Google Chrome

Google Chrome

If your a big fan of Google Chrome like I am you will be happy to know that version 2.0 is out the new version is notably faster, has a full screen mode, and auto complete. To download chrome if you haven’t yet tried it go to google.com/chrome

If you all ready have Chrome installed and want to update to the new version click on the little wrench in the upper right corner ( The Customize and Control icon) and go down to About Google Chrome it will check to see you have he newest version.

When ever I go and visit someone client or friend I check to see what the default brouser is. I find IE6 is still widly used if you don’t want to take a chance on Firefox or Chrome please at least upgrade to IE8. Ie6 is just not secure.

My daughter is back East visiting her Grandparents and spent time upgrading them from AOL over dialup. Don’t let the people you love live like that.

Today’s Discovery or why I love the internet

When I was 13 I fell in love with the only Japanese language song to make it to #1 on the American pop charts. I knew it as “Sukiyaki” that was the catchy one word title that the American record industry geniuses gave it. I memorized the song, when I went to college I studied Japanese (I was horrible at it and when I failed the coarse I nearly flunked out of school) but that’s beside the point.

The point is this morningI found the song on Blip.fm then I went to Song Facts and  found out the  story behind the song. Interesting story by the way.  Then I found the lyrics and a translation.

I love the internet how did people live before this came along?

Wolfram|Alpha

I believe I witnessed history tonight. Spending your Friday night on the web watching a new web service launch is geeky even by my standards but this was special. Wolfram|Alpha is a new kind of tool it doesn’t search the web and bring you pages like Google does it computes the answer to a question.

Ask about a city and it gives population, map current time and weather and a map.  Ask about a petroleum and it gives the chemical formula the flash point the density and the chemical identifiers. Enter a date and you know how many days, months, years ago it was and what phase the moon was in but what major events happened. Turns out nothing of interest happened on the day of my birth but maybe that was just an oversight  it’s just hours old after all. Ask about Xerox it will tell you all kinds of stock related info that I don’t understand (charts and graphs included)  and that it has 57,000 employees and it’s based in Stamford Conn.

But the real advantage will come for engineers,  mathematicians, I just figured a 30year 5.5% mortgage on $150,ooo This a very powerful tool

Blip FM

By this time many of you have tried Twitter. It’s hit the mainstream Brittany Spears and Ashton Kutcher have past President Obama in popularity. Maybe it’s jumped the shark or maybe it’s going to be so mainstream that it will become as ubiquitous as e-mail. I’ve been a casual Twitterer for a year or so now and I just don’t think I have that much I can say in 140 characters or less.

However a couple of weeks ago I found Blip FM maybe it just appeals to my inner DJ maybe I need some direction but a Twitter like client that is focused on music is just more interesting. Give it a try

One of the things I like about this is that they seem to have a solid business model. Darned important considering SeeqPod which I also love looks like it was forced into bankruptcy.

Blip FM is a great way to discover music from people who have simmilar musical tastes or just dip your toe into the stream and sample what the crowd is listening to.

If you would like to see what I’m listening to: visit my BlipFM

Pirate Bay Trial

I was reading about the pirate bay trial and the thing I’m coming away with is the prosecution is trying to find out two things who runs the company and how much money they are making off of this venture. The testimony suggests that there is no real structure the guys that work there do things when they need to get done, no one is in charge they work as a collective, there isn’t that much money one of the guys said if we need money for something we just tell the others we need it and we take it but they don’t work there for the money because they could make more money if they worked in the strait world. they work for the work

When asked about his view of the law as it related to copyrights, Neij said that he doesn’t worry much about the law, doesn’t care about the ideology behind (some) file-swapping, and does what he does because it’s fun to run a large site. He did indicate that he thought the site was legal.
Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is exactly the sort of person who shouldn’t wear a scruffy little beard, but does—one Swedish commentator referred to him today as a prototypical “datanörd” (data nerd). He took the stand today and showed the same lack of apparent interest in ownership, contracts, and legal papers as Fredrik Neij.
Prosecutors are trying to show that there is a lot of cash and there is some one in charge and they can’t seem to get to the bottom of the case. An interesting clash of cultures
Read more about it in Ars tecnica article

Texting What a Good Deal

Text messaging is big business worldwide and is expected to grow. Last year an estimated 2.5 trillion text messages were sent and that is expected to rise to 3.3 trillion messages in 2009.

