Monday, July 7, 2008

To buy or not to buy that is the question


July 11th, 2008 is the day for iPhone 3G with its marketing tag taken from the official website: twice as fast, half the price.

TWICE AS FAST. If you're googling for more pages about this upcoming and most awaited gadget, you will find articles such as this one that will guide us to a conclusion that European and Asian market know better about mobile data access speed. The hardware will support not only 3G capability (maximum download speed 384Kbps), but apparently it will support HSDPA download speed (1.8Mbps, 3.6Mbps, 7.2Mbps, 14.4Mbps - not sure which one it will support). According to this wikipedia page, Apple iPhone 3G is an HSDPA phone. If you're a mobile phone seller in countries where the users familiar with 3G and HSDPA or 3.5G terms, and you try to sell this new iPhone as iPhone 3G, your user might thought why should I buy 3G capable only handset if there are a bunch of handsets that already support HSDPA? But if you say 'Hey, checkout this new iPhone. Yes, it supports HSDPA, and the price is reasonable', then no doubt if your buyer will pick this lovely gadget. The conclusion is: Apple should change - and they might already (planned) to change - the name to iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3.5G, iPhone HSDPA, etc.

HALF THE PRICE. Responses according to the decision to cut the price to $199 for the new 8GB iPhone varies. There might be protests similar like what happened on September 5, 2007 when Apple cut iPhone price by $200 with refund policy, from $599 to $399 for the 8GB model. You might expect that there will be other price drop of this new iPhone from $199 to $99 in October 2008. Who knows? But make sure you understand that this July 11th amazing $199 price does not include extra $240 for two years data plan. Checkout this article.

To buy or not to buy, that is the question. The decision is all yours.

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Friday, July 4, 2008

Google 4 people who can not live without $ or # (*NIX shells)

Google is a tremendous innovation that makes Internet a better virtual world. Looking back on day one when I had my first Internet access - it was on 1996 - Yahoo! was the most important website where you can search for anything it may concern.

When one of my friend introduced me with Google, I became more interested with this innovative way to search the web. Today, many people say that they can not live without Google. Hey, I don't mean to make an article to advertise for Google. Google need no advertising, isn't it?

Yesterday I found a link to goosh.org that might change the way any computer geeks, especially *NIX experts, who lives with their shells everyday - sh, csh, tcsh, ksh, bash, etc.

If you are a real *NIX geeks, don't miss it. Give it a try and you might love it.

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Thursday, November 22, 2007

WinUtuxu: Good or Bad Campaign for Ubuntu Linux?

When sight seeing on some websites, I found quite an interesting website that has an operating system called WinUtuxu (or an alternative link pointed here). If you don't understand Arabic, at least you can see some screenshots from the link available at the top of the page, or you can read the English translation - thanks to Google Translate - here.

When you go to the download page, you can see that it links to rapidshare, well I guess if you don't actually have a rapidshare account, you might not enjoy downloading WinUtuxu.

After looking at some of the screenshots and doing some googling, I can now see that WinUtuxu is actually a Windows XP with preinstalled Windows-based open source softwares. If you wonder why I relate this with Ubuntu, it's because the name - WinUtuxu - has some similar alphabets as Ubuntu. I guess the author wants to relate this Windows version with Ubuntu and Tux - the name of the penguin, the symbol of Linux kernel - at once.

I also found the co-relation of WinUtuxu and Ubuntu by reading this Ubuntuforums thread. There was a discussion about whether this would be a good or bad campaign for open source world. Some agree that it's good, but many others don't. However if you plan to download and install this Windows with a new look - hey, it's definitely not a Linux distro! - then you might be aware of the copyright policy.

For me, I can not decide whether it's good or bad. From one point, it's good to see this effort - making people more familiar with open source softwares. But if we see from other point of view, it's bad because it's breaking the law.

Wanna try to download and install this OS before the website is closed by the authority or the rapidshare hosted files deleted? The choice is yours.

