My first post using iPhone’s Wordpress application. Let’s see if I can get to posting once a year.
Here I am watching the UK version of Dragons Den on BBC America.
It may be a semi-bold statement but it’s great to see so many Canadians involved with Digg. And the list of names seems to keep growing. Digg just launched their new universal taxonomy along with their much-anticipated photo support, and to help with removing duplicate photos, Digg enlisted the help of Idée Inc. Kevin Rose announced the relationship the afternoon before launching:
Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
We’ve added a new sort to the images section called “mosaic” view – it’s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we’ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.
Now, the others involved from the Great North hold substantial roles at Digg. Co-founder and Senior Software Engineer, Owen Byrne was actually the coder Kevin Rose hired on Elance to code the idea of Digg. Estimates as to how much it cost, range in value between $200 and $1000 at a rate of $10/hour. That’s pretty low for a 20 year industry veteran who holds an MBA from Dalhousie, and a BA from Saint Mary’s University - he also held a role as a professor. Kevin got quite the deal.
The next Canadian in the bunch is Daniel Burka - partner at web design house silverorange of PEI, and Creative Director at Digg. Everything you see at Digg - the layout and user interface and plenty more fall under the reign of Daniel. silverorange has worked on a few high-profile designs including: GigaOm, Bebo and the Mozilla Foundation. Not too sure how Daniel was hired but if anyone does - do let me know. His educational past is unknown but he’s also the co-founder of Pownce, along with Kevin and Leah Culver.
These are just a couple of Canadians involved over at Digg that I know of, and there may be more. As Digg continues to grow, we can pretend that a piece of it belongs to Canada with coding and design work all headed by Canadians.
If you’re any sort of nerd - you’re going to love this. This discussion will go down as a milestone in the technology industry as a truly awakening event that really reveals how these two (once young) individuals contributed to our lives and how they brought personal computing to the masses. I believe we’ve hit a milestone as this technology in the hands of the masses is starting to reinvent itself, and empower others to reinvent everything its applied to. With Bill Gates retiring soon - it truly marks an end to an era. From BASIC, to DOS, to Windows, to Office - and exploiting it all on the IBM PC - Bill made his billions, and he’s putting it all towards charitable causes.Both Steve and Bill seemed to really approach this conversation/interview wholeheartedly and at times you can really tell that they honestly care about each other and what they do. Some great insight and some inspirational moments. There were even a few tear jerkers (haha) especially when Steve quoted the Beatles regarding his friendship with Bill, “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.”Check out all these clips down below - I decided to link them from Brightcove as theyhave a higher resoultion in comparison to YouTube. Trust me it’s worth the opening ad in order to really hear and see what’s going on in this interview…
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Prologue Read more…
Looks like Ottawa has taken out the Buffalo Sabres and is heading for the cup. That’s 3 years in a row that a Canadian team has shown up in the finals and for that I am proud (Calgary in 03-04, Lockout 04-05, Edmonton 05-06)!
Ottawa has a good chance of taking it. In regular season play they were only separated by 5 points. History is definitely on the side of Ottawa as every NHL season that ended with a ‘7′ such as the 1956-57 season, has always been won by a Canadian team or the Detroit Redwings. Take a look for yourself if you don’t believe me: Wikipedia: List of Stanley Cup champions.
It’s cool to sit back and watch the open public fix and enhance products without a single word from the original manufacturer (against or for). Apple definitely has it made - crowdsourcing without actually asking for it. In the couple of months since the launch of Apple TV, it’s obvious what the public wants - larger hard disks, RSS feeds, more support in terms of Codecs, and some seem to want OSX over HDMI - which is a valid need for many also. All of which were made possible on the same hardware that Apple has released to the public - oh, and for free!
That said, Revision3’s SYSTM series does an indepth episode covering from start to finish how to upgrade your AppleTV to a larger hard disk, support RSS feeds and DivX video files (and other codecs) without changing in any way how the Apple TV operates. They also make the Apple TV SSH accessible which makes future soft mods easy to accomplish.
