There are a lot of adds for mobile internet on Belgian TV the last month, but there is one that makes me almost mad. I'm very anti-belgacom, mostly because of the olden days when all we had were modems and used it to connect to BBS's - i even had my own 2 node demo scene oriented board.

Anyway, the add goes something like this. 'Pick mobile internet from Proximus (the mobile provider of Belgacom), it's great and we were the first to have a mobile phone network in Belgium'. They sure did, not because they are this innovative, but because the market wasn't open and Belgacom had a monopoly on anything phone related at that time (fixed & mobile). You wanted a phone? great, pay through your nose for outdated fixed phone technology and their mobile phone pricing was ridiculously high to put it mildly.

After a while, the market got open and competing companies were allowed to enter with their products. The first to do so was Mobistar, their price was half of Proximus. The very next! day Proximus slashed their prices in half as well.

The ad gets me mad, because they try to convince the people they were the first, while the truth is that there was no other choice and they were certainly overpriced at the time.

Chrome OS, I'm not sure what to think about it. Going from what we know, it sounds like Linux booting the Chrome browser, because where Google is comming from, the browser is the OS. Nothing stops you from creating a similar expirience with any decent linux distri currently available. On my 4G Surf i did just that, basic Linux (Ubuntu minimal) and then adding several packages to make ACPI working for example. It boots up lighting fast and all you get is a browser, no other apps. I have build in a terminal though (who can live without?) by installing tilda, which is excellent in this scenario. I have now something you could call Firefox-OS.

What else is great? It is still linux as we all know it. It uses X and as a result i have all excisting toolkits available. In case i do need some app, i can still quickly install it, and it will work. For my netbook i won't do this too often, but Google is targetting Chrome-OS towards desktop/laptop systems, and they do not regular X and not any regular toolkit which will break compatibility with any current linux app. That for me reduces the functionality of that system consideratly.

Every Ubuntu release before 2008, i has the custom habbit of switching totem with its gstreamer backend to the version with the xine backend. Xine is a really good player, which i have used intensivly before switching to Ubuntu. Why did i change to the xine variant, simply because the gstreamer backend wasn't able to play everything, it got better each release, but each time there were still some files that didn't play well (or at all). About at 2008 gstreamer got to the point it did play everything i threw at it, so there was no reason to switch anymore, i think nobody does these days.



After upgrading to the latest 9.04, everything worked as expected, no problems on my home-pc. At work i don't play a lot of movies and it wasn't until we got a videocast of one of our c*o's that i noticed video didn't work anymore. Everything worked just fine at home, so there had to be something else causing the issue. One of the major differences between my home and work-pc was the video card, at work it uses the radeon driver. I solved it by starting up 'gstreamer-properties' from the command line, which allows you to configure some minimal aspects of the audio and video output/input of the gstreamer framework. In the video tab there is the option to adjust the output mechanism, after selecting 'X Window System (No Xv)' everything worked perfectly. The disadvantage of this approach is that no acceleration is done, this means playing a video takes seriously more cpu, which could give problems on older system (but it's still better then no video i suppose).

Anybody else excited by the news that Monkey Island is making a return? On Wii-Ware you'll be getting Tales of Monkey Island, some other platforms will get an HD revision of the original. I don't care much about the new HD builds because frankly, the original is still great (certainly with scummvm on the go everywhere with you).
I'm not sure about the 3D just yet, and the latest 3D attempt MI4 was not that great at least when compared to the previous episodes. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Asus and Microsoft have combined forces against Linux on the netbook, their first step has been the release of this website. Nothing to see there, except a movie, and it pisses me off.
The movies shown all include the original netbook (the 4G surf), and they are running windows XP. Now each time the movie zooms in, it is most certainly not the screen of a 4G you are seeing, the screen estate is just to big! Then in the last ad you they promote as a benefit that you can 'protect your family online' - that is beyond absurd.
It's all too bad, Asus was the one to start the netbook revolution, and they did so with Linux on it. I'm sure the success of the netbook took them a bit by surprise and all, but i don't see that as a reason to throw away their Linux strategy. A lot of people just removed the Asus/Xandros Linux on it and installed something else, the default installation wasn't very interesting, though it did everything it was supposed to do. What if they just invested a little bit more money (surely the massive sales of netbooks can support a little investment?) to make their distro suck less (for most people)? I don't buy the argument of an unfamiliar OS causing lots of problems, that is probably true for people expecting to buy a laptop, but as i told people interested in a netbook over and over again - it is not a laptop, it is a device that enables you quick and easy internet access. Really, my 4G does that perfectly. The interface story is false because a lot of other devices people use every day do not have XP on them either. Mobile phones is the biggest example, each phone is different and i don't see those returned en-mass. The Nintendo Wii is the number one console in sales, no windows to be found on there. GPS devices, the most popular ones from TomTom and Garmin also run on Linux.
So either, the high return of netbooks because of Linux is a false story or the netbooks are marketed wrongly.

Does this Asus-Microsoft alliance mean that no linux versions of the Eee-PC will be available anymore? Seems that if i ever need to replace mine, i'll be looking at Dell or Acer instead.

I think it is pretty cool what Canonical is trying to do with android. As you may know android uses the linux kernel, but has nothing else in common with a regular linux distro. Another libc is used, their own graphics system, special java stack. In practise this means that you can just run regular linux apps on Android or the other way around.
With the Canonical work done you can run Android apps on your desktop, alongside all your normal apps. Very nice for Netbooks, all the power of a linux environment and all the cool Adnroid apps available at your fingertips.

Mozilla Labs released Jetpack which is a browser (Firefox) add-on API which uses only easy to use 'languages' and web standards like HTML/CSS and JavaScript, the excellent firebug is used for debugging. There is even an API for common web interfaces (although right now it only includes Twitter), and it's possible for others to expand the API with their web service. I can imagine something like the Firefox add-on repository for Jetpack already.

Canonical released Ubuntu One somewhere in the past days and discussion about the thing are lighting up the Linux world. Jeez people, what is the freaking problem? Nobody is forcing you to use it, so if you don't like it, don't use it! You have a choice here. I'm not too worried about the fact that it might end up in an Ubuntu release one day, Canonical has only benefits of keeping their user base happy because switching to another Linux distro is probably the easist thing in the world to do (compare that to the whining of Vista or Leopard users, they have no compatible alternatives - except downgrading).
The whole trademark discussion lost me as well. These are total non-issues in my book, shouldn't we be putting this energy in something more interesting that will advance OSS as a whole instead?