It’s no secret that there’s some awful names that have been given to technologies over the years. WiFi (what’s the ‘fi’ for, Fidelity? Finance? Fishing?) and SCSI come to mind quickly but there’s lots of others. But RFID has turned out to be a great name, as it accurately captures the two elements that make it interesting: Radio Frequency communications and IDentity.
Ken Traub, our CTO at ConnecTerra, talks about these being the ying and yang of the movement.
There’s a great red herring flying around the net based on the single datum reported at itunesperipod.com. Everyone seems to be using it for their own purposes (links go here).
Many people have assumed this means people are pirating music left and right. In my case I’ve bought more than 21 songs on iTunes, but it’s only a small fraction of the music on my ipod. The top two classifications (by far) are a) music I bought on CD and b) music from archive.
So you’re a large consumer company with a virtual lock-in in your home town. You have other large competitors at a national level, but long-time market presence coupled with some local governmental help maintain your position. So what do you do?
Well, if you’re Northwest Airlines, the answer is clear - gouge your home town as much as possible!
I’m sitting here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport (MSP, for those who remember these things) looking at gate after gate, plane after plane, and check-in counter after check-in counter of Northwest Airlines facilities.
Congrats to Sun on the birth of Open Solaris. It’s been under way in different forms of concept and reality since I was there earlier in the decade.
With this event I hope that Sun folks remember Rob Gingell’s contribution to this effort. He was one of the first people to stand up and get people to understand that the act of open sourcing is, by definition, about last year’s software, and innovation and value creation are about next year’s software.
I’m moving my blog to my website. Please switch to that - there won’t be any new posts here.
Cheers,
Dave
My friend Hal nicely captures the mentality of those of us who like coffee, but like to stick with “regular” as opposed to “double-shot grande mochachino, no foam, with soy milk”.
I read the original Associated Press article on Apple’s Intel announcement and it was very harsh (I recall the first sentence including the word “desparate”). Now they’ve cleaned it up and cited analysts and others to express their opinion. Yet another reminder that every article has a point of view…
I’m moving my site from Radio to Pebble, and also from the community server onto my own server. Radio has been great, but work on it has slowed down and I wanted to get more control over the website.
I’m also going to transition over to MarsEdit, and expect the tools combination to allow me to post more often, but we’ll see.
One thing I’ve got to do is figure out what to do with my old posts.
Good review of the Family Movie Act by Ed Felten. The Act is poorly named, as it opens up the law for a variety of modifications to movies, not just taking out “inappropriate” parts.
(Via Freedom to Tinker.)
X-Plane - a very cool looking, realistic flight simulator.