Take a look - this episode has recreated the temptation for an Apple TV and depending on how your finances are, you may or may not want to watch.
I’ve been playing with a Mobile 6 device for a few hours now and for the love of all things good - why is this thing so damn annoying? The device in question is a high profile smartphone which would fairly represent Mobile 6 in a smartphone application.
Quick qwerks:
Oy. Keep in mind that I am a RIM employee, and thus have come to learn the BlackBerry OS and smartphones very well. I’m sure many of these things will work themselves out once I get going on this device.
I don’t own one. I’d like to own one. But I’ve yet to figure out why I would want one north of the US/Canada border. As a Mac user I’ve grown to love Apple’s UI and stability and is now my consumer electronics usability baseline.
I’ve had HTPC plans for a couple years now but haven’t really figured out which path I want to take. The best path up until Apple TV was a Windows Media Center… but the thought of going to Windows and leaving Apple’s UI and stability has been the sole reason why I’ve yet to. Price is also an issue as it’ll take a pretty penny to get HD going smoothly with Media Center.
The next logical HTPC avenue was MythTV (Linux). I’m a geek, but a lazy geek, so for me it just has to work, with no fiddling and command line installations etc. So as powerful as it is, I’m just too lazy and short on time these days to fiddle with a Linux machine.
So when Apple TV was announced, I was excited - like most. As reviews have streamed in, I remain excited at the possibilities of this little machine. Its sleek, small, achieves HD through HDMI and component connections. Oh - best part - it runs a stripped version of OSX, so it’s damn stable.
But alas, as great as it is there are some major pitfalls (especially for anyone who’s not in the US). The biggest being no support for DivX/Xvid video formats - the most common codec at the moment. Apple is looking to strictly support only formats that iTunes supports (obviously). Well, audio is easy to get into iTunes, but video is a whole different story. Transcoding videos to h.264 will take hours and is far from ideal. This makes iTunes Store purchases the easiest way to get video on the Apple TV. I wouldn’t mind a few purchases from time to time if it was even an option in Canada - but even then why would we want to pay for video at 1/4 the resolution of ‘free’ alternatives.
Apple will DEFINITELY sell a lot more of these Apple TVs when they throw in DivX/XviD support. I think they will support these codecs - heck they let Windows (the polar opposite of all things Apple) run on their computers. So really, where’s the harm with supporting an open codec (Xvid, not DivX)?
The product is fresh off the line and I think they’re taking the conventional route and letting early adopters iron out the kinks (I would too). When they throw in that additional codec support, I’ll pick one up. I’ll even pretend to not notice the lack of DVD playback and cable tuner.
EDIT/UPDATE: Oh and I don’t count hacking AppleTV back to a plain old OSX system and running CentreStage or any other regular OSX program as enough of a reason to purchase one. If I wanted to just use OSX, I’d use my PowerBook…
Got an email today from the guys over at Adobe…
The first alpha release is focused at Flex(TM) based applications, and we anticipate the next beta release will be targeted at HTML based applications. While this is an alpha, and not all features areimplemented, you may run into bugs, but there is plenty offunctionality for you to play with.
For those who want to knwo what it is in a small paragraph….
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.
Think of it as a webpage running on your computer (with no browser around it) with access to former desktop application only things such as system level alerts and access to your hard disk. When online it does pretty much everything a webpage can do plus the desktop perks and when it’s offline you can still use it and it will sync everything up to your online profile next time your connected to the interweb.
Here’s a cool Apollo eBay application…
I’m not sure if this is a step towards thin clients or a step away. On one hand it’s a step away because its a new style of desktop application - another use for a desktop. On the other hand this application isn’t much more than a constant webpage displayed on the desktop - making it more of a thin client.
OTTAWA, March 5 — Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry hand-held device, said on Monday that a top executive stepped down from one of his posts after the company said it would restate about $250 million in earnings after reviewing its stock option grants.
