Humsara

Its been almost two full months since the iPad came out and Apple claims to have sold 2 million already which is quite impressive; but what I’m wondering is where the hell are the other tablets? It’s not like this concept was an Apple original. People (techies and geeks) had been clamoring for such a device for quite a long time. The folks over at TechCrunch even proposed specs two years ago and started to round up people to build a device, and for a while it looked like they might actually pull it off. Too bad they got stabbed in the back and the whole project fell … well sort of (more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrunchPad).
I’m just wondering what all the other tech companies are waiting for. They should have been on the ball and at it for a while now if they had any sense at all; and the longer they wait the worse they’ll continue loosing to Apple. I’m pretty damn sure, apple is already gearing up for major upgrades for the 2nd gen iPad (perhaps then I might actually care for one). What are these companies doing wrong, or rather.. what are they not doing that Apple surely is?

By the way, I know the JooJoo (aka CrunchPad) is supposed to be shipping soon, but I refuse to buy one given how they treated TechCrunch.  I refuse to condone/support those kind of business tactics.

Anyways, waiting for any,  just one iPad competitor to get on the market.

Why is that in every coffee shop equipped with wifi in the bay-area, where students and tech geeks alike hang out or study or work (as i do), the most popular brand of laptops to be seen is always a Mac.  This observation goes directly against the stats I keep reading on the net indicating that Apple has around 10% of the market share for personal computers. Is this unique to the bay area? Are we collectively just too wealthy to all be able to afford Apple’s products? Are we just just slaves to Apple’s marketing where we just feel they are more “cool” to have? Or it could be that the only people who are at cafe’s during the day are people who can afford to do so.  I mean.. I’m pretty damn lucky to be able to spend my entire work day in a coffee shop while not serving coffee.

Of course I say this just two days after having ordered a macbook myself.  Actually it’s more accurate to say, reluctantly ordered.  As much as I like the design and feel of a macbook, they’re simply too expensive.   For the same amount of money I could have purchased a far superior windows laptop and would have been completely happy with it at the same time. I even prefer Windows 7 over mac os.   But I’m forced to go with a mac because I want to get into iPhone/iPodTouch and iPad development (two other devices I have absolutely no interest in for myself).  Apple forces you to use their machines if you wish to develop for their mobile devices.  That’s another reason for my dislike for Apple.  Developers serve under the dictatorship of Apple.  Either do it their way or go to hell.

meh..  useless ranting ..  i shall finish my thoughts another time.
by the way:  this post written on a 5 year old dell laptop running windows 7 (and it works beautifully)

If someone wrote a book with that title, I’d probably read it…  well probably won’t.. but I like to think that I would.

First of all, its is generally advisable to stay away from any first gen Apple product.
Problems with ipad : WIFI & USB charging issues

And by then hopefully, plenty of good alternatives will be there:
HPSlate actually looks promising
Other hopeful alternatives in the making right now

I’m gonna wait… (and not just ‘cauz I’m poor at the moment )

There is a great piece on Nummi plant shutdown and GM automotive in this weeks This American Life.

“A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn’t learn the lessons – until it was too late.”

Each weeks broadcast is available for free during that week.

about: This American Life is a weekly public radio show broadcast on more than 500 stations to about 1.7 million listeners. It is produced by Chicago Public Radio, distributed by Public Radio International, and has won all of the major broadcasting awards. It is also often the most popular podcast in the country, with more than a half million people downloading each week.

via This American Life.

I’ve been using mint.com for a while now, pretty much since they launched,  and they have by been by far the best online financial tracking / budgeting tool I’ve tried.  For a while the people at Quicken tried their shot at their online tool and frankly it sucked.  Last year Intuit (Quicken) finally decided to give up trying to build their own online app and just acquired mint.com.

Now I know this is a fairly common occurrence on the  web; companies get bought out by their bigger competitors all the time. I guess I’m just tired of hearing about it.  For the past three years I have loved Mint and very much disliked Quicken.  Now looking at the new red tagline under the mint logo just made me cringe.  It feels as if Intuit is pretending to be the masterminds behind Mint when all they did was throw money at them to acquire them.  I know its the way of the web… still it just bugs me a little.

Eyelid Movies by Phantogram
my favorite tracks:
1) Mouthfull of Diamonds
2) When I’m Small are probably the best
7) You are the Ocean and I
but the whole album kicks ass.

Really nice article about the whole HTML5 vs Flash battle
http://blogs.gartner.com/ray_valdes/2010/02/10/html5-and-flash/

Wow.. one of the freshest albums I’ve heard in a long time.
If you like off-the-beat, non mainstream, funk, brass, jazz, underground styles… this album is a perfect mix.
Their Myspace page has a couple of songs from this album.
Ya-Ka-May on Amazon – Preview all the songs.

Track 4 “Heart of Steal” is going on my all-time favorite songs list.