News from the front

O2 will sell iphones 3G with prepaid plans (ie, no plan) for 299GBP which comes to around 374EUR. That probably means the EU price will be under 400EUR. It doesn’t say anywhere the iphones will be unlocked though.

Yes, this is all very confusing. Nokia, not in response to Android as some people advanced but, in response to Apple pulled a page out of Google’s world domination plan and announced it would free Symbian both to other manufacturers and the unwashed masses. Nokia went and said, “Look, Symbian is stabler than iPhone and is just as open as Android”

And really, when I got my N80 the second thing I did was try to figure out how to develop for it. And after a couple of hours poking around the nokia site and various foruns I said “oh screw it this isn’t worth the effort”.
And I guess that’s why it’s so hard to find quick ass apps for Symbian not made by nokia labs …

An interesting tidbit I came across, airplane fuel consumption is droping and is now as low a 4.8l per 100km per passenger which is better than a european car with just one person or a fully loaded american suv.

De novo, a realidade na Madeira ultrapassou-me. Não há grande coisa a comentar sobre a alteração da lei sobre a queima de tabaco em espaços públicos. Já foi dito que é ilegal e feita à medida para beneficiar os locais Pestana e Berardo. Tem também a típica alarvidade de independentismo.

Resta-me apelar aos Marcelos Rebelo de Sousa da vida (Marcelos ? será assim ? tenho que consultar as Dr. Edites Estrelas da vida!) que se mudem de armas e bagagem para a Madeira para estar entre os seus e deixar as pessoas em paz.

A proposito, a expressão “já chegamos à Madeira ou quê ??” tornou-se muito popular no Zimbabue à custa da situação politíca do país.

For the record, a Nokia N80 gets hell-u-va confused when you accidentally feed it a 8G microSDHC.

Don’t ask.

Optimus (Orange) will sell iphones with prepaid (pay as you go) accounts but won’t sell unlocked iphones, at least during launch. More info in portuguese at the optimus preregister site .

No word from Vodafone yet.

Em primeiro lugar aprendi que quando quiser alguma coisa do Governo, por mais inane que seja, só preciso de pegar em meia de amigos e ir para o Carregado arremessar pedras aos TIR. O Governo dá-me logo o dobro do que quero e não faz perguntas irritantes nem cargas policiais. Porreiro pá!

Em segundo o Sr Presidente Silva ensinou-me que o Tratado de Lisboa foi recusado pelos irlandeses porque as pessoas são influenciáveis por campanhas demagógicas. Em resumo, as pessoas são parvas e por isso as coisas importantes não deviam ser decididas em eleições. Se calhar, já que as pessoas são tão influenciáveis, acabava-mos com isto da democracia e com a maçada das eleições não é Sr Presidente ?

Sr Primeiro Ministro, um Estado de Direito não negoceia com terroristas. Um Estado de Direito prende os criminosos comuns. Um Estado de Direito como o nome indica acima de tudo mantém a ordem pública e garante o Direito. Um Estado em que os transportes de combustível deslocam-se a meio da noite com escolta policial não é de Direito. É o Iraque.

Sr Primeiro Ministro, utilize as forças para-militarizadas e se necessário as forças militarizadas que os meus impostos mantêm em prontidão para garantir a ordem pública e o Estado de Direito. Ou será que só servem para amedrontar agricultores em tractores em estradas secundárias ?

I must say the 2Mpx camera sticks out like a sore thumb on the specs. The lack of video call is kind of annoying but the crappy camera on this day and age should have been looked at more closely if apple is banking on photosharing through mobileme and such services.

On the other hand the 199/299 price point is a huge pleasant surprise. It wasn’t clear if it’s without contrat but even with it’s a really agressive price. And that’s probably what doomed the camera to crapiness, apple isn’t known for selling hardware at a loss so something gotta give.

The basic message for RIM was, we got a business phone normal people actually want to use outside work, it’s easier to setup on a corporate network than your stuff, it’s priced right at the business phone price point (bye bye decent camera) and we’re going to cream your ass.

The basic message for Nokia was, we got nintendo level game instead of crappy n-gage, a single platform that we can scale like crazy instead of a gazillion models and we got people actually developing for our phones. Enjoy the lowend, we’re taking the VAS section of the market.

The basic message for Microsoft was, wow, you suck. Windows mobile sucks, crappy programing models used by crapy programs make it suck even more, oems make it suck even even more. ‘nough said.

So apple is finally closing the loop around consumers. Buy from iTunes, download into the iPhone, sync with your home mac and your work crappy windows computer you’re forced to use.
Resistance is futile.

As oposed to Fedora 8 (which shiped Gnome 2.20), Fedora 9 (which shiped with Gnome 2.22 and the corresponding gvfs) will not show you your fstab nfs user mounts. On the other hand it will show you a given servers exports if you browse /net/servername/ on nautilus. The path is not Gnome choosen (don’t get your panties tied up) and everything works via autofs so go there to configure it.
(this is not new to Fedora 9, it’s just that I never needed it before)

Unsurprisingly, Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 can’t render this site properly. C’mon Microsoft, it’s not like tables are that hard. Show some effort will you.
On the other hand it can actually pass the Acid Test 2 now and managed to overtake FireFox2 there so MS might actually be being honest about being standards oriented now.

