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DRM-Free, Google Chinese Connection and the Superjet 100

October 1, 2007 – 7:00 am

“It’s over. Restrictions on copying digital music are going to be history — and all hell could break loose in the music retail business.” - Kevin Kelleher - TheStreet.com - 9/26/2007

You know this was coming sooner then later. You know it. It’s all reflected in the “practical” ways that people use their music with this new freedom that the digital age - and specially the MP3 format - have created. “Practically”, my 60GB+ of digital music in WAV and MP3 formats is made up of 70% ripped, 22% purchased and the rest, traded tracks. I like to carry “this” certain quantity of “this” genre on my trusted IRiver digital player. A combination of albums, party tracks and videos go on my Archos. About 1GB is constantly being shuffled around in the 2GB Flash drive in the T-Mobile Dash. The playlists and combinations in each device changes based on the need of the occasion. And yes, I’m not the iPod fan at all as you can see.

What I am saying is that in my “practical” life, the way I consume “my” music, is as varied as the occasion for which I am compiling the playlist for as the number of devices that I have around me. Having one DRM-free format where all my concerns are returned squarely to the task at hand: creating the ultimate playlist for the moment. DRM dictates my choices or combinations and restricts my creativity.

In my “practical” experiences with every aspects of the music industry, I can also say that the pattern that I have observed has been one where the P2P networks are a great way to get free tracks to try. In my collection, plenty artists “live” because of easily found one-track that I thought was “good enough”. It kept those artists in my library. It would have been those $2CD’s I used to buy from the guy around my block, just to “try” new albums instead of dropping up to $20 for new releases at the store. Now, that CD you bought for $2 at the corner, you knew it was a scam, done cheaply, on cheap CD’s and they were bound to stop playing sooner or later (you learn that quickly). But the few weeks they lasted, I had the time to discover the whole album and decide if I would pay for it later at a store when it went on sale or at a reasonable price. Two bucks for a CD that was gonna last me 3 months top, of questionable audio quality, I didn’t mind that. It allowed me the time to taste and make a good later investment of my money. Same with the stuff that i get of the web; when I want to have it for “real”, I’ve never hesitated dropping the cash; for an MP3 or WAVE format so far, all the way. When I have it on my drive, it’s mine. And with my paranoia, I backup the backup of the backup of the backup. So, who is anybody to restrict how many times I decide to “protect”, backup or share my audio “treasures”?

I still pay for my music. I still share tunes, tracks, Youtube videos and the likes with my friends, we exchange, I complete my collection from theirs sometimes, but I continue to buy the music because ultimately, it’s mine to shape.

Jon C. Dvorak - the man is brilliant and twisted. I’ve enjoyed regularly his columns for years - he never runs out of angles to sniff things out. His latest is the case of how Google can be sabotaged right under their own nose by tainting the results returned by their search algorithms. After all, algorithms are exactly that by definition: repeatable results.

Dvorak makes an interesting case for the proliferation of those “inane Chinese sites that were not even parking sites, just an assortment of keywords that somehow got indexed and brought to the top of the results list.”

You’ve seen them more frequently in the last six months or more, right? I have. I mean, I dismissed them quickly because I instinctively know what they are for having landed on them way too many times. But there are there. And they usually have nothing to do with your search query in the first place. It’s good reading and will have you thinking. If nothing else, I like to know when my sauce is being messed with.

On First “Look“. This comes from a totally unscientific experiment. The new Sony PSP went on sale recently in Japan and sold more then 130 thousand copies the first day. It’s not yet available here in the US. On that day, every time I encountered a colleague, I would show them the picture of the PSP and just told them what it was. I have a lot of gamers around me. 8 out of 10 had some kind of negative or unflattering reaction to the new “rounded” look of the console. They all seemed to missed the square-ish old design better. These reactions all came from just seeing picture of the device, not the actual device itself.

