Both Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird have recently received a version bump to 1.0.7. The new versions are purely security updates, but several of them are listed as “critical” so if you’re running either product you may want to head over to mozilla.org to keep your system up to date.
I’ve not checked my RSS feeds for a while, and when I was catching up this morning I noticed a large number of posts complaining about the new iPod Nano getting scratched easily. This is a bit worrying, as I was considering buying a new MP3 player (my iRiver is great but a bit too heavy to carry around in my pocket – already it’s ripped the lining a bit) and the Nano was one of the models I was looking at. Having seen these reports and experienced Apple’s support when things go wrong (I’m still waiting for my Powerbook to be returned, which I handed in to their authorised repair centre three weeks ago) I’m now a bit wary of the Nano.
Of course this could just be a few people who have scratched their Nanos and thought it was Apple’s fault, so I’m not passing judgement either way as of yet. There’s plenty of places where you can read about this, but some of the sites I’ve come across are:
Opera gives away ad-free browser via The Register
Opera Software has announced that, as of today, it will be distributing its award-winning web browser for free to anyone who wishes to download it. Whilst previous versions of the software required the payment of a license fee in order to remove the advertisements served up in the free version, you can now instead enjoy the full feature set of Opera without intrusive ads or reaching into your wallet.
I’m not entirely surprised that Opera has taken this decision, as I have never been a great believer in the idea of using sales of web browsers as a primary revenue stream. Sure, it worked for Netscape back in the early 1990s, but once Internet Explorer came onto the market free of charge (one of the few things we can genuinely thank Microsoft for is not being forced to pay for a web browser) that was the end of it. Now people have the choice of Firefox, Mozilla, Opera and (if they’re running Windows) Internet Explorer, plus a few other less well-known browsers such as Konqueror and Dillo. Opera is the only one on that list to come with a fee, although one could argue that IE is included in the extortionate license fees attached to Windows, so why would people want to pay for it? Last time I looked at the Opera browser, there was nothing in particular to differentiate it from the others. Like any other piece of software, it had its proponents and detractors who would argue over things like features, security and customisation, but at the end of the day it did the same as every other browser – the display of web pages. For most people there probably weren’t enough differences to warrant spending cold hard cash on.
Personally, I’ve never been overly impressed by Opera, but now that the browser is free (as in beer, it’s not open source as far as I’m aware) and doesn’t have any ads I’ll probably give it another go. I doubt I’ll change it to my default browser because I’m used to Firefox and it does everything I want, but no license fee means nothing to lose, so Opera have possibly gained at least one new user by making their software available without charge.
For anyone who is interested, Opera’s Investors FAQ details how their revenue streams operate. They seem to be fairly simple and straightforward, so I imagine they won’t be going out of business any time soon.
Posted by Jimmy on UNaXcess 2 (message ID 1426583 until it expires).
“Here is a list depicting various types of ‘computer girl’:
Hard disk girl
She remembers everything, FOREVER.
RAM girl
She forgets about you, the moment you turn her off.
Windows girl
Everyone knows that she can’t do anything right, but no one can live without her.
Screensaver girl
She is good for nothing but at least she is fun.
Internet girl
Difficult to access.
Server girl
Always busy when you need her.
Multimedia girl
She makes horrible things look beautiful.
CD-Rom girl
She is always faster and faster.
E-mail girl
Every ten things she says, eight are nonsense.
Virus girl
Also known as “wife” – when you are not expecting her, she comes, installs herself and uses all your resources. If you try to uninstall her you will lose something, if you don’t try to uninstall her you will lose everything.
USB girl
They like it in every slot.
Broadband girl
Enjoys a fat pipe, but every time you try to use it she gets all coy and caps your usage.
The SLI girl
Has an identical twin sister but, when you get hold of it, it’s slightly disappointing.
The Linux girl
She’ll let you do anything so long as you make available a full video copy of the action.
The Firewall girl
Overly protective and doesn’t like you playing games.