Peak oil is definitely here to stay. Oil states have figured out they need to milk their resources for all they’re worth as opposed to keeping price controlled for the sake of USA internal politik.
While there’s some very interesting analysis out there on how we got here and where we’re heading in the near future some insta-pundits are doing forecasts on the 30 to 40 year range which is idiotic and in some cases down right funny.

Around one week ago I caught a debate on BBC Prime (or was it World ?) about the oil crisis where a commenter declared the oil would keep rising in the 40 year scale, there was no way out of it and and there was no way technology could save us.
That’s it, people are declaring on TeeVee there’s no way technology will rid us of oil based economy in the 30 to 40 year time frame.
Luckily there was someone with some sense on the show who pointed out the peak blubber oil crisis 100 years ago where everybody was worried about how they would be able to light and warm their homes given the rising price of (blubber) oil. So, you don’t need to be a technologist, engineer or scientist to figure out there will probably be a technology way out of all this. All you really need is a brain!

More about this in /green

The current biodiesel push toward cleaner diesel is going in the totally wrong direction, both by locking us further into the diesel technology and using up valuable farm land that could otherwise be used to grow perfectly good people food.

The ethanol alternative is slightly better as it can be distilled from sugar cane suds. However, it’s more economically efficient to turn most of the cane into alcohol instead of just the lower yield suds and just like in the case of corn or beet biodiesel agriculturally viable land is being used to grow ethanol cane.

The biofuel future head into a relatively new field of research where algae and other simple plants are being modified to generate gas like hydrocarbs. Some algae already do this naturally and there’s an emerging theory this type was much more abundant in the past generated pretty much all of the oil reserves in the world. But given success in this research we could turn the current carbon vicious cycle into a virtuous cycle. The bioengineered algae would turn free CO2 from either the ocean or the atmosphere into hydrocarbs easily processable into fuels compatible with the current oil based types. f the process is scaled up enough we’d eventually reach a 0 sum process were all the released CO2 is recaptured by the algae using sun light as a power source.
Another interesting advance would be to tweak other types of algae into the generation of fertilizer through the same process in order to remove excess carbon from the fuel cycle back into the biomass cycles.

It kind of sliped by me but Nvidia made good on supporting Fedora9 by releasing a new package with beta support for new Xorg ABI. It doesn’t all work yet but it’s definitly way better than nv.

I’ll keep track on the rumoured new iphone 3G news and factoids here.

• Sources in TIM reported they will announce their iPhone launch date Tuesday morning, right after the WWDC keynote.
• Vodafone has announced it will launch a new iphone in 5 european markets, including Portugal. Orange has also announced availability in a number of markets, including Portugal. The iphone will be available through at least 2 carriers in most european markets.
• AT&T has sliped and an “iphone black” has shown briefly on its online store. AT&T claims this is an internal reference and doesn’t actually refer to a black iphone but it links to the plastic composite shell.
• A 3G on/off button as shown up on 2.0 firmware betas confirming the 3G version has 3G :)
• Suposed leaks of shell designs sent to accessory makers include a video call camera in the front. Not surprising for a 3G phone
• AT&T is in high alert for the 3rd week of June so that’s the believed date for US launch.
• Strings found on the 2.0 betas point to A2DP and GPS bluetooth support
• Also, stuff found on the 2.0 betas makes us think the iphone3G will be powered by the SGOLD3 Infinenon chip which puts the core platform at the nokia n96 level.

I’ll keep track of Google Android stuff here.

• T-Mobile says they will have an Android based device till the end of the year. (recent rumours had it android phones weren’t coming out till 2009 but more recent rumours confirmed launch in 2008)
• HTC demoed the “Dream” at Google I/O. It’s touchscreen and has niceness like accelerometers.
• Texas Instrument demoed an handheld prototype based on a current midrange TI OMAP chipset.
• People have managed to get an Android beta booting on HTC TyTN II hardware (not really interesting).
• People have managed to get a recent Android image running OK on a Nokia N810 (this is interesting).
• Wild rumours say Dell will make an Android device
• Am I the only one who noticed the qvga Android simulator is very very similar to a Palm Centro ?
• Not really Android but AT&T is jumping on the LiMo bandwagon with a lot of enthusiasm so it’s probably not on the Android bandwagon.

Por qualquer razão sempre que há uma crise especulativa bate-nos com mais força que ao resto da Europa. Se calhar somos mais especulativos por natureza mas uma coisa é o arroz do Lidl e outra é o preço da gasolina.

Em Portugal o preço dos combustiveis feito com petroleo comprado em 2007 cola-se ao preço do petroleo que vai ser entregue em 2009, mas só quando sobe. Apesar do mercado estar “aberto” só a Galp refina e distribui em Portugal em virtude da falta de regulação de acesso aos meios.
Como é possível o Estado não ter completado o processo de privatização que iria permitir que os preços dos combustiveis se alinhassem com o resto do mercado europeu ? Simples, a Galp é protegida porque é o fundo de pensões de actuais e futuros ex-ministros e como tal não pode enfrentar real concorrência.

Já perdemos qualquer hipotese de não sermos explorados pela Lusoponte mas ainda vamos a tempo provar que não há uma coninvência imoral entre o Estado e a Galp.
Que tal Sr. Primeiro Ministro ? Vai deixar este vicio também ?

Discovered Internet Explorer 7 does a piss poor job at rendering this site. It’s not like it’s a complex layout, but it assumes a working flowing and box model :) If you peek under the hood you’ll find it involved flowing dinamic tables which IE never did very well …

But if IE people wanted pages to actually look right they’d use something else.