Microsoft must abandon Vista to save itself. I second that opinion. Read the article and make your own mind if you haven’t already. I, as an “early adopter”, am not too taken by the migration to Vista. I know it’ll happen on one or two systems eventually in the small business that I run. Right now, the mix of XP, 2000, Ubuntu, OSX and the various mobile flavors suit us quite nicely. Investing “into” Vista, for us, seems too BIG, both in price, requirements, size,commitment and bloat. If anything, we are more excited with news of developments that free us and let us mix and match, be on and off the grid, plug and unplug, easily. See the DRM argument above.

In Africa, it seems that “beeping” is the rage. It’s a new form of “call back” where you call someone from your cell phone (yes, cell phone), let it ring once, just enough so that the caller ID box at the other end registers your number and hopefully your name, then quickly hang up before the person answers. These calls take a fraction of a second to complete. I’ve done it a few times. And it’s always been when I was concerned about charges; either my balance was getting low or the person on the other end is known for being the chhhhaaaaaattttyyyyyy kind. In those cases, passing on the fee for the call to the other party didn’t seem too bad. After all, they can chose when to return my call. However, I understand the mentality.

In countries in Africa where air time can be expensive, those short calls are overwhelming the cellular providers systems who are trying - of course - to figure out a way to make money out of the practice. I know I’ll keep beeping when the situation requires it. Those cellular charges are… beep…

Another commercial passenger airliner will make its maiden flight before the end of the year and add to my ginormous collection of digital aviation pictures. Sukhoi–the Russian company, is branching out into the civilian sector with the Superjet 100.

Sukhoi Civil Aircraft unveiled the medium-range on September 26th at its Komsomolsk-on-Amur plant.The plane will seat roughly 75 to 95 passengers and is touted for its greater fuel efficiency and a quieter ride.

This year (2007) marks the the centennial of the helicopter. “Designs by Maurice Leger, Jacques and Louis Breguet, and Paul Cornu all got off the ground in 1907–just barely, and for just a very few seconds.” Cnet has an interesting slide show of the evolution of this novel mode of mechanical locomotion.

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Presentations or Zoho, Cassette or Vinyl, One Laptop May Be The Answer.

September 24, 2007 – 7:00 am

Let me get it started with my weekly Google fix out of the way before I get to the meat of this post. To the tune of $30 millions US, Google is “Platinum” sponsor of the next X-Prize. This time, the X-Fund will go to the first private team to the moon and back, with some payload activities in between. For more info, visit the X-Prize site. Right now to me, $30 millions seem too little to really attract serious participants. I mean, it’s not like we don’t know of the millions and millions that NASA has to spend every year just to keep the shuttle program going. So in terms of scale, in today’s market, that prize seems puny in comparison to the requirements. Plus, the timing is a little off to me. In 2008, we should hopefully see the first tests of the sub orbital planes like those from Branson with his Galatic enterprises. If any hope or success came out of these efforts, an announcement date around that time would have definitely invigorated the race.

That said, my interest is piqued with the announcement of the Google Presentations. Google continues to generate traction with the somewhat complete integration of all their parts that make me get deeper and deeper into their universe. It started with Gmail. To save documents and access easily, Docs came next. Then Analytics, Reader then iGoogle. I long had installed Picassa on my desktop, then lately, i found it easily to store my pics on Picassaweb and use them on my blog. See, I’m getting deeper. However, I gotta admit, I have been looking at Zoho. Seems like same kind of integration direction, however better looking.

These two upcoming items directly tickle my musician, DJ, record producer and vinyl collector in me. First, the USB cassette deck, for those tons of good old home made mixed tapes that still stack my apartment. Yeah, I still hold on to some of them, plus believe it or not, there are some gems on there. Several solutions can be found around.

Music is music, 20 years ago, as it is today and gems take shape at any time. With a USB deck, I can digitize hours of entertainment and probably get rid of the tapes (not too sure. I’m not too safe and convinced of the digital-only format of my treasures).