The average cost has risen over the past couple years and we expect that. Here is what we most of us don’t know. The cost for the wireless companies is very reasonable. Let me restate that it is very very very reasonable for them. Their cost approach nothing here’s why.

First the packet of text, usually limited to 160 characters, is tiny. When you send a text it goes wirelessly  from your phone to a cell tower and then by wire copper or fiber to the tower of your friend, breathlessly waiting for your message. The once again wirelessly to his/her phone.

On the wired part of the journey it is so small it tucks into the data and voice stream and causes no load. On the wireless part of the journey however you would think there would be some overhead incurred. Not so the cell tower is constantly broadcasting to your phone this is the control channel and the text message rides for free. The channel is being used all the time whether a text message is sent or not.

Eight or nine years ago I was reading about the at the time fledgling cell phone network then being set up in Manila.  And there was this new phenomenon text messaging. The cell providers were eager to promote texting as an alternative to calling because it lacked bandwith to acomidate phone calls.

So why do we pay for this service Randal Stross writing last week in the New York Times explored the anti trust issues

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices fortext messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.

So, in September, Mr. Kohl sent a letter to Verizon Wireless,AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, inviting them to answer some basic questions about their text messaging costs and pricing.

All four of the major carriers decided during the last three years to increase the pay-per-use price for messages to 20 cents from 10 cents.

So what is the best deal well it depends on your point of view. For the phone companies the best plan is the one that extracts the most money from it’s customers.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

Yes what a good deal especially if you are the service provider

Google Chrome

Google has released it’s browser. It is now out of Beta and you should download it and try it out.

Here is why it is faster, cleaner and gives you more screan real estate. When you open a new tab Chrome shows you the 9 pages you visit the most and the last 9 bookmarks you made. The tabs are above the address bar that gives a cleaner look to the page.  But mostly it is faster dramaticly faster at rendering pages.

Security is enhanced in Chrome the browser keeps two blacklists (one for phishing and one for malware), and warns users when they try to access those sites

If you use other Google services, Gmail, Google documents, Calendar and Reader you will find that they in  integrate better.

Downside No Mac or Linux implimintation yet no independent applications .

Music Services part 1

I try all the new music services. I’ve written  about Pandora. and Seeqpod in the past. I’ve tried Last FM .

In the last couple weeks I’ve been playing with Grooveshark and Lala

Grooveshark has been around since 2006 but when I first tried it out I found it to be unwieldy. I am much more positive about it now. Here are it’s strong points. Search over  6 million songs play them an unlimited number of times for free. Make play lists and share them with friends. You can upload all the songs on your computer and listen to them from any internet computer.

Grooveshark gives you the ability to make widgets and put them on your website. I tried it out and it worked well. I was going to put it up here but I hate being subjected to other peoples music so I won’t impose my idea of good music on you. On the other hand if you want to see my music go to browse people and look for jimlyons (one word no caps)

Grooveshark is also a great way to find new music. As you choose songs for your que there is an auto play button that will populate the que with simmilar songs. The revenue model advertising. I hope it works out for them in these hard economic times

Evernote

As I grow older I find that memories are in there but seem to be harder to pull up, very frustrating at times. In the Harry Potter books Professor Dumbldore had a gadget called a pensive. Dumbldore could down load his memories to be viewed later. I have something almost as good Evernote

Evernote can keep you orginized and give you acess to all thoes pesky memories. Evernote can be downloaded to your computer then sync to the Evernote servers so it can be acessed from any computer

This is a screen shot of Evernote showing an article discribing  how fuel cells work I have pulled this up when talking to people about fuel cells. Evernote works with Windows, MacOS, iPhone and Windows Moble OS or even on a flash drive. You can save text, photos, videos

Here is an example you are at lunch, you have a great idea, you pull out a pencil and jot it down on a napkin then pull out your cell phone snap a photo of it and send it on to Evernote. Two months later you recall that napkin and do a search for a word that you joted down and vola. It will recognize the your handwriting on the photo of the napkin

Website for a new Administration

President Elect Barock Obama, I just love to say that, owes a good deal of his sucess in the election to his online presence. His web site designed by Blue State Digital gave him the ability to raise an unpresedted amount of money, a platform to manage his email and make people feel they were part of the campain.

I was trying to imagine the next step one would go with all the information that has been acumulated and then yesterday up pops Change.gov from the office of the Presedent Elect.

On the web site you can read the blog, watch videos, read about the appointments, share your vision and apply for a job.

It’s quite remarkable what maybe possible when the people will be able interact with their government