And history the planes have become. However advanced they were, time and technology overtook them; in 1990, as satellites appropriated their mission, operational flights ended. Today’s unmanned orbital droids may represent the state of the art. But compared with the Blackbird, they are hardly art at all.

A quick look back at the legendary SR-71 Blackbird. [via kottke]

For some unknown reason someone [or a group of people] have been hitting Magnatune hard with credit card fraud, to the point where the company was dropped by their payment processor.

This is a great example of how a good company [and one that helps artists worldwide] gets harassed by ‘criminals’ only to find itself punished by the very same people whose inadequate systems are responsible for the mess in the first place: Visa. John Buckman reports that Magnatune saw ⅓ of its subscriber base disappear due to this change [Magnatune is now depending on PayPal for its credit card transactions and the fact that each payment goes via another entity makes it slightly harder to charge the recurring fees subscriptions bring, without asking the users to register with PayPal etc].

As regular readers may have noticed, I am a great fan of Magnatune; both ethically and artistically I find their effort and business commendable and I have, over the years, found several excellent albums from that company. I hope that things get better for them soon. As a sidenote, I really wonder why someone would hit Magnatune in this manner. Clearly it’s not aimed at getting hold of the music, given that you can get the tracks for free anyway…

I’m not sure if this is a political stunt by Microsoft, or if they are really going to go forward with it. If they are it is insane: By not giving Europeans the capability to upgrade their operating system, like it has done for more than twenty years and at the same time trying to put the blame on the European Commission for doing so (while not providing any specific reasons for doing so), Microsoft is really shooting itself in the foot; from a PR point of view it’s a pretty bad strategy that’s almost certainly going to backfire. At any rate, I feel so sorry for all those people that are going to want to upgrade from a poor OS like Vista to a mediocre one like Windows 7 and having to do a full reinstall [let alone pay the premium of getting the full version].

Definitely still Taiwanese though. =)

Of course, it’d be too early to tell whether the Hero, or, indeed, Android will become a success, but if anything, the new HTC Hero will be remembered as the device that started the custom Android experience era.

From the company that, according to Microsoft’s own statements and some simple arithmetic, makes 80% of Windows Mobile handsets comes a beautiful ‘port’ and of its popular TouchFlo interface but with a twist. It may be true that the Hero only sports skin-deep improvements to Android, but with the platform rapidly evolving and with 18 to 20 Android powered devices due by year’s end, it is already looking like a fantastic alternative to the ageing, craptastic Windows Mobile platform that HTC has depended upon since its earliest days.

If anything, contrary to Nokia, HTC seems to ‘get’ how important the User Experience is.

That’s for Tracemonkey, the new, somewhat faster javascript engine that’s included with Firefox 3.5. Don’t be alarmed then when Firefox 3.5 performs only marginally faster on javascript heavy sites than Firefox 3.0. No 64bit support for the new javascript engine, on the platform where Firefox pretty much dominates. In my view, that should’ve been Mozilla’s first priority on Linux: many linux users choose 64bit because they are not hindered by missing drivers or applications. Linux users are typically more computer-savvy than your average windows or OS X users and could serve as good guinea pigs for a 64bit version of Tracemonkey. In any case, irrespectively of operating system, Tracemonkey ‘feels’ slower than Nitro (or v8) in 32bits too, but giving 64bit linux such a low priority is somewhat dumb, especially given the ever increasing interest and market share for 64bit linux among linux users (after years of requests Adobe released its exceptionally stable 64bit flash player for linux a few months ago). Hopefully a 64bit version of tracemonkey will be included in one of the minor upgrades before 2010, but I feel like Mozilla has made a mistake here.

Update: It seems that there is no 64bit Tracemonkey code, linux or otherwise, which is surprising; I am not exactly clear as to what prevents them from releasing a 64bit version.

The Nokia N97 is out. And what a disappointment this is. Still great hardware features. Still the same mediocre system software, the poor usability that comes ‘for free’ with Symbian, and average industrial design [from the moment a phone is that bulky, it's bad --- it doesn't matter how many Mpixels its camera has or what the resolution of its display is]. I find the idea of a resistive touchscreen dated and wrong, although I understand why Nokia might have chosen it over the capacitive kind that everyone else is currently using, given the subpar feel that its software has as a touch interface and the possibility for the need of a stylus. I’m really surprised however: given the success of the iPhone, the huge challenge that Android is going to pose to low and mid-level phone manufacturers (especially given how customisable it is) in the near future and the dwindling profits, mind and marketshare, why on earth isn’t Nokia caring more about the user experience?

Όπως είπε φέτος υπάρχουν 3.500 πυροσβέστες λιγότεροι ενώ οι μόνιμοι δεν έχουν μέσα ατομικής προστασίας.

3,500 λιγότεροι πυροσβέστες [από πέρυσι;], μόλις δυο χρόνια μετά τις καταστροφικές πυρκαγιές σε Πάρνηθα, Εύβοια και Πελοππόνησο και με τη περίοδο των πυρκαγιών να έχει ήδη ξεκινήσει για τα καλά. Και όλα αυτά σε μια χώρα 11 εκατομμυρίων που τουλάχιστον καταφέρνει επιτυχώς να επαναπροσδιορίσει τον όρο ‘ανικανότητα’ και ‘απάθεια’, με περισσότερους δημόσιους υπαλλήλους από τη Γερμανία των 82 εκατομμυρίων και τη Βρετανία των 65 εκατομμυρίων.