Dreams & Missives

So, officially announced at the WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) less than a week ago, the fourth generation of the iPhone appears to have sold out via international pre-sales – in less than a day.

Despite an official prototpye being leaked to the tech press more than a month ago, there were still a new surprises surrounding the new phone. The most instantly noticeable is the new form factor. The newest iDevice is much squarer, allegedly 24% thinner, and sports a noticeable metal frame. There was also the introduction of something Apple has coined as ‘Retina Display‘ technology. Apple marketing insist this new display technology amounts to ‘more pixels than the human can distinguish’ . Many Experts have predictably challenged this claim.

The infographic below gives the most details with the fewest words:

IOS4 iPhone infographic

- Source: {http://www.mahalo.com/iphone-4]

And despite a myriad of issues relating to online pre-ordering, Apple today released a statement confirming that at least 600,00 orders were definitely processed, and now anyone hoping to get an iDevice will simply have to queue up in front of a real life store on launch day.  Pre-orders are due to be shipped out to the lucky few in early July, and everyone else will just have to try and get one of the [reported first wave] of three million.

I’m not getting one because I don’t need a smart phone, and even if I did I’d have to think long and hard before committing to any of the available UK tariffs, but I find it amusing that  a brand which as only been in the Mobile telecommunications space for four years can shift units so easily.

Blackberry, Nokia, Sony et al can only *DREAM* of having consumers so hungry to own one of their mobile devices.  Notice how I didn’t mention Microsoft and Windows 7 just then? That’s because the first Windows 7 Phone handsets won’t be released until the end of 2010.

So far so good, am about 15 pages into “Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional “(Magnus Lie Hetland), and so far I have firmly grasped the following:

Python is much closer to a natural language, erm language.
To do the standard ‘Hello World’ in Python requires the code:

print "Hello World"

And that’s it. No ending statement semi-colons required, just a simple single line of code which apes standard English pretty well.
I have also discovered that Python really *really* cares about white spaces, the code must be readable and understood by a human to run correctly. How did I discover this? Well the text mentions doing standard maths in the Python compiler and how 1/2 will not give the result 0.5 by default. To get he compiler to understand 1/2, you have to run the program:
from __future__ import division
*then* run
1/2.
Only in the text it is hard to tell if that program is:

A - from_future_import division
B - from _future_ import division
C - from_ _future_ _import division
D - from __future__ import division

The correct answer is D from(space) __(two underscores with no space)future(two underscore with no space)(space)division.
All discovered via the help of http://www.linuxtopia.org/online. Specifically – http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_books/python_programming/python_ch05s06.html

Python is not as close to standard English as say Applescript, but Applescript only works in the coco environment and Python is cross platform. I would dearly love to be paid to work in an OSX only environment, but don’t see that happening, so onwards and upwards with Python.

My beauty lives here: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=geekfeminism.org and Mycroft ^[1] was so easy to use!

Took me all of 30 minutes (mostly because I had to create the favicon^[2] from scratch. I have left a comment on the website in question Geekfeminisim.org. and told them about it so I hope they like it

Yay me. I developed a real live useful thing which is now out in the wilds of the ‘net.

¹ Mozilla are the creators and maintainers of the Open source Browser Firefox. Mycroft is an official development arm of Mozdev.org. Mozdev works on development for Mozilla projects. Mycroft is a project which provides a collection of more than 19 thousand Sherlock & OpenSearch Search Engine Plugins for your web browser. The name Mycroft refers to Mycroft Holmes, the brother of Sherlock Holmes in the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle

² A favicon icon is the little icon you see in the URL / Address bar of your browser for most websites. Probably the most discussed and most recognised favicon is the Google one

Why ‘Surprise! ‘ ?  Because when every other braded Tech company is losing revenue or reducing thier workforce via large scale lay-offs, Apple continue to make a huge profit.