The ITT USB Turntable from ION serves the same above described purpose, but this comes handy because as a club dj for more then 12 years, the majority of my tools of the trade are in vinyl format. Even tough CD’s have been around for a while and many DJ’s started the conversion not too long after, it took clubs a long time to upgrade to CD’s and then the digital world.

Whereas in the days, you could count on finding solid decent Technics 1200 decks at most clubs and reliably depend on their sturdiness to take you through your sets, when the transition started, it was a hard road of low quality CD decks that would skip your tracks, various modes of unsuccessful vinyl emulations, tentative attempts at the MP3 format and plenty horrified moments in the middle of your live set. Nowadays, formats have taken shape and with laptops, digital players and Flash drives, the once scary threat of the digital revolution to the DJ purist is now opening countless new ways to express, play and keep the crowds growing. What those cross format appliances reveal is that variety is the spice of life and the markings of a generation. We grew up with tapes and records, why can’t we enjoy and pass them on for more interesting recombinations? (DRM-free obviously.)

Since it was first announced, I have kept an eye on the One-Laptop-Per-Child movement and was keenly interested in their developments. Apparently, there are a few bumps on the road, with a recent price hike and delay with manufacturers, to realizing its full potential. Having seen both here in New York and back in the Caribbean what a computer can do in improving the lives of the receiver, from family members here and abroad, to friends in the neighbourhood without the means to afford a machine, anything from a cheap bare bone to a second-hand computer inevitably increases productivity, outlets, ways to communicate and so much more. It’s a connected world after all.

Among all my techy friends and acquaintances, I always collect second hand or discarded hardware. These days, you put a few parts together, slap Ubuntu Linux on the machine, get a wireless card and you’ve got a tool and a whole new set of possibilities. Right now, I am writing this article on a rescued Dell Latitude CPx with Feisty.

With the prize of going to close to $200 US, it looks like half the children will get their computers after all; or they’ll all get them, but later. I understand first product blues and the likes. I have no doubt that with the first few ones out there in the wild, people will get to thinker with them and come up with brilliant ideas to improve. It’s the open-source community model after all. Wouldn’t be over the top if the solutions actually came from the same third-world countries where those laptops would be distributed?

Short interesting news: Winamp, the venerable media player celebrated it’s 10th year anniversary with the release of an edition that would challenge iTunes. Yeah, right! I mean, I had forgotten about winamp because for a while, they lost their mojo, their innovative ways in their corporate parents corridors. Ask me again later because these days, I am still going through my evaluations of which media player I’ll be moving to next, so I have downloaded their latest release, but not installed not tested it yet. I’m still giving recently downloaded Media Monkey a try for now (my gripe for now is that it refuses to read my mapped network drives.)

More interesting bits I collected or heard over the recent week:
Salesforce.com: It’s all about the UI

AOL comes to manhattan with ads in tow

Lotus Symphony relaunches as open source

IBM’s Office Rival

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The Ringle’s DOA, the 787’s late and I want 3-factor authentication.

September 17, 2007 – 7:00 am

The past week ended with a jingle of a joke: the “Ringle“. Before I get into the details, let me say that it’s from the RIAA that approved and endorsed the name. So far, only Sony BMG and Universal have signed up for this “new” distribution method. Now for the details: it’s a ringtone and a single in one. Get it? Ring-le. It will retail for about $7 and should hit shelves by the holiday season. It’s a combination of one single, a ringtone, a remix of the single and an old track (usually from the same artist). It comes on a CD that fits in a thin slip-sleeve cover.

Cnet says “the idea is that if consumers in the digital age can download any tracks they want individually, why not let them buy singles in the store as well? It also enables stores to get involved in the ringtone phenomenon.” At this point, you should be asking yourself why the life support for what is obviously a dying format - the CD? In this age of digital everything, the first “commodity” that enjoyed a huge revolution was the audio tracks. Everywhere in Manhattan, I see those ear buds running from someone’s ears to some digital jukebox or their phone. They’re everywhere. Even the peddlers in the New York subways do their quick musical numbers in between stations with an iPod Nano or one of those digital players that look like the old Walkmans.

