It’s been all over the tech news world lately; apparently Google is muling over taking Skype off of Ebay’s hands. Ebay has already written down the value of Skype as a large loss on their purchase price of $2.6 billion in stock and cash. But would Skype’s G-branded future be any better?

I think it would be. Skype is a strong international brand for voice calls, instant messaging and video calls; but of course it competes directly with Google Talk. Skype as a company has made a lot of mistakes; but they actually produces some of the best technology for p2p VOIP out there in the marketplace. Skype is particularly strong in redundancy, cost of network operation (since it’s p2p every user carries’ each others traffic; most people have no idea of this fact) and routing around the most draconian network admins out their through their routers.

I recently read a Slashdot article “EU Commissioner proposes 95 year copyright”. I am a staunch supporter of the European project; or at least the ideals it is based on to create a peaceful, demcratic union of countries with a common background and share similiar goals. Intrigued by the article I read it only to find out that a local man who used to represent my area was responsible. I had to write to him to ask how he lost his mind….

I just purchased an Amarok hoodie andt-shirt; and I couldn’t be happier supporting one of my favourite open source projects! What makes it so good? Have you ever heard of Amarok? Chances are if your an OS X or Windows user; you haven’t. All this is about to change! The amarok team are busy porting it from it’s UNIX underpinnings to Windows and OS X.

Whats to like about Amarok then?
also is cool phonetically: am a rock!

I last discussed the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet in October; when details were only starting to filter out. It wasn’t expected for Nokia to introduce an upgrade to the N800 Internet Tablet (which I also reviewed here) so soon. I certainly don’t envy the position of a small team getting the hardware and software for a mini-computer right in such a short space of time. But needless to say the N810 feels right; in fact it feels more right than the N770 which I thought had the best design of all (be it functionality not so much style). The N810 has bags of style; in a flashy brand-new-car sort of way; it looks expensive and I believe Nokia plays to this in their pricing.

Apple does it again: explosive growth in the computer market, no doubt in part to its Macbook/Macbook Pro line of laptops. As Ars Technica points out:

As predicted last quarter, however, Apple broke its tie for third place with Gateway by shipping 1.33 million units and growing by a whopping 37.2 percent (double that of any other US vendor) from third quarter 2006 to claim 8.1 percent of the US market for the quarter. These numbers also continue the company’s trend of steadily gaining market share every two quarters for at least the past year.

Nokia have announced an upgrade to the N800 Internet tablet, called the N810. I suspect its called that because it is more of an incremental upgrade than a total visual refresh it was going from an Nokia 770 to N800. Here it is:

(Picture Courtesy: Internet Tablet Talk)

It sports a nice new hardware keyboard; inbuilt GPS (For satellite mapping) and OS 2008 (an upgrade to the operating system it runs). The N800 will also benefit from OS 2008, which will include GoogleTalk, Skype, Mozilla browser, among the usual such as its email client, media player, file manager, control panel, assorted games and an image/PDF viewer. The one feature it will emit is an inbuilt FM Radio, which was axed to make the N810 a smaller tablet. It still retains the best screen size for web browsing, bluetooth connectivity, and of course Wifi which is central to the tablets existance! No word on what easter eggs are included if any; on the N800 it was a radio and the N770 it was the microphone. Engadget has a great writeup on it, choc-a-bloc full of high resolution photos with size comparisons to Apples iPhone.

So I read the news Novell and Red Hat are being sued for patent infringement. This is all about multiple workspaces that can hold various graphical user elements, a Xerox Parc patent which dates to the early 1990’s. Xerox Palo Alto Research center invented the graphical user interface in the 1980’s, only to been, licensed and used by Steve Jobs in Mac OS Classic. Now IP Innovation, a submarine patent troll, who make no products and bought the patent want their payday. The logical step is to go after the biggest infringer to set a precedent for your patent, and then make your way to all the smaller companies who infringe. Well logically of course that would be Apple or Microsoft. Apple has already paid them a reported 20 million dollars, and well no-one knows what Microsoft has done, but this fish is smelly. From the Register Article:

Planning to build a computer can be fun also. Researching parts, making sure they work well together (if they are on Manufacturers QVL). Making a list of all the parts you need is the beginning of the purchasing, assembly and then seeing your machine in action! Lots of guides online help with the planning stage; but nearly all are advice and tips. How do you know which is biased? Are the benchmarks relevant to what you are building your machine for? Probably not most of the time. If you’re not a hardcore gamer like myself, your machine can mid-range and cheaper than a pre-built solution, saving you money. I am using my machine as a long term investment: I plan to have it long into the future and just replace components. I think that could save me at least €3000 over ten years (two €1,500 machines every 5 years, not beyond possibility) if not more. I can also re-use perfectly good parts when my other machines have departed to that big waste recycling plant in the sky.

I found a new pastime: dismantling pc’s. It my not sound like great fun, but its a challenge to do it right and make sure you don’t break your pc at the end of it all. Nothing feels of so much relief when you see the BIOS boot up again after ripping everything you can out and cramming it all back in. It stands to you in developing problem solving skills, which of course employers love. It is so much more visual than any theory, plus it is what the majority of people like: physical objects like Lego going together. I am writing this on a computer I stripped everything out of at the moment: a Dell 3100c, a Celeron D machine I bought in August of last year. Today I dismantled a very old Optiplex PIII, and the difference between the machines is marked, even though there are only a few years between them. I have included some photos below to show the inside internals:

Is the much beloved Apple the new Microsoft? First there was IBM, the big all crushing corporate machine that was humbled by the next big giant in the form of Microsoft, so it seems Apple’s turn is long overdue. The next few weeks are crucial to this crossroads in which Apple finds itself: It owes a HUGE amount to the BSD (an open source Unix clone) which is the foundation for not just OS X, but the iPhone and now the iPod Touch. Basically without the kernel that runs these fantastic devices, Apple would still be up shit creek without a paddle. Granted the iPod would have been a huge success probably still, but OS X’s core is the foundation for the real money making Apple will do over the next few years, a point that is not lost on Mr. Jobs as the company intelligently markets different segments to different markets of which I have first hand experience of: Go to the Apple site for education and they extol the brilliance of a Macbook and make they deal sweeter by throwing in an iPod Nano. But if you go to a link I was provided in a college advert; they bring to a page pointing out key areas a mac can make a difference. I picked Computer Science naturally, and the site extolled the virtues of Open Source, a Unix base and programming tools like Xcode.