Pure genuis, couldn’t stop laughing when I read it. Here’s some I came up with, though perhaps not as funny:
Perl girl
Insists on each date being different and on communicating in sentences that are as short as possible. Easy to make mistakes that don’t manifest themselves until later, but if you push hard enough she’ll point out exactly where you’re going wrong.
PHP girl
Very inconsistent, and will change her mind about what is the best way to do things every five minutes, resulting in all your previous ideas for dates suddenly failing to get her attention.
Assembly girl
Likes you to move as fast as possible, but can only date one particular type of guy.
ADSL girl
Likes her guys to live nearby, flat out refuses to do long distance relationships. Will always ask for your phone number before agreeing to go on a date.
Cable girl
Lots of fast action, providing you don’t mind her dating every other guy on the street at the same time.
Blog girl
Will insist on boring you to tears with every little detail of what happened to her in the last week and will be dump you if you don’t reply to every single point.
Found this via Photo Matt.
Meebo is a way of accessing your instant messing accounts (AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ) through an AJAX-powered web interface. It’s still in an alpha stage, but so far it looks promising – I logged in with my Yahoo account (which I never use anyway) and the interface was very good considering that it’s all done within a web browser. However, I see three major problems arising with this service.
Firstly, there is no privacy policy. That’s right, these people (who I have certainly never heard of before) want you to type in your username and passwords for a third party service into their web site without any formal policy about what they do with the information. That sounds awfully like the scam Paypal/eBay emails that make their way into my inbox every day. Admittedly there is a post on their forums explaining that they don’t record login information or conversations and I doubt they’d have gone to the trouble of setting up the site just to watch people say “lol” to each other all day (which, let’s face it, is what 90% of IM conversations consist of), but I’m still wary of entering my details, and I don’t think I’m ever likely to use the service with my MSN account. I’m not saying that the people behind the site are running some of scam, but you have to admit that it does look at least a bit dodgy.
Secondly, there’s no Jabber support, which means you can’t use your normal Jabber account or a Google Talk one. Given that Jabber is the only open and properly documented IM protocol that sees any amount of use, you’d think they’d have added support for it.
Finally, I can see this service getting very popular in a short space of time as people start linking to it. That might sound like a good thing until you realise that one of the following consequences will almost certainly occur. The first possibility is that the site gets too popular for its own good and collapses under the weight of users. The second (and in my opinion more likely) possibility is that suddenly a paid subscription becomes available and free accounts can only talk for ten minutes at a time, or some other restriction. The knock on effect of the latter consequence could also be for the companies that run these IM services to suddenly turn their attention to Meebo and say “stop profiting from our services”.
Overall, I think it’s a nice idea in theory and will probably be doing the rounds on popular blogs for the next few days, but sooner or later it will hit legal, financial or technical problems and slowly fade back into oblivion.
The photograph album software popular with many sites has now reached version 2.0. There’s been quite a lot of changes since version 1 and an awful lot of security holes have been patched so if you’re still running the previous version now is probably the time to upgrade.
From a personal viewpoint, I’ve never really been Gallery’s biggest fan – partially because of the number of security holes it has seen over the years and also because I’ve looked at the source code and it’s nasty. It really does look like something that I might have hacked together after coming home from the pub with one too many pints in my system. We’ve used it at work and it does the job (thankfully customising the stylesheets wasn’t too difficult, although there was an awful lot of redundant styles that either weren’t being used or could be merged together) but I think if I ever restore my photos to their rightful place on Rixort I’ll probably cobble together my own script instead.
