They are billed as a tribute band, but I have a feeling they’ve got a few surprises in them.
Archive for the 'General' CategoryPage 3 of 95
Yesterday an app showed up on the iPhone Application Store called “NetShare.” NetShare, which is a product of Nullriver, is a SOCKS proxy which let’s your Laptop connect to your iPhone over WiFi and share its EDGE or 3G Internet connection.
This arrangement is typically called tethering. It is a common feature with a lot of other phones. You are supposed to pay $30 or so on top of your standard data plan to use it, though a lot of people get away with using it with basic data plans. There is no tethering plan for the iPhone.
It was a little suprising to see such an app on the application store. So, it wasn’t much of a suprise when it registered as unavailable a few hours later.
Then it showed up again this afternoon, before disappearing again. I managed to snag a copy before it vanished again. It seems to work pretty much as promised.
I don’t know what is going on. One of nullriver’s other apps, Tuner, which plays streaming audio, had a similar on-again-off again presence early in it’s existance, but it has been solidly available for a while.
My theory is that this is just a glitch, and that Apple let the product through on the first place because they aren’t ready with their own tethering app. I think a later version of the firmware will bring tethering and the opportunity to give AT&T even more more money every month. As a consolation, AT&T will finally turn on free wifi at their Hotspota for iPhone owners with an appropriate data plan.
Yeah yeah yeah. I know, it’s a lame theory but at least I did it in a fee thousand fewer words than Cringley would have spent on it.
Sphere: Related ContentYou can tell it’s an election year, because the price incumbent congressmen are willing to pay for a vote seems to be near an all time high.
Congress just passed legislation that is expected to help 400,000 homeowners who risk having their homes forclosed on. The measure includes $3.9B in grants to acquire already forclosed homes from banks, $180M in pre-forclosure counciling, and $15B in tax credits.
By my count, that works out to be $19B in the hopes of securing 400,000 reelection votes, or $47,500.
That seems pretty high to me. It’s probably safe to assume that the households this helps often contain more than one voter. Figure 1.5 voters per household, we are at $31,666. That seems high. I wouldn’t be suprised if the price of votes is being pushed up significantly by those damn speculators we’ve been hearing so much about.
Sphere: Related ContentAutomattic has posted their Wordpress iPhone app to the iTunes application store. I’m using it to write this post. It seems straightforward and functional and allows posting of photos, which is cool.
It would be nice if it supported automatically adding some sort geotag.
I was just googling and came across something I’ve never seen before. The first result for “bill gates children” was “Bill Gates—Children: 3” with an attribution to wikipedia.
I couldn’t repeat the result searching for the children of other public figures, but then I tried “Bill Gates born”, and got another semantic result from Wikipedia:
The born search works for lots of public figures, like Elvis and Nixon.
This really surprised me, especially since I haven’t seen anyone else talking about it. I wonder if this is a response to microsoft’s recent acquistion of Powerset and an answer to those wondering whether the Microsoft/Powerset combo would beat Google.
Searching Powerset for “Bill Gates Born” delivers a similar looking result as the top item. (Update: I just noticed that Powerset’s summary result is actually from Freebase. Dumb that I didn’t notice, because my first thought was that that was where Google was pulling their info from.
Sphere: Related ContentObama has released a “refinement” of his position on FISA in response to the outcry among his supporters. Glen Greenwald explains how Obama is still full of crap.
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