I understand the “bundling” idea, but why not try a new progressive approach? Offer these “Rungles” via download, or on flash drives that can easily fit in most modern cell phone, handheld game device, mp3 player, PC or laptop and even in your camera. Explore the possibilities. Using such formats, it offers the costumer much more freedom and allows for greater penetration of the media format onto all sorts of digital devices. But the RIAA (and Sony and Universal) missed out on a great opportunity. Who’s gonna pay $7 for a CD that you’ll have to rip to get the music, load on a PC to get the ringtone to then transfer to your phone. Nowadays, we do all this digitally and with so much ease! Let’s see how long this Ringle lasts - “the bastard that nobody wants to really claim”.

On the “Tech Help Desk” tip, I wanted to share this little tip from PC Magazine that comes in handy when dealing with two accounts to the same web service. If you are like me, you probably have two or more Gmail or Hotmail accounts and sometimes, or you want to access a web application’s backend as an admin and the front end as a client to see a transaction from both ends. When using Internet Explorer (that bloat), you can open different tabs and access the same site with completely different sessions.

First, close all Internet Explorer windows and launch Windows Explorer. Go to “Tools”, “Folder Options” from the menu then click the “View” tab. Check the box titled “Launch folder windows in a separate process”, then click OK. That’s it.

What this Microsoft cryptic message doesn’t say is that this choice affects Internet Explorer as well. Now you can open one Yahoo! mail account in one window and open a second account in another window.

I have to admit that i love the ease of the “username/password” system of authentication that is prevalent on the web for everything else except for my online bank transactions. Yes, there is no other time when my senses are more alert when entering a username and password into a browser then when I enter them on my bank’s home page to start my online business. In Europe, most banks have mailed or delivered to their customers some form of third-factor authentication - usually in a small form factor with a secret code that changes often, at regular intervals. RSA (a subsidiary of EMC) is one of the vendors that makes this form of multi-factor authentication possible with its SecurID solution. I actually am one of those customers that would walk to the closest branch of my bank and get my own secure id for online banking and avoid them the mailing fee. That’s how serious I am about protecting my online financials. It’s just way too easy to get duped these days.

I’m a complete civil aviation nut. I can even name the manufacturer and the model class of most civil aviation airplanes in service nowadays by just hearing the noise made by their engines as they cross overhead. That nut! So it should be no surprise that I am deeply engrossed in the saga being waged across the Atlantic between Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and Airbus Industrie’s A380 Airbus. Now comes news that the test flight of Boeing’s 787 will be delayed till December due to “uncompleted work by suppliers, delays in programming the flight control software and a shortage of bolts”, which means an even shorter test flight period. But Boeing says that it will deliver the first plane on time in May 2008 and that it should not impact its financials. Blah, blah, blah. The A380 is doing ego test flights all over the world for final certification! There are even banner ads on the web with flash countdowns till the first flight of the A380 with Singapore Airlines! Come on Boeing, time to tighten those bolts and get the Dream out.

Still on the airplane tip, seems that Delta and Alaska Airlines are pioneering new flight navigation systems using the widely available GPS grid to allow for more efficient departures and landings in crowded airports. The whole thing involved equipping their planes with GPS devices that allow them to know the plane’s exact location with far much greater precision that the old beacon system that is in use today. Instead of mental maps that pilots have to plot in their brains while navigating from marker to marker, with the new system, it’s an LCD display with the plane’s position clearly marked among the surrounding topography. Now instead of 1,000 feet and 2 mile visibly restriction at Anchorage for landings in cloudy conditions, it’s down to less then 600 feet and less then 1 mile, which translates in less planes delayed and less ripples in the system.