Ok, it’s been posted on slashdot and a couple of other places already but I just can’t resist commenting that the next glorious edition of Windows will come in more editions than you would have thought possible. Expect clever marketing techniques that will no doubt have box colours of different hues and no doubt different UIs schemes in co-ordinated assault with them. As usual there was a massive thing made over it at the aforementioned site, as MS is evil and all it’s spawn must be hated etc, etc. At the end of the day is it going to make a big difference? No. It’s likely that most people will simply not care as even the basic version will let you do just about everything you might want, only the IT professionals are going to need the expensive offerings, and the gamers will just pirate the one that’s easiest to hack down all the services on. As for Vista itself, it will not be the second coming of Jesus, it will not break the mould, it will not do anything fancy, playing with the Beta I imagine it will be just the same as the jump from OS X Panther to Tiger. There will be some new features, mostly irrelevant to a lot of people, there will be some speedup (and Vista is indeed faster than XP) and there will be a whole host of new bugs.
eBay to buy Skype in $2.6bn deal via BBC News
This story has been doing the rounds on the rumour mills in the past few weeks, but now it’s official – eBay is going to buy Skype for £1.4bn, half in cash and half in stocks (with performance bonuses as a potential incentive later on).
Personally I’ve never used the Skype software and have never been overly interested in Voice over IP (except from a “that looks like a cool technology” viewpoint) given that most of my phone calls are included in my monthly bill anyway. However, most people I know who have used it have been impressed with the quality of the sound and the price tag, even though you can’t call normal phones without paying a fee.
The main question though is why do eBay want to spend so much money buying Skype? One reason that is being touted by most of the news sites is that it will enable potential bidders on eBay to call sellers to ask questions and (most importantly) see if they’re genuine rather than scam merchants. Whilst I think this is probably a good way to add some value to the existing eBay services, I doubt that it is worth paying £1.4bn for. eBay could easily add a field to user accounts allowing them to specify their Skype ID, just like you could pay by Paypal when they were a separate company. There’s no real tie-in with the two products – unlike the huge advantage of Paypal where you could bid and then pay all under one system – so what do eBay stand to gain from this?
In my opinion, the reason for the purchase is fairly simple: eBay has more or less cornered the auctions market and can probably afford to buy out any competitors who start getting a bit big for their boots. I would also hazard that new user registrations have slowed down significantly over the past few months as the market becomes saturated and most people who want an eBay account already have one. Trading volumes might increase over time, but eBay’s user base is unlikely to expand much and its market share may even start to dip slightly as smaller competitors offer better rates in niche markets (e.g. site specifically for the auction of computer goods). So, how can eBay as a company continue to grow and keep its shareholders happy? One way would be to buy out a relatively small but fast growing company which is expanding into an immature market. eBay has cash and stock reserves so can afford to buy Skype instead of investing time and money in the development of its own solution, and that’s what they’ve done.
Of course there may be many reasons for the buyout, and I’m not privy to eBay board meetings so I can’t tell you for sure what they are. All that I can say is that I’m fairly confident that a major factor behind the takeover is a desire for eBay to continue growing and in order to do so there is a necessity to expand into other markets which have not yet reached saturation point. If eBay plays its cards right and doesn’t try and profit too much from the service Skype offers (e.g. by hiking prices) then it could easily emerge as a leader in the VoIP market. However, companies like Google (with their recently launched Google Talk software) are already in on the game, and of course there’s always Microsoft who like to dominate all aspects of technology wherever possible and have the resources (mainly financial) to force their way in.
The Mozilla Foundation annouced beta releases of its Firefox and Thunderbird software this week. If you’d like to help iron out bugs or just prefer to be on the bleeding edge when it comes to browsing and email, you can get the new betas here:
N.B. Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is actually a later version of Deer Park Alpha 2, for some reason the Mozilla team can’t understand the concept of having a consistent naming scheme that doesn’t change every five minutes (instead of calling the alpha build Firefox 1.5 alpha, which would make so much more sense).
Anyway, I’ve tried both beta products and they haven’t caused me any problems yet. Thunderbird seems to be gradually improving, not too sure whether any enhancements have been made to Firefox but it claims better stability on OS X which I shall have to try out once I get my Powerbook back from the repair centre. As with all beta products, don’t try these out in a production environment unless you’re prepared to accept a higher risk of problems arising.