Saturday, 5. September 2009, 18:48:26
internet, technology, file sharing, society
...
Denne uken kom det et opprop fra kunstnerdypet, iallfall
noen av dem, som sa seg forfordelt, eller var det forforstjelt? At bransjeorganisasjonene ikke er velvillig innstilt til fildeling er knapt nytt, men denne gangen var kampanjen frontet av forfattere og utøvere. Gitt det 20. århundres historie gir forfatteropprop meg mange assosiasjoner, ikke alle like gode.
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Friday, 28. August 2009, 09:03:57
Google, widgets, internet, Apple
...
Last issue of
New Scientist published a paean to IPhone named
Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives. It follows a traditional NS pattern of being ahead of the curve for science and behind it with technology. The author was elated, and there is a crucial distinction between things that make you happy and things that don't.
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Saturday, 15. March 2008, 16:05:21
internet, society, science, the forums
It seems to be science week at the
Debates & Discussions forum, and of course I couldn't resist butting in, be it
peer-reviewed sinful science, or the
study of armageddon.
Wednesday, 8. February 2006, 14:27:07
travel, Praha, past, internet
Still in Prague. Had I blogged using Opera Mobile or Mini I would have been at the airport in time (maybe a posting on battery life on mobile devices at a later time), but as the trip was almost a stopover in Oslo before going to Berlin a couple days later, and Berlin is just north of here, missing it was no disaster.
The travel time from my flat in Oslo to my base in Prague is 4 hours and 42 minutes including busses, metro, and walking distance plus a maximum of 29 minutes waiting (assuming no delays). The cost is 100€ upwards return fare for the ticket plus another 17€ getting to the airports and back (thanks to the
the currency converter to figure that out).
Ten years ago travelling
by bus would cost half again as much, and take 24 hours (twice that again, and slower and less convenient, if you travelled by train). Six years before that the Iron Curtain was still in effect, which didn't just separate the "East" from the "West", but the East from the East. A train journey in those days would entail as much standing still and be processed, or just as likely standing still for the purpose of standing still, as it would be actually rolling along at anything but high speed.
As the wireless connectivity of Prague
is excellent, city-sponsored WiFi (partially) and unlimited GRPS connectivity to an acceptable price, working here is just as easy as it would be in Oslo, and
a bit cheaper. Fifteen years earlier the Internet connectivity from the Charles University in Prague, the entire republic in effect (there was a further line to Liberec in the north), was a shaky 64kbps line to Linz in Austria. Then again at that time the infrastructure was abysmal, and apart from Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and the Nordic countries that had megabit lines between their universities, the situation wasn't much better elsewhere. West Germany for instance was a X.25 morass that didn't "get" the Internet until years later.
Saturday, 20. August 2005, 16:16:57
origin, Opera, past, internet
There is something bombastic about round numbers. Opera Software
just celebrated 10, a long time in Internet years. Half that time I have been working here, while Opera in turn has been around almost half my Internet life, which has been close to half the fifty-sixty years lifetime I expect the Internet to have as a project. It will garner as much interest to speak about the Net in the 2020s as it would be to speak of electricity today.
A decade ago Opera was this ridiculously obscure Telenor based browser that no sane observer, myself included, would give a fighting chance to survive a the decade, let alone come into the position we are in today.
When I started five years ago Opera was in transition. Like today Opera was growing fast. In 2000 we quadrupled in size, compared to a doubling in 2005. The goals were to turn Opera into a truly platform-independent product and complete the Opera 4 (codenamed Elektra) migration. While the offices were stacked with an amazing array of multicultural machines and gadgets, they still are, in truth the Opera versions were largely Windows ports and remained so until Opera 7. We were committed to CSS and flexible design at the time the dinosaurs ruled the web.
But the excitement was around a shh! product we were to make for this large to-be-unnamed company in Finland. While the Communicator 9210i was a minor product by today's standards, it was the harbinger of phones to come. And then the lean years came.
The bubble of temporal insanity had to burst. While it didn't affect us directly our customers found themselves short of money, and projects started to disappear. We rode this out, expecting them to return eventually as they did, thanks to our users buying Opera licences. The turnaround happened not long after Opera 7. We got more customers, many more users, and IE started to look vulnerable.
There is no guarantee there will be an Opera Software ten years from now. But we are in a vastly better placed to make a difference than ten years ago. The spunk, the skill, and the ideas are there as before but now we have more just a handful of people to take advantage of them. Five years from now we will know how well we did succeed.
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