With the FAA urging airlines to shrink their schedules in order to reduce delays and increased on-time arrivals, according to Forbes Magazine, “the airline industry’s on-time performance in the first seven months of 2007 was its worst since comparable data began being collected in 1995, according to government data. U.S. carriers reported an on-time arrival rate of 69.8 percent in July, the most recent statistics available, down from 73.7 percent a year ago, according to the Department of Transportation.”

Time to let the technology be put to good use in the consumer realm and start re-invigorating a stalwart aviation industry. With space tourism just around the corner, is that what i have to look forward to by the time travelling to the moon will become as common as travelling to Washington DC?

Read this title recently: “Facebook now ranked 3rd in Page Views; MySpace down nearly 20%”. I’m somewhat giggling inside! If you know me personally, you know that I don’t get the “MySpace” phenomenon. Never signed up. I’ve been brainwashed by friends and business associates to join. No thank you. I oh so so vary rarely use it. I don’t get it. The interface alone allows for people to create those horrible mess of web pages that seem to flow from a bad personal site, circa 1996, template. Ning and other copycats are doing rings around Pad Thai Space, and plenty open-source applications available now let you create your own BybySpace-like social network communities with so much more engaging widgets and more pleasing and readable layouts.

The NASA rovers on Mars are celebrating 4 years of “life” on another planet. Yeah, just in case they’re not in the limelight anymore doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped being special. Four years, with Opportunity having survived the worst dust storm it encountered so far and Spirit, though hobbled and dragging one inoperative wheel, also is back on the job on the other side of the planet. They were supposed to last 3 months. Similar odds for a human colony on the Red Planet would be phenomenal.

On a Google tip, Google Earth now can peer outward into the universe. I have to admit, this is one of the Google products that I have seen and used on other people’s computers but never downloaded or installed on any of my machines. Now that I can look out and planet hop, I am definitely inclined to give Google Earth/Sky a chance.

I wanted to end this by sharing a project that I am planning to implement shortly. I have a couple business partners to whom I outsource work in different parts of the country. For a while now, we’ve been talking about implementing a remote customer support operation where at nighttime when people are at home, they can access an online service and have a technician remotely diagnose and service their computers. Clients would book time and pay for a base service online in advance and then the technician assigned to that job would log on, have the client download a small utility program allowing for a one-time agreed live access to control the client’s computer. While sitting in front of the computer, the client can see every step of the work done and at any time, cancel the remote control.

I figured that starting small with a couple of guys in key markets, mostly computer technicians with free time on their hands in the evening after work, even through the night, would be a good extra source of income for all parties involved. Employees could even schedule the blocks of hours they are available for each day in advance and even log on to see if there are any jobs waiting on a queue that can be addressed immediately.

Any insights into such a venture would be greatly appreciated and anyone interested, please leave me a post here for further contact.

Support.com and LogMeIn Free are templates of what I am shooting for but starting with a locality-based approach to the service. That’s all I’m saying on that for now. More as the venture progresses.

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Apple TOUCH iPod, iCache and Firefox’s milestone.

September 10, 2007 – 7:00 am

In the “bet you didn’t know Google did that”, it has just been revealed that Google is changing its policy on cookies expiration date. Originally, all Google cookies were set to expire in 2038, which meant that they could track all your search histories and countless of other movements you do on any of the Google properties for at least 30 years! Imagine being tracked for 30 years! How inaccurate a picture you’d get about a person’s trends since things you did in college could be part of your “profile” long after you’ve left the beer drinking binges contest behind or you’ve long given up on that sporty expensive car you wanted to own when you were in you twenties. Thank God they’ve changed their policies recently to have their cookies expire just 2 years after they’ve been placed - for a better “profile”of where you are now in your life, I hope.

