For all of Scoble’s cheering about Start.com and it’s design team, it doesn’t work in Firefox for me. Works fine in IE. OMG M$ CONSPIRACY!!@@!!!11 (don’t try telling me this is just beta software, such logical arguments have no effect on me)

Firefox:

IE:

Joel picks on Microsoft. Robert picks back.

My point? Scoble uses the non-word “heh” WAY TO MUCH. Every day he says heh and I call for an end to it.

Techdirt:More CD Copy Protections Coming: No More CDs Here

The music industry does nothing but alienate more customers every day. The consistently show that they are clueless how to handle the internet age.

If you live anywhere in the US without broadband access which is the vast majority of the country, geographically speaking, you know the pain of dial-up or ISDN connections. I see a change coming in the next several years.

Currently, if your neighborhood isn’t served by DSL or cable your options are limited. You can use dial-up, which once you’ve used broadband you can hardly call dial-up an option, you can use ISDN which is OK…128kbps up and down with around 70-100 ms latency, or you can use satellite which is maybe 1.5mbps down with maybe 128kbps up but latency approaching 1000ms. ISDN can be pricy (I currently pay around $140/month). Satellite is also pricey. Five hundred dollar set-up/equipment fees aren’t unusual. Few areas are served by wireless internet services.

Perhaps the cellular operators will be our savior. As much as I dislike having to deal with the mobile carriers, they are rolling out 3G networks at a reasonable pace. I expect that within a couple years, I’ll be able to tap into a 3G signal with my cell in most areas of the country. All of the talk I see about 3G is focused mainly on it’s ability to deliver high-speed content to cellular devices, however the first thing that came into my mind when I heard about 3G years ago was “rural high-speed”. Right now Cingular’s unlimited UMTS plan runs around 80 dollars/month. This is perhaps double what you’d pay for DSL or cable, but it’s not a terrible price, and by the time UMTS is available in many rural areas I’m sure this price will be down much further as long as Cingular builds the data capacity to match the data availability.

UMTS promises over 10mbit/sec download rates (that is when Cingular updates with UMTS HDSPA) with very good upload rates. Additionally UMTS HDSPA will provide decent latency of maybe 60-100 ms.

Maybe this is all a pipe-dream, but I’m sure there’s some people at Cingular thinking the same things…

AnandTech: WWDC 2005 – Apple to Move to Intel Processors in 2006

Seems like everyone on the internet is interested in this news today. Apparently, Apple is transitioning from IBM’s PowerPC processor to Intel’s x86 (Pentium) processor. All this does for me is raise more questions.

Why Intel? AMD is widely acknowledged to be superior in the x86 space for most applications. A couple of reasons I can think of includes Intel’s slight lead on many content-creation applications…a market Apple has a large toe-hold in. Secondly, while AMD is overall the performance leader in x86, Apple desperately needs a high-performance platform for it’s Powerbook notebook line which is currently still running on the old G4 processor because the newer G5 is just too hot to shoe-horn into a compact notebook. Intel’s mobile platforms are widely acknowledged as being best-of-breed, so this probably weighed heavily in Apple’s decisions.

Another question that comes to mind is, are some enterprising hackers going to be able to get OS X running on generic PC hardware? While this announcement is about Apple using Intel processors, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to just go out and buy a copy of OS X to run on the PC you’re running right now. Most likely, Apple will have their own proprietary system architecture, but this move to Intel processors has got to make it easier to port OS X to the PC world.

For those of you not in the know, OS X is considered by many to be superior to Windows XP in many areas, not least of which is it’s user-friendliness. Plus, it’s pretty.