• Mood: irritated
• Music: Howie Day - Collide

Ask me, hype me, trask me, Skype me

From the RSS feed of Le Slashdot comes the BBC News of Microsoft's planned Skype killer.

(Well, it beats reading and writing about that other MS story all the time.)

If you ask me, more competition is really very much a good thing, whether it be pressure from a company such as MS trying to gain entre into new niches or pressure from new startups challenging the established giants. Now, I must qualify that: any company with deep pockets can crush the innovation out of a small niche market if it really wants to. This may be worth while in the long run if the return on investment (ROI) is there.

Sometimes a company will pour money into loss leaders and get good products out there (witness the Microsoft XBox) and sometimes it will try to drown problems in money and succeed in getting market share, but not produce anything really better for the user. For example, I'm still not convinced that Media Player is a better product, nor have I seen a single multi-IM client that I am totally happy with. I was happy with my iPAQ (which started with PocketPC 2000 and which I flashed soon thereafter with PocketPC 2002), but as you can see, RIM's Blackberry and Palm still have their pieces of the pie. (Mmm. PDA pie.)


I have not given up on Skypifying Sting (my H3635 iPAQ, 32Mb RAM, CF-based 802.11b)! nikolasco pointed out that HP is only selling Windows for Pocket PC 2003 Second Edition upgrades for the 3900 series and up, but as I always say, there's got to be a way to make new software run on POC obsolete hardware because I'm not ready to get a new one!

In other news:

• I'm still trying to recover that JPEG photo from the Dell Inspiron 6000, and it's annozzling. I've shut Hirilonde down just so the swap and incidental use won't overwrite it, but masaga tells me it may involve a laptop HD adapter (IDE? portable SCSI?) and a session with Linux sector scan utilities. Whatever happened to Undo My Doopitity operating system features? What's that? There never were any, you say? Every OS sucks, you say?


• Is anyone familiar with the finduser feature in LiveJournal? I'm trying to do a http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?userid=[number]&mode=full instead of http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=[name]&mode=full, but LJ requires the user issuing the POST command to have "finduser privileges". Is there any way to get the same functionality?

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Banazir