Techcrunch is reporting that development on the Netscape browser will officially end on February 1st, 2008. This kind of signals the end of an era. Those of us who were on the web early on, remember the great advance Netscape was over other browsers such as XMosaic. I remember when Netscape 2.0 came out, and the great advance tables seemed to be in HTML.

However, the Browser Wars were not kind of Netscape, and by the late 90’s even I had switched to Internet Explorer. By then, Netscape 4.x was a bloated mess that I remember crashing about every five minutes no matter what I did. It became unusable, and I, like so many grudgingly moved to IE.

What seemed like a desperation move (and it really was), Netscape was bought by AOL and soon open sourced the browser, creating the Mozilla Foundation. Years later, I was still using IE as the project had nothing had come of it. I did use Netscape a little here and there, but it never really worked right. Finally came Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox in 2002 and we finally had a modern browser to use. IE was forced to update to catch up to Firefox, and we’re all better for it.

Netscape has long been left behind, and no one I know really uses it. I can’t remember when I last actually used a Netscape branded browser. Though its spirit lives on in Mozilla and Firefox, it still stings a little to see Netscape come to the end.

During the holiday season, I was given an iPod 1GB shuffle (pictured above), my first iPod. I’ve not been a big fan of the majority of the iPod product line. I think they tend to be overpriced, have clunky interfaces, and I’m not a big fan of iTunes either. For the money, if you’re looking for storage and a good price, Creative and iriver are probably better bets. I also have an Apacer shuffle like ripoff that I’ve been using for a couple years, which at the time seemed like a good deal.

So, now I have an iPod. When I opened it up, i was surprised how damn small it is. It’s small enough that I would worry about losing it. The docking station is a little inconvenient because you can’t use a normal USB cable at all to connect or charge it, but to keep the unit simple I see why they did it the way they did. The first thing I tried was installing iTunes, version 7.5. What a failure that was. No matter how many times I installed, uninstalled, reinstalled, iTunes would never come up. What I finally ended up doing, was just using an older version (7.2) that installed and worked. I’m afraid to upgrade now, in case it doesn’t work and I screw up my library trying to downgrade later. It’s running, though, and that’s all I can ask for.

I don’t actually like using iTunes though, so in reality, I’m using Winamp to manage my songs and transfers. I find it less clunky than iTunes. Using the actual iPod is easy. The buttons make sense, the battery life is great (> 12 hours), and it’s nice to just clip it on and go. When checking the prices, I found that they can be bought for anywhere from $70.00 to $80.00, which seems completely reasonable for the form factor, battery life, and easy of use. The tiny size is definitely a premium feature worth paying for.

So, I still don’t think I would buy a regular iPod, but I am a fan of the small shuffles. I’m enjoying mine, listening to podcasts, music, and audio books for hours and hours on a tiny device.

I found this article yesterday titled “Some in Silicon Valley begin to sour on India“. The theme of the article is that the pay of Indian engineers is getting closer to what engineers are paid in America. When you factor in the overhead associated with outsourcing, the costs savings have dramatically shrunk. Two years ago Robert X. Cringely wrote an article that said pretty much the same thing. The overhead of managing outsourcing is bound to make the cost savings a wash.

To me this illustrates how powerful and fast the market is. While our politicians are blathering on in Washington about the “evils” of outsourcing cheap labor, the market, at least in the high tech sectors, is already solving the problem. Silicon Valley has been creating wealth and jobs in this country with outsourced labor, and India, a poor country for the most part, has a new and growing 40 billion dollar industry. Everybody wins.

My Christmas celebration with my wife was delayed a week this year due to the unfortunate passing of my grandmother on December 20th of 2006. Being that we’re atheists, the day itself doesn’t have any special meaning other than tradition. So, we ended up celebrating on December 31st.

The favorite gift I gave my wife this year, was this multi-purpose media box that I put together with some parts I had laying around and a couple new things I bought.

First, here are the basic specs:

1 Athlon 1800
1 GB memory
45 G hard drive
NVidia 6600 video card with S-Video out/512 MB
1 wireless Nic
1 Abit MicroATX motherboard

The case I found was made by Shuttle:

http://global.shuttle.com/Product/Barebone/SN27P2.asp

Mind you I didn’t get the “barebones” package. I acquired just the case. The next key part was how to control the computer from the couch. I looked a couple basic remotes, but I thought that would end up being limiting. Sure I could use some software to build an “On-Screen Display” menu, but I think that would have limited the usefulness of the box. So I ended up settling on something I found on Ebay:

http://www.gyration.com/en-US/ProductDetail.html?modelnum=GC1105CKM&accshow=3

The mouse control is pretty good, though I could see how my arm might get tired after a while. It’s sensitive enough though, that you can just use a little wrist action to move the mouse around. The keyboard comes in handy when you need to do something quick that can’t be mapped to the mouse, such as mute the sound. The wireless receiver works well hidden in the back of the box.

