Get used to it, you have no rights

It’s the classic battle of big vs small, the single user vs the large company, grassroots vs the global corporate world, David vs Goliath; you get the idea. What’s interesting about this isn’t necessarily the issue at hand, but more that we have never had so many legislative checks in place to prevent this as we do now.

What on earth am I talking about? Well, to some extent, it’s the Internet, and to some extent it’s not. The Internet angle on this is that never before have so many people been able to reach so many other people in such a short period of time. This, among other things, means that ideas travel very fast. The concept of “information wants to be free” has never been more to the point than now. What I’m trying to describe isn’t unique for the world of Internet, there are other angles, but it’s very present and obvious when we talk about the Internet.

The very same companies that earns billions of dollars due to the very existence of Internet are also the same companies that seem most afraid of it. They’re afraid of it because they cannot control it, yet. If they could, they would. And they may very well end up tightening their grip to the point where even the politicians with their heads up their creative loophole will wake up and realize something isn’t quite right (maybe only due to the fact that people aren’t voting for them). The companies are Music Record companies, TV & Broadcasting companies, Telcos/Internet Service Providers, and the Hybrid companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. There are of course the odd hugely successful Internet players like Facebook too.

This is not a post about a global conspiracy, they’re too big to do anything about 🙂 This is a post about some things that don’t smell right.. and we’re all helping to stockpile the bad smelling goo.

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Opera 11, an awesome e-mail client

Quite a few people know about Opera, “the other browser”. For many years it has been lurking in the shadows of Firefox and others. Opera 11 may put an end to that, or at least shake things up a bit. I’ve been using Opera since …

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When version control systems fail miserably

When I began using version control system software, the world was mostly stuck with RCS, if you wanted to use free software that is. Next came CVS, PRCS, SVN (Subversion), Bazaar, Git, Mercurial, and many others. There were, of course, also many commercial version control …

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Did Skype just make a boo-boo, only supporting “hi-res” Android devices?

Instant Messaging, or IM, has been something mainly used between computer users; “computer” being a workstation, desktop, or laptop. Sure, there have been IM clients around for some mobile phones and other gadgets, but until recently, many users have opted out on the use-your-cell-to-chat for a number of reasons. One reason is that it’s been considered something “geeks” do. Another reason has been that most mobile phones sold until recently haven’t been so-called smartphones.

Slowly but surely, with the arrival of iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, and too many Android-based phones to keep track of, the smartphone market is set to explode (brace for impact). With more smartphones being sold, so is also the number of data subscriptions; in other words a mobile phone carrier plan that allows for a certain amount of data to be transmitted through the mobile data network. Many people choose a flat-fee data plan that allows “unlimited” data.

Two manufactures of Android-based smartphones have also seen a different kind of light; SonyEricsson with their X10 Mini (and X10 Mini Pro) and HTC with their Tattoo and Wildfire products. These phones stand out in the way that they are aimed at users that don’t necessarily want to look like they’re conducting the Vienna Philharmonics, in other words, they’re small 🙂 The SonyEricsson X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro are really small (too small some would say). But they have one thing in common, they are fairly affordable while sporting a lot of the smartphone functionality.

So what does this have to do with Skype? Quite a bit, if you ask me.

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Why Netbeans 6.9x+ is an awesome PHP development environment

I’ve been doing some form of coding since around the advent of the IBM PC and VIC-20 and have obviously come across many editors and IDE:s for a number of platforms. Things have come a long way since Edlin. I cannot recall every single editor and IDE I’ve been toying with, and I’m not sure it’s relevant to this post, but some of them include A/Edit, Emacs, TSE/Qedit, Brief, SlickEdit, vi, and many derivatives of these. Having been a DOS programmer for quite some time, I’ve also been working in the various Borland IDE:s.

In the past 10 years I’ve mostly been using Emacs, and every now and then I’ve been sneaking a peek at various other Linux based editors. For the past several years I’ve been giving both Eclipse and NetBeans a go. There are a number of IDE:s out there that are based on Eclipse (Zend/ZDE, Aptana Studio, Eclipse PDT to name a few), so in many cases they share their core behavior, look ‘n’ feel, pros and cons.

One thing I’ve learned, the hard way, is that there are just about as many “My editor is better than your editor”-battles being fought as there are “My language is better than your language”-battles; programmers and developers truly seem to enjoy trying to outdo each other when it comes to proving their arsenal of tools to be superior to that of others. I’ve never understood this part. If you can solve the given task, with all its parameters, with whatever tools you prefer, go and do it. If someone else can manage the same thing with some other tool, good for them. Listening to these arguments is like listening to two five-year-olds battling it out trying to convince the other that a given color is prettier than another. Of course, one could just turn a deaf ear and not listen 🙂

Now let’s talk a little bit about Eclipse and NetBeans.

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