Apple on Monday reported its most profitable quarter ever, with record sales of its Macs and iPhones blowing away analysts’ estimates. Overall, the company’s profits rose 46 percent compared to a year ago. – Wired

To save you checking each link references above let me sumarise:

• In January of this year Sun Microsystems laid off 1,300 workers as part of a planned ( and announced)  sequence of job reductions. They had originally planned on shedding 6,000 international positions, and closed their only UK plant based in Scotland – entirely [Source: Cnet news]

• Again in January of this year, Microsoft announced an 11% drop in  it’s second revue of the quarter, and announced a global reduction of the workforce to the tune of approximately 5,000 people over the following 18 months [Source: Engadget.com]

• January was a bad month for the world of Tech employment, because Intel – the worlds number one chipset manufacturer and developer  – announced plans to lay of 6,000 of their work force. [Source: PC World Business online]

• In August of this year Dell reported a quarterly profit reduction of 23% on Retail sales. This was thier fourth consecutive quarter of falling sales figures. Bear in mind they are the second biggest PC retailer (by shipments) throughout the US. [ Source Wall street Journal online]

• Depending on which financial institution numbers you believe – Palm experienced a $13.6 million NET LOSS in September 2009, and that was after the Pre smart-phone (their make or break device according to all the Tech pundits) had been on the market for an entire month and sold just over 800,00 handsets. [Source: Engadget.com]

And Apple? Well they have opened stores in more than 25 locations internationally:  Barcelona, Lyon, Marseille, Lonsdale (Australia), Lamar Blvd (Austin Texas),  Dublin, Laredo (Texas), Paris, Las Vegas City Centre, Aberdeen City Centre (Scotland), Montpellier (France), Manhasset (New York US), Oakridge Center (Canada), Norwich (UK), Carosella (Milan, Italy), Alesteral (Hamburg Germany), Churchill Square (Brighton, UK), Westerfield Doncaster (Australia), Bahnofrastrasse (Zurich Switzerland), Liverpool One (UK), Sainte-Catherine Street (Canada), Sanlitun (China), George Street (Sydney Australia), Grand Arcade (Cambridge, UK), Milton Keynes (UK) – and that listing does not even cover all the US interstate store openings. [Source: Ifoapplestore.com/stores]

They have 11 more confirmed store openings still to happen this year: Sau paual (Brazil), Manila, Bristol (UK), Newcastle-on-Tyne (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Queensland (Australia), Hamberg (Germany), El Paseo Village (Near Palm Springs US), Cardiff (Wales), Fairview Pointe Claire (Canada). [Source: Ifoapplestore.com/stores]

Plus they made a reported $1.6 BILLION in net PROFIT in the last financial Quarter. And all without even releasing any new technology – just upgrading existing lines.

So Surprise! – Apple is still making a profit even whan other branded tech companies are using workforce downsizing to protect thier profit margins  – Apple continues to expand. [Source Wired.com]

In a recent Wired UK article, Steve Haber (President of Sony’s Digital Division) claimed that:

“With the digital music boom, people were copying CDs onto their computers before MP3 players were widely available. People have learnt from the music industry and we now know how to make consumers happy, reward the content maker and keep industry happy too. We have DRM measures in place right from the beginning. The move from books to e-books is much more under control.”

My first thought on reading this was ‘Really?’. Because all the tech savvy people I know (who are the early adopters for these devices and service) would disagree. Has the recent backlash regards remote mass deletion of a copy of Orwell’s 1984, by Amazon on customers Kindle devices – been ignored by the entire publishing industry?

It seems nonsensical to me to fully equate a electronic copy of a book with a physical copy, but I have yet to see a valid argument as to why ownership rights should be so vastly different between formats.

DRM on books will fail for precisely the same reasosn it is failing (and continues to fail) on music. Consumers don’t want it. Those that understand the full implications of DRM will find a way to circumnavigate it anyway, and those that don’t -intially- understand the implications will get fed up of being locked into hardware devices or increasingly not being able to use the texts they have ‘bought” in the ways they reasonably expect. And also -cruicially – in ways which are not trying to subvert copyright.

Please do not mis-understand me, I still want authors and artists to get paid for thier work. I still want them to retain copyright of that work. But as a consumer, what I emphatically do not want, are arbitrary restrictions on what I do with that work once I have bought it – presuming I am not breaking that copyright or undervaluing the work by distributing it for free.

I know I am not alone in this. As the hardware for readers becomes cheaper, and the availability of texts increases more and more people will want to know that once they ‘buy’ some data. They OWN it.