure the best experience, we’ve specifically optimized this site for the iPhone. Please visit http://i.eb.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch. If you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch handy, you can still access plenty of great Britannica content from your desktop. Come see us at … Continue reading “Encyclopedia Britannica on iPhone.”

Britannica Mobile – iPhone Edition

In order to ensure the best experience, we’ve specifically optimized this site for the iPhone. Please visit http://i.eb.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

If you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch handy, you can still access plenty of great Britannica content from your desktop. Come see us at http://www.britannica.com.

Nicely done.

Spore coming Sept 7th.

I’ll be waiting with baited breath. Related posts: 30 day Tariffs for iPad in UK Mobile Phone Operators are shit. All of them. Holiday plans in June: Roaming Data Games Development Seminar – Belfast, 14th Sept

I’ll be waiting with baited breath.

Swear to God, I had nothing to do with it.

MacNN link

Apple stock was subject to slight gains as Citigroup added the Cupertino-based company to it Top Picks Live list, which allowed the computer manufacturer to maintain a Buy rating, with a target of $212 per share.

Microsoft to start manufacturing phones?

Zu-ne. verb. 1. To fuck over or generally bugger up partners who believed your shite for years and invested heavily in it. (From Zune, noun, a music player released by Microsoft which is incompatible with their previous music sales efforts under the PlaysForSure brand and immediately began to undermine their own branding and hurt their … Continue reading “Microsoft to start manufacturing phones?”

Zu-ne. verb. 1. To fuck over or generally bugger up partners who believed your shite for years and invested heavily in it. (From Zune, noun, a music player released by Microsoft which is incompatible with their previous music sales efforts under the PlaysForSure brand and immediately began to undermine their own branding and hurt their partners).

If you’re currently a vendor of phone handsets using the Windows Mobile operating system, you’re about to get Zuned.

Microsoft has just acquired Danger, makers of the consumer smartphones, the Sidekick. They’re reportedly buying Sidekick to keep it out of Google’s hands as well as to line it up against Research in Motion’s Blackberry and Google’s Android, not to mention Apple’s hit iPhone (which recently garnered 23% of the smartphone market). The Sidekick, although popular, does not run Windows Mobile.

What does this mean to any manufacturer currently using Windows Mobile? Well, if Microsoft is getting into the hardware game for phones then you can expect to have a rough time. This is bad news for beleaguered handset maker, Palm and possibly even worse news for Sony-Ericsson. Palm is floundering after dividing it’s market offering Palm OS and Windows Mobile based handhelds rather than concentrating on developing a decent successor to Palm OS (and what the hell did they do with everything they got from their acquisition of Be?). But there’s more.

After Nokia started road-testing it’s new Linux-based platform in the 770/N800/N810 series of handhelds, Sony-Ericsson knew that it’s use of Symbian as an OS for their phones would leave it in the doldrums in terms of features and development speed. Their solution was the opposite of Nokia’s and they decided to license Windows Mobile.

Boo. Bad mistake.

If Microsoft starts manufacturing their own hardware running their own operating system, where does that leave everyone else who’s investing in Microsoft’s operating systems?

Exactly. Without a paddle.

Don’t believe me? Wikipedia speaks!

During its launch week, the original Zune, now Zune 30, was the second-most-sold portable media device with a 9â€‰% unit share; behind the market-leading iPodâ€™s 63â€‰%. For the first 6 months after launch, NPD Group figures show that the Zune 30 achieved approximately 10% market share in the Hard Drive based MP3 market and 3% in the overall MP3 player market.

Good for Microsoft. $100 million spent on marketing for a 3% market share in the US and 0% outside the US. But that 3% comes at a cost – that’s a few million sales for Microsoft’s previous PlaysForSure partners. Microsoft robbed their hardware partners of those sales and then proceeded to screw over anyone who opened a PlaysForSure store because it didn’t play anything from Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, or even their own MSN Music Service.

So, what’s the chance they’ll sacrifice their own hardware sales to enable licensees to make a buck?

WebKit: Tom Raftery tests it right

One of the things about blogging is that it’s a two way experience. I think it’s important to share interesting links, though I’m loathe to just list them. One such like is on the always interesting Tom Raftery’s Social Media (which, for the life of me I always spell as “Rafferty” but that’s my own … Continue reading “WebKit: Tom Raftery tests it right”

Today he’s talking about browsers and how the new WebKit based browser builds are screaming fast. So much so that he took the time to test them out on both Vista and Mac OS X which shows a lot of dedication to the craft and seriously makes me want to run this WebKit build. Running the SunSpider Javascript test…

Highlights

Internet Explorer 7 on Vista: 66 seconds.
Firefox was fastest on Mac OS X with 10 seconds (29 seconds on Vista).
Safari was faster on Vista than Firefox
WebKit r30123 took 9 seconds on Vista and 5 seconds on Mac OS X

Can you credit it? Safari on Mac OS X was 13 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 on Vista?

The real question now is when do we get WebKit builds on the iPhone.

I ran the tests this morning and got 21 seconds for FireFox 2 and 44 seconds for IE6 so there must be a CPU/Memory component too. Hmm, interesting.

Pixish: a new site where you can create image contests.

For Artists: You’ve got talent, admit it. You can draw, paint, take a great photo, or design something beautiful. But you need a way to get your work out there. Pixish is your chance to get published. … For Publishers: Right now, if you want images, you have two options. You could hire an artist … Continue reading “Pixish: a new site where you can create image contests.”

For Artists: You’ve got talent, admit it. You can draw, paint, take a great photo, or design something beautiful. But you need a way to get your work out there. Pixish is your chance to get published.
…
For Publishers: Right now, if you want images, you have two options. You could hire an artist (expensive, difficult, and time-consuming) or you could surf microstock sites (cheap, but frustrating and time-consuming). Pixish seeks to be a middle path.

Pixish is a cool idea. One that will hopefully improve the look of books, T-shirts and application user interfaces.

Silicon Valley -> Ireland

Pop on over to eirepreneur: Gareth Coen and colleague Diane Roberts were inspired by the Enterprise Ireland bash during Paddy’s Valley to offer a similar event here in Ireland. Gareth, based in Silicon Valley, and Diane, based in Dublin, recently started a consultancy firm with the goal of helping bridge the gap between Valley and … Continue reading “Silicon Valley -> Ireland”

Pop on over to eirepreneur:

Gareth Coen and colleague Diane Roberts were inspired by the Enterprise Ireland bash during Paddy’s Valley to offer a similar event here in Ireland. Gareth, based in Silicon Valley, and Diane, based in Dublin, recently started a consultancy firm with the goal of helping bridge the gap between Valley and Irish tech start-ups.

If you want to know more, and save money, read on.

I remain sceptical about this approach, still likening it to trying to make Ireland into Hollywood by shipping a couple of casting agents over here but if you’re in charge of a tech startup and you’re running the kind of tech that would benefit greatly from a step onto the first rung of the ladder then you should register immediately using the secret code provided and enjoy.