Categories
Technology

Self-fulfilling Prophesies

Marco Arment has the following quote on Build and Analyze 60 (this was transcribed by me, so might not be 100% accurate):

I don’t blame them. Because it’s a computer. Because we as an industry … as a computer industry have taught people over the last few decades that computers are incredibly complicated and unreliable.

Dan and Marco were discussing the issues around the iPhone ringer switch and all of the discussions around how it works. This was in response to whether people trust their phones as their alarms in important occasions.

For the record, I do (and so does my wife).

That above quote, though, is the mindset of so many people. What can we do, as an industry, to turn the tide?

Categories
Life Technology

So … there’s This One Podcast

My friend Phil Wels and I recently recorded our first ever podcast and I just finished posted it tonight. You can head on over to the This One Podcast site and take a listen yourself.

We will be updating things on the site and also listing the podcast in iTunes soon as well.

I need to apologize for my audio quality, my headset that I was going to use was not loud enough so I defaulted to my iPhone headset which worked fine, but was muddy and also had some noise when it hit my shirt (which was often). I’m looking into getting my hands on a better microphone for next time.

Hope you all enjoy!

Categories
Life Technology

Only Good Thing at CES

This is the only good thing at CES (via Engadget).

Who wants to go in with me on one?

Categories
Business Technology

Mozilla Announces Firefox ESR

Mozilla has announced the Firefox Extended Support Release. More information will be coming out soon, but what I can find basically states that instead of a rolling, 6-week release schedule of the mainline Firefox release, the ESR version will be once a year and then security and critical updates will come out during the whole of that year for that version.

Starting with Firefox 10 (which will be the first ESR release), every year there will be another ESR release that will follow the same version number as the Firefox that is being released then (for now, that would mean Firefox 17 in 2013 and Firefox 24 in 2014). Then x.0.x releases would come out during the whole of the year for security issues, mainly coinciding with rolling in the security fixes of each new Firefox release: Firefox ESR 10.0.1 would include the fixes from Firefox 11, Firefox ESR 10.0.2 from Firefox 12, 10.0.3 from 13 … you get the idea.

This will not be advertised through the Mozilla site but available through their Enterprise wiki page. You can read the draft of the proposal at their wiki as well.

This is great news and I think a good compromise for businesses and other organizations instead of needing to work around the rapid release of the mainline Firefox.

Categories
Technology

My Mobile Industry

With CES taking place right now and Apple soon to release their numbers for the holiday quarter, there is a lot of talk about the current mobile industry. There are many people better able to talk about the current state of the industry and many more willing to talk about where they see the industry going.

I’m going to briefly talk about what I would like from the mobile industry.

I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit:

  • lower data prices
  • LTE in rural markets
  • better reliability
  • no data caps (or at least much higher ones)
  • better customer support

Like I said, low-hanging fruit. I think most people would agree that those would be great changes to the overall industry. If this happened, I could see many rural customers ditch their current providers for mobile LTE connections only just because of the speed.

However, how about the devices?

For me, I don’t want a single mobile player to have control of the industry. I don’t want a “Microsoft” for the mobile space, that will be very bad for everyone. Not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft … no one should be able to control greater than 50% of the market at one time.

What I want is three strong players constantly competing with each other to make better devices that serve their customers. Right now I hope that Apple, Google, and Microsoft will go ahead and do that, each holding between 20% – 40% of the smartphone market at any given time.

That’s what I want from My Mobile Industry.