The next step was installing software. I included emulators for Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and general arcade games. I installed XaMp Studio so Kelly can listen to the online XM Radio feeds from the living room. The last thing I installed was Creative Media Source and mapped to Kelly’s mp3 drive, so she can listen to all her music from the living room as well. All via a wireless mouse remote and a wireless net connection.

The box hooked into my TV and stereo system smooth with RCA and S-Video cables. There is some initial noise upon bootup, but the machine runs as quiet as my Dish Network PVR box. Throw in some 10 foot USB extension cables, and you never have to leave the couch (once you power it on). Overall I’m really happy how it came out. I hope we get some real use out of it.

While running some errands today, I had to stop at Best Buy. I knew the Nintendo Wii was coming out tomorrow, but didn’t really expect to see anything. However, I did see people camping out waiting to buy it tomorrow:

I have to admit, the Wii looks cool. It’s at a good price point, the games are priced nice, and it has the most innovative controller out there. In Madden 07, you have actually make a throwing motion to throw the ball. Crazy.

By far my new favorite podcast:

Audiomartini

I have a friend who is currently working at AdMob, and it looks like to me they’re doing some good work over there. They are using, what I would call, the “Bottom Up” method of building a company and platform. They started small, let the business grow according the existing market conditions, and now are on the cusp of being massively successful. I don’t know how much money was used to found AdMob, but I’m judging by the blog that the business started out with a relatively small amount of investment, and has been bootstrapping its efforts with profits. This is the same method I would use.

I, on the other hand, work for a company that would take what I call the “Top Down” approach. This means, that my company would start out by finding large advertising partners, begin long term studies and revenue projections, and then begin building the product from the existing advertising partners and revenue projections. There are reasons why we have to do it this way, and I fully understand the reasons. In some cases, we have no choice.

However, it seems clear to me that “Top Down” is almost always slower to innovate than “Bottom Up”. Entrenched corporate polices prohibit my company from really starting something like AdMob (not that we’re interested). It would be hard to convince the appropiate board members, sales staff, and IT managers to take a flyer on a product like AdMob.

I think this all points to a certain sweet spot for a size of the company, and it’s ability to innovate. If I had to guess, I’d say the perfect sized company for innovation would be made up like this:

• 1 Founder/CEO who has the vision
• 1 Marketing guy who also handles most of the general business functions
• 3 Senior developers with copious amounts of skills
• 4 Junior developers who could innovate the designs of the senior developers
• 1 Sysadmin to handle setting up servers, etc.

What do you think?

I’m not sure why Dembski pointed to an article that points out how evolutionary genetics have weakened the dog species.  He comes up with another snarky title, I guess hoping that his readers don’t bother to read the full article.

I’d like to see how this stories disproves evolution.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/1326

I hate to give any recognition to any proponent of crackpot theories like Intelligent Design, however, one site really caught my eye.  William Dembski is one of the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement, and maintains a blog at Uncommon Descent.  Much like the actual Intelligent Design movement, the blog lacks anything of real substance, and spends most of it’s time making snarky comments about various stories that may or may not be related to evolution.  Very little serious discussion occurs.  I suppose that is fine, after all, it is just a blog, and I know Dembski spends time writing books. 

A couple headlines stand out to me:

"Natural selection builds bacteria that build nanowires — yeah, right"

I’m not sure where "yeah right" comes from, since he doesn’t present any arguments for "yeah right."  I guess we have to take his argument on faith.

"Marsupials and Placentals: a case of front-loaded, pre-programmed, designed evolution?"

This is interesting.  Even though the ID movement is over ten years old, it’s failed to ever make a single scientific prediction, or lead to any advance in knowledge.  In fact, by definition, when things get hard for ID’ers to explain, they just end the investigation with "God did it."  It’s a very lazy way of being "scientific".

"For sheer smarminess, this one is hard to beat . . ."

In this post, Dembski responds to an email from a writer about Dembski’s own work.  Of course, Dembski couldn’t be bothered to respond,  and instread resorted to childishness, by belittling the emailer, without responding to any of the points in an email  This is typical of ID’ers.  When challenged by those outside of their group think, they crumble, just like in the Dover case.

I don’t know where Dembski gets the smugness from.  His theories have no acceptance, and worse, no accomplishments.  He’s not much different than a member of the Flat Earth Society, peddling old theories that have long been disproven.

My friend Brian, pretty much sums up everything I’ve been thinking about the Palm platform for the last six or more months.  I have an old Palm Tungsten T, which is very outdated of course, but nothing from the Palm line really excites me.  There is a definite lack of focus with the Palm platform, and I think a lot of the developers have now moved on to other platforms.  The Palm platform is very much adrift, and I honestly think it’s too late.