One of the bigger news for this week is all about the cell phone; from Barack Obama’s clever use of the new cell technologies to reach as many constituents as possible to Apple reducing the price of the barely 3-month-old iPhone by $200. First, Obama is credited for grabbing and easy-to-remember branded short code (62262 - which spells o-b-a-m-a) for text messaging and his site offers ring tones and wallpaper downloads, compared to the Republicans candidates who so far have not embarrassed the technology in any meaningful ways. With more and more young adults using the technology, it is not difficult to understand why the Democratic agenda resonates louder and deeper with young voters in the US. On another hand, my fellow blogger Jon Percepto attended the Apple announcement of their new iPod Touch and the reduction in their iPhone prices. Read his post and view the pictures taken that day inside the Apple store in New York.

Still on the cell phone front, a post on the InformationWeek’s blog discusses the various differences in cell usage etiquette between the US and our friends across the pond. Seems that this blogger’s visit in London recently was marked by the fact that there “was virtually none of the shouted conversations that have unfortunately become difficult - if not impossible - to avoid in the United States.” From the comments left on that blog, it seems that the majority of travelers agree with his point, reporting seeing cell phones everywhere in Europe, but “very little in the way of heard conversations.” Even discreet signs stating firmly “that cell phone use was off-limits were scrupulously obeyed.” I know for experience that using my cell phone in the streets of New York city is an exercise in auditive boot camp, marked by my shouting, constantly angling the phone for “better” reception, and usually texting my thoughts. Achieving this quiet nirvana in the US won’t begin before the call quality from the major service providers increase tremendously. When it comes to clarity, i never think of my T-Mobile cell phone.

Anybody who knows me long enough quickly discovers that I hate carrying things in my pocket. My cell phone is a clam-shell tiny Motorola phone that I can carry without fearing the bulging side pants; my wallet consists of a money clip that can only accommodate 3 credit-sized cards while remaining super thin for my jeans. The recently introduced iCache (http://www.icache.com/) seems to be one answer to my plight. The $99 device, as thin as a Razr phone, will go on sale early next year. To use it, users will register their cards on the company’s website (this is the part that I still have concern with - why couldn’t the registration happen via some kind of USB interface with the user’s computer only? - and upload the info into the iCache). At the cash register, you activate the iCache with your fingertip on the biometric strip. This then activates a list of the cards registered on the iCache screen. All you do is scroll through the list and pick the one you want to use. From the iCache then pops out a plastic card, the size and shape or a regular credit card, with the data of the card you’ve chosen temporarily loaded on its magnetic stripe. You swap the card in the card reader terminal at the store where you are and pop it back in its place. Once in, the data of the card that you just used is automatically erased. It all sounds great for less-bulk people like me, but since the iCache doesn’t display your credit card’s information, what do you do when you conduct your purchases online? You still have to find the original card. I only wished the iCache had a way to display all those numbers, even the security pin in the back, still protected by requiring a thumb swipe on the biometric strip.

In the latest Business 2.0 magazine (september 2007), I was elated to read on page 21 about “software that writes itself.” It’s a feature about the release in the Fall or Charles Simonyl’s latest pet project: Intentional Software. You remember Simonyl as the Hungarian immigrant who developed the first word-processor, Bravo, at Xerox PARC, headed the development of Word and Excel at Microsoft and recently took a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyout vehicle for a cool $20 million. As a web application developer for more then 10 years, i have always used a similar approach in developing any web-facing application. My cPak application framework - in development for the last 6 years - promotes the same practices: any set of processes that can or will be repeated get defined in XML as a series of “connections” that essentially duplicate an original process while applying any rules, database constraints and user priviledges declared in the XML file to the new process. This approach has proven its merits over time by supporting quick web prototyping and development for such web interfaces as the NYU EDR (the NYU Hospital Electronic Data Repository), the Mount Sinai Lab reporting system, the FIU and Miami Dade College STS (pre-college programs student tracking system), numerous lightweight and easily adaptable websites (a complete list can be seen at www.burken.com) and an interface to the Wordpress installation that powers this hosted blog service.

