Life As It Comes

It will be Tuesday in a few minutes, and it will be an exciting day! Coldplay’s new album comes out, and Firefox 3 will be released!

Happy downloading!

Update: Wine 1.0 will also be released!

The human genome is increasingly studied and understood. Projects out of IBM’s Computational Biology group, such as The Genographic Project powered by technology on par with BlueGene, stand to change the way we look at heredity and ancestry. With that in mind, it is important to think about the ramifications this will have on the societal aspects of our everyday lives.

It is good to know that legislation such as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act is already making its way into the books.

Check out this scathing letter to Motorola’s executives in light of them spinning off their handset business:

The Fall of a Technology Icon

IBM has released Lotus Symphony for free to the masses today. This is huge news in the office suite front. Lotus Symphony will compete directly with Microsoft Office (since it is enterprise-quality). Office lost a huge battle last week when Microsoft’s efforts to fast-track OOXML were voted down at ISO, and this, coupled with today’s launch of Google Presentations, is like a 1-2 punch.

Hooray for openness, innovation, and moving away from Microsoft’s propriety lock-down in yet another arena!

First of all, David Pogue’s review of the iPhone is a good one.

Here are the reasons why I will not be buying an iPhone as soon as I can get my hands on one:

1) EDGE - The first-generation iPhone supports AT&T’s outdated EDGE network exclusively. This generation will never support the faster network AT&T is currently building (and has deployed in many U.S. cities). Using the EDGE network with iPhone has been compared to using a brand-new top-of-the-line computer to connect to the internet via dial-up.

2) Flash Memory - Flash memory has been going down in price recently with many manufacturers offering 64 GB flash cards/chips suitable for sub-compact notebooks, etc. It won’t be long before an 8 GB iPhone or iPod Nano will be laughable. If the whole point of this device is to have my songs, pictures, and video on my phone, then I’d rather have most of my data on there rather than only a fraction.

3) 2.0 in the Works - I’ve heard rumors of an iPhone 2.0 as early as September/October. I’m sure that will not be the case, but they can’t be far away (maybe January for Macworld) in light of points 1 and 2.

4) Cost vs Likely Upgrade - The iPhone is an expensive gadget. Though Apple can easily attract me to this device (I really do want one), the likelihood that this generation will quickly be obsolete is high. I’d rather spend my $600 on version 2.0.