Archive for 2007

Not surprisingly, the huge success of the iPhone and its advanced mobile web functionality is making a lot of developers take another look at this growing market segment.

Mozilla, developers of the Firefox browsers, announced last week that they are working on a mobile browser with a planned release in 2008. For more information, check out this article at CIO.com. Even more details can be found on Mozilla Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer’s blog, here.

Okay, so the party is probably over now, since the official anniversary was two months ago.

What am I talking about? The 25th birthday of the compact disc (aka CD)! That’s right, 25th!

I had no idea CDs were that old. Of course I was *ahem* only 8 when the first one was made…

In all fairness to other forms of music media, the CD may be two and half decades old, but it has not been in common use that long. When I was in high school in the early 90s the cassette section at the music store was still 2-3x as large as the CD section and they were prohibitively expensive for a teenager selling popcorn at the movie theatre after school. Heck, when I was in college a couple years later you could still get current tracks on LP. You had to go to grungy stores in Houston’s museum district, but you could get them.

I didn’t even own a CD player til 1995…and had to get married to get it because it technically belonged to my now-husband!

Anywho… Happy birthday CD!

Philips’ official press release about the CDs birthday

Amusing post from NetworkWorld on the same.

Bonus points if you know the name of the artist recorded on that first CD without following the links!

Over the past few years, Open Source has really come to the fore front of everyone’s mind. It is a great way to cut costs and yet still maintain compatibility with the rest of your industry. Need compatibility with MS Office? Open Office can do that for you. Need to be able to open 3d Studio Max renders? Open Source Blender could be right for you.

The producers of these pieces of software and hundreds more provide their work to you for free. But Microsoft has been threatening to take all of that away. How? 235 counts of Intellectual Property infringement.

Which 235 patents have been violated? Microsoft isn’t saying. Why? The wonderful thing about the Open Source community is how fast something new can be done. Need to work around a patent issue with a hardware driver? Somebody will find. Most probably several somebodies. And much faster than one of the big software companies would do it. Microsoft will not say which 235 patents are infringed because, if they did, there would soon be no infringement.

Microsoft is attempting to leverage large Linux distributors (such as Red Hat) into paying royalties to Microsoft for every copy sold. I think leverage is exactly the right word here. Lets say you need to leverage a rock. You need a fulcrum. A real fulcrum, that you can see, touch, and you know is strong enough to support you lever.

So in the case of Microsoft vs. Linux, we have the rock (MS wanting your money), we have the fulcrum (235 patents), and we have the lever (MS lawyers). The problem is that the fulcrum is undefined. I could just as easily call Microsoft and tell them that they are violating 235 of MY patents. Do you think they would pay me if I refused to tell them which ones?

Yeah, I didn’t think so either. So why should we pay when there is no proof that we are doing anything wrong? Innocent until proven guilty. The responsibility for showing us what we are doing wrong lies with Microsoft.

Microsoft: Tell us which 235 patents are the problem. We’ll pay you till its fixed. Don’t worry, it won’t be long.

I wish they hadn’t cut off the rest of the story, but this is really neat…

http://www.glumbert.com/embed/countpasses

Ben Franklin is getting an uber high-tech makeover! Starting in 2008, he’s going mobile. Okay, that sounded better in my head.

In all seriousness, the United States $100 bill is the one most counterfeited outside the country and the Treasury is aiming to put a stop to it.

The new $100 bills, which are expected to hit the streets in 2008, will feature a microlens technology that will make it appear as though Benjamin Franklin is moving when the bill is moved. This founding father will appear to move from side to side when the bill is shifted vertically, and seem to move up and down when the bill is moved horizontally.

~~~

USA Today article about the changes.

Notes about the $100 at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing(BEP) website.

BEP notes about the latest US currency redesigns and a spot to subscribe to updates.

With loads of new features, primarily aimed at making life easier for less experienced users and those in service industries, who bill by time rather than product or task, QuickBooks 2008 is now available.

Technically it’s been available directly from Intuit, via their website (quickbooks.intuit.com) for a week now. That’s still the only way to get it, since it won’t be available in retail stores until next Wednesday, the 10th.

For more info on the new features, consider taking one of Intuit’s update classes. You can find more info on these sessions here.

…to give him your opinion in exchange for a credit on your tax account. This is apparently the latest phishing scam using the IRS name & logo to try to defraud people, according to accoutingweb.

So, for the record:

A) The IRS does not ever send taxpayers unsolicited emails. That means they will never contact you via email as a first contact–they will only email you after you have been dealing with some matter and authorized them to contact you via email regarding it.

B) If you’re not sure your IRS email is legit, check out their official page on e-mail scams that use their name, found here.

C) If you do get an unsolicited email from the IRS offering you a refund on your credit card as a result of their internal records audit (um, yea, riiight..) and choose not to check it out on the IRS page above, if it is like the one I got this morning, that told me to click on the below address, it is probably not legit.

“w3.tehran.agri-jahad.ir:84/IRS…”

The words in red ought to send up a red flag, even if they are spelled wrong.

(yes, the end of the link has been cut off and no, it is not clickable, just in case someone cruises by who hasn’t had their coffee yet this morning)

Home-based businesses are coming out and coming clean. More and more home-based are becoming “transparent”, that is admitting that they are run from home, sometimes with kids underfoot.

There’s a spiffy article in the New York Times on the phenomenon and growth of home-based business, that you can read here. You may have to register, but it’s worth it.

Home-based businesses are no longer minor. According to the article, HBB represent a half a trillion dollar economy.

Me? I think it’s great. I work hard to maintain a professional image, but also make no secret of the fact that I work at home. Of course, this is easier for me as a freelance writer; people tend to assume I am home-based.

Don’t be ashamed to admit you work at home – half the businesses in the country operate that way.

Both Intuit and Microsoft recently updated their personal finance software, Quicken and Money respectively.

Intuit dropped their Quicken Basic and added Quicken Starter, which retails for the same $29.99. Starter includes tools for bill paying, account balancing, and tracking spending, but lacks the saving planning and investment management bells and whistles of its big brothers, Quicken Deluxe, Premier, and Home and Business versions. Those same big brothers got a few new gadgets, too, like support for PayPal transactions (has eBay taken over the world yet?) and streamlined budgeting.

Intuit also announced an online-only version of Quicken is in the works for 2008, presumably thanks to the success of the online version of Intuit’s business line, Quickbooks, but nothing solid about the likely subscription fee.

Microsoft, ever eager to beat the competition to the punch, released the 2008 versions of Microsoft Money a week prior to the new Quicken release.

For more information on the new versions, check out their websites.

Quicken

Microsoft Money

Okay, I admit it, I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. I have a friend who works for AT&T; mobile, the company with the exclusive airtime contract for the iPhone for the first three years, so I heard all about the bells and whistles early on from someone who had to know. I admit, the visual voicemail feature sounded neat, but not likely to give me iPhone envy.

Apparently I am in the minority. Check out this article from internetnews.com about new VV alternatives on the horizon.