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Psycho-Cybernetics

Have you ever heard about Psycho Cybernetics? It's an idea that was claimed by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, an American cosmetic surgeon that realize this science because of changes to the life of his patients after plastic surgery - or specifically face surgery.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz then write the book titled Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living out of Life that was first published in 1960 by Prentice-Hall and first appeared in a pocket book edition in 1969. It's interesting that to be a successful person, you should change the way you see of yourself.

Another idea that was written in this book is another ingredient needed to achieve success. You must have a clear visualization before you do something, and you will achieve a great result of what you have imagined.

This book is published in the new version, titled New Psycho-Cybernetics. This idea seems similar to what recently shocked America and other parts of the world - the book (also a video version of this book) called The Secret.

Read/watch them, it might change your life. But be aware that God is the number one authority for this whole universe.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27, RSV)

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Saturday, November 17, 2007

Copyright 2.0

Are you a musician, song writer, or book writer? If so, the word 'copyright' must sound very familiar in your ears. While some people doing campaign about the importance of copyright, there are many others doing the same thing for copyleft. Yes, you have your freedom to choose!

Meanwhile, the Internet age make the copyright seems more important. Nowadays, copyright not only applied to the printed or published matters, but also to softwares, files, etc. - i.e. something that doesn't physically exist. The way people applying for copyright also changing. I've just found a Web 2.0 Copyright and Rights Assignment Services called Numly. Here's some description about Numly.

Numly assigns Numly Numbers (Electronic Serial Numbers / ESNs) for all things digital. The unique identifiers enable rights statements to be associated with digital content as well as third-party, non-repudiation measures for proof of copyright via real-time verifications. Numly Numbers are simple to generate and act as an electronic timestamp. They also allow you to track who is viewing your content and when it is accessed, monitor ratings, and can be used as permalinks!

If you're interested on using this service, 100 Numly Numbers per month costs $4.95. Hey, I'm not doing advertising on behalf of Numly nor receive any advantage from them. Just in case you're wondering about the cost of this service. You can also visit their blog here

One of the website that leads me to Numly is Shambles, a website designed to support the international school communities (teachers, support staff, administrators, students and families) in 17 countries in South East Asia.

Are you ready for digital licensing?

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Friday, November 16, 2007

Trading for A Living

These last few weeks, I've been thinking about a 'new' way of money making. Why should I call it a new way? Because it's apparently not a new way, because many people already do this for a living. No, it's not by being a blog author :-) Yes, you might be able to make money by writing your blog in such interactive way. But what I'm talking about is about trading for a living.

A friend of mine suggest me to read this book. It's just like a must read book for many traders. Well, if you see the details about this book at amazon.com, it's not a new book. The 1st edition of this book was published on March 8, 1993. But this book still manage to get a quite high rank at some book categories at amazon.com

I've read some parts of this book, and I learn that to be a day trader, it is not enough only to master technical analysis. There are more aspects you should learn to be a great and successful day trader. And one of them is related with the way you manage your thinking. I will show you some excerpts from this great book (page 27, Trading Psychology).

Your feelings have an immediate impact on your account equity. You may
have a brilliant trading system, but if you feel frightened, arrogant, or upset,
your account is sure to suffer. When you recognize that a gambler's high or
fear is clouding your mind, stop trading. Your success or failure as a trader
depends on controlling your emotions.

When you trade, you compete against the sharpest minds in the world.
The field on which you compete has been slanted to ensure your failure. If
you allow your emotions to interfere with your trading, the battle is over.

Surely I should be well-prepared before I decide to enter this new way of living - trading for a living.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007

LGPLed J2ME emulator

Have you ever imagined running your mobile Java games in your desktop? MicroEmulator might enables you to do such thing. It's been used by Opera to show you the demo of Opera Mini, a great browser for your mobile devices.

These are some excerpts taken from the homepage of MicroEmulator website.

MicroEmulator is a pure Java implementation of J2ME in J2SE. MicroEmulator is licensed under LGPL so it is possible to link and distribute commercial software with its libraries.

I haven't had a chance to do some testing using MicroEmulator. As soon as I had my time, I will write my post here.


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