My wife has purchased a new mp3 player, the Samsung YP-P2 8gb. It’s a cool little gadget (native A2DP Bluetooth, mp4 video capable, pictures, touch screen, etc, etc). Unfortunately, out of the box it only speaks MTP. My lovely wife’s PC boots a Debian GNOME desktop, which only groks UMS. What’s a bald hacker to do?
At the end of this year, we’re beginning to hear all the people writing about the technical innovations, surprises, and vaporware that has caught our attention during the last 12 months. SCO finally gets its due, Oracle and Microsoft are being stranger bedfellows than anyone even pretended to think originally, and hardware just keeps on evolving. All these topics are served up for me on my customized Google homepage, pithy link and all, just waiting for me to begin reading…
In and amongst the froth of articles that will only cease with the arrival of 2007jan01, I find this piece. I read it because I’m a Free Software advocate; I pay attention to the author’s message (a much higher bit of praise) because it addresses the future of computing.
My big prediction:
We know what computers can do; I believe that there will be change in the way that computers do them.
It would seem that Blake Ross, lead coder for Mozilla Firefox, is up to something.
His new project, called Parakey, will be focused on making the Web transparent from your desktop OS. Here’s the article I’ve seen. After reading over it, my only concern about the implications are that there are some of us users who actually like the way things are now… Believe me, I understand the need to make this last, intuitive leap for non-gearheads! However, I’m kind of set in my ways.