The executive, James L. Balsillie, will no longer be the chairman but will remain as a co-chief executive. He and the other co-chief executive, Mike Lazaridis, will pay about $8.5 million toward the company’s restatement costs.
The restatement is substantially higher than the company’s initial estimate of $25 million to $45 million.
Shakeup at the place I call work. A few unfortunate but overall positive happenings.
First off - RIM executives (in simple terms) hid 250 million dollars from the public. Their restated earnings will be lower than initially announced earnings when accounting for this new found money. Every executive who benefitted from the backdating is more than willing - and will repay any additional benefits (the additional lining in their pockets) that backdating the options had back to RIM. I am very impressed (in a moral/honesty sort of way) that RIM revealed such drastic numbers, giving the fact that they provided an outlook of ~$40 million. This investigation was done voluntarily without any requests from the SEC or OSC and to be so brutally honest only reinforces investor confidence.
Balsillie steps down as Chairman of the BOD- I believe this is good considering that it’s hard to lead the vote and be indifferent on Board of Director subjects such as executive pay raises and bonuses when you’re one of the executives who would benefit from such events. He will remain co-CEO and continue the (great) job he is doing.
Laurier grad and all-star corporate finance and accounting guru, Dennis Kavelman has been promoted to the position of COO - there are now three COO’s at RIM. This leaves the role of CFO ripe for the picking - my resume is already in.
Other events that took place include two directors on the board announcing they will be leaving, as well a couple of new additions to the board including an executive from RBC and the former head of IBM Canada.
All of these changes and the stock didn’t even dip 1%. That’s a definite vote of confidence from the market regarding the future of RIM.
Disclaimer: I am still an employee at RIM.
Just putting up a comment I posted on RahulSood.com’s (founder of VoodooPC) in response to his post called Microsoft’s Next Chapter.
I’m not going to get into the details, but my comment turned into a rant and this is what I spat out all over his blog.
I think you’re giving Microsoft too much credit. To begin with, Vista’s UI is horrible. I would expect that sort of UI refinement from an open source OS. The widgets are an annoying version of Yahoo and Apple’s offering and window management is no better in Vista than XP. I’m so dissapointed in Vista. 7 years of work to deliver a product that doesn’t even have all of the initial technologies it promised.
Yes it has gaming, but for how much longer? A shift is taking place where people dont’ neccessarily want better graphics - or are not willing to spend $1000 on a graphics card that delivers ‘better’ graphics. The flop of the PS3 is a good example of how power is no longer the necessary component to success in the gaming world. Hardware needs to take a break and a focus on software needs to be applied - lets let the programmers take advantage of multiple cores and 64 bit processes.
The ‘Windows’ and Gaming world need to take a step back and a larger focus on the actual games and the OS are needed.
This is probably why Apple’s popularity is growing. There’s a great union of hardware and software in Apple products. They work with each other, and one always has the other one in mind it seems. Try running Vista on a 6 year old computer. You’ll definitely be able to run Tiger on a 6 year old piece of Apple hardware - probably Leopard too.
Microsoft is so lost and is bleeding money. Their marketing budget for Vista is obscene and unncessary and a dangerous indication of Microsoft’s current mentality.
A great indicator of how lost Microsoft is with thier Zune. You have to love how faithful subscribers to their URGE music service have no incentive to choose the Microsoft product over the Apple product- they both won’t work with URGE. In order to get music on your Zune, you’ll have to join a new music service and pay for your songs again.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
For the record - I was a huge PC fanatic (still to this day) but I am also an Apple user too… more and more Apple lately. Hey - Kevin Rose and Anand lal Shimpi seem to be on the right track with their Apple switch.
This could be connected to my changing views on things, but the gist of my mantras seems to be ‘power isn’t enough anymore’, ‘it’s more about the experience now and not just the product’, ‘it’s not how much you have - it’s what you do with it’ and the sure hell sign of getting old - ‘it just has to work’. Other current mantras in my book include ‘everything looks good in hi-def’ and ‘it’s not about money - it’s about the utility!’.