Questions they may ask on your next interview:
1 - How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
2 - How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
3 - Why exactly manhole covers are round and not square?
Find the answers to these at the bottom of this post.

Blade-designed USB flash drive - the Apacer Handy Steno. Finally! The design of the Apacer is such that the actual accessory sits at a 90 degree angle right after the USB connector (see image). A USB accessory that fits flush with my laptop. For a while now, everyone around me has been buying those flash thumb drives - even my mother got one very recently at the urging of my 6-year-old nephew. Me, on the contrary, I’ve been reluctant to get one (I carry a small USB multi-card-reader and just plug in whatever card I’m faced with. For my own data, my trusted 2.1lbs Averatec laptop does fine in my backpack.) However, I have accumulated almost 5 USB Wi-Fi access kits over the last 6 months. They are handy for when I am fiddling around with old desktops and laptops trying to install Ubuntu or revive any old computer in general. Having those USB Wi-Fi kits make network setup a breeze since they are almost always recognized by any recent operating system. Nowadays, I don’t have to string any long 25 feet Ethernet CAT6 cable from my router to wherever I happen to have the new computer placed. Even while sitting on my couch, I can still tickle with an old laptop on my lap with the freedom provided by the USB access card. Living in New York, I can pretty much repair, fix or fiddle with any installation on location by just hoping quickly onto one of the many free Wi-Fi access points that blanket the city. My one MAJOR gripe: those USB thinghys are always designed in a rectangular shape. More things proturbing out of the sides of my laptop that I have to watch for when I move, maneuver or change spot. The laptop industry had finally adopted an all-compacted and tucked-in design that made laptop handling pretty much straigh-forward. Now I am back to watching where I move or swing my laptop. I hope they can adopt this blade-design to USB Wi-Fi network cards soon before I hurt myself or one of the current sticking-out ones that I am amassing.

Happy milestone to Firefox. September 7th marked the 400 million download of Firefox according to the Mozilla Foundation. Launched on November 9th, 2004, it took Firefox nearly one year to reach their first 100 million downloads. I was one of those early adopters as I had been complaining about the bloat of Internet Explorer 6 and beyond, and as a developer of web applications, it made more sense to code for a platform-compliant browser while agreeing to sacrifice some functionalities that were IE-only. Over the years, I have stayed with Firefox, converting everyone that rely on me for computer advice to switch to that browser. I would even hide the IE icon on computers that my friends or family would have me rebuild for them, and make the Firefox browser available from so many places within the OS. With the serious adoption of Linux in every aspect of my business (computers and music production), and the introduction of a couple of Macbooks to the business network, it made more sense then ever to get everybody standardized on Firefox. It’s a strategy that works and makes for easy transition to whichever computer we happen to be sitting in front of to do any kind of work related stuff. However, for the last 8 months, I have been keeping a secret browser on my main desktop and my development box: K-Meleon. I still have a lot of issues with the layout, the interface design, their bookmarks concepts as groups, and other minor gripes about this browser, but boy, does it load fast and does it display things quickly. On a few occasions, I have had about the same amount of tabs opened to similar pages on both firefox and k-meleon. Switching to Firefox from any other software took some noticeable seconds. Switching form tab to tab seems quicker in k-meleon, specially after the browser has stayed opened for hours. As has been reported before, Firefox can be a huge drag on available resources after any prolonged use. I usually reset Firefox’s nimbleness and quickness by restarting the application. Can’t remember ever having done that with k-meleon. Now if only k-meleon adopted a standard interface UI, or Firefox fixed that resource hoagging, the race is still out when it comes to the browser I use the most. Just for disclosure, my development box houses Firefox, Safari, IE 7 and K-meleon.

Answers:
1 - approximating 10,000 city blocks, 600 windows per block, five minute per window, $20 per hour, that’s about $10 millions.
2 - assuming the bus is 50 balls high, 50 balls wide and 200 balls long, that’s 500,000.
3 - a square manhole cover, tipped at an angle, can fall through the hole.

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