The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged Amazon
List: Services Not Available in Canada [UPDATE x3]
Jan 31st
Here is a semi-complete list of everything I’ve come in contact with that aren’t available in Canada:
- Lala (international copyright issues) -> See Video <- (not available ANYWHERE as of May 31)
- Pandora (international copyright issues) -> See Picture <-
- Hulu (international copyright issues; this includes embeds for any associated companies including the Comedy Channel for example) -> See Picture <-
- Google Voice (won’t forward to Canadian numbers; suspicion is that it’s CRTC regulations on E911 services) -> See Picture <-
- Amazon MP3 -> See Picture <-
- Amazon Prime
- Amazon streaming TV and movies
- Netflix Streaming (Netflix physical media rentals are provided by Zip.ca)
- textPlus (won’t accept Canadian phone numbers; although, GOGII is conducting a beta regarding that, see here.)[UPDATE! textPlus is now available in Canada as of February 16, 2010]
- Motorola Droid (or GSM/UMTS version called the “Milestone”) – no carriers yet – available in Canada on Telus as of February 2010
- Nexus One (won’t ship to Canada; Nexus One uses irregular UMTS bands that none of the major 3 Canadian carriers use; AWS is going to be provided by WIND mobile — currently in Toronto only) – available as of March 2010 on Rogers, Telus, and Bell. Orders as AT&T compatible, ships to Canada. Paid apps are supported.
- FitBit – won’t ship to Canada; hasn’t been approved for sale in Canada.
Book: BeOS Bible
Aug 19th
If you’ve followed me on Twitter and my occasional posts you know that I have an unexplainable urge to have as many operating systems as I can, and just about my favorite is BeOS. This book explains this ultralight, media oriented operating system in great detail.
The problem that the authors, Scot Hacker, Henry Bortman, and Chris Herborth, faced was the BeOS climate was always rapidly evolving and changing. How they solved this problem was to write their chapter segments then tie them together and allow the engineers to elaborate what they think is important. There are thirteen interviews and a foreword by Jean-Louis Gassee, the CEO and founder of Be Inc and former head of Macintosh development.
BeOS came onto my radar because Apple considered purchasing them in the nineties as a quick-way into a new operating system. We do know that NextStep won over Be, but it has an interesting and quirky history.
This book is only available through trade as this book was published in 1998 and doesn’t seem to have been updated since.
The BeOS Bible is available “new” on Amazon from $8.76.
The book’s original website is currently maintained with permission from PeachPit Press and includes many chapter excerpts at birdhouse.org.
(Publisher’s Summery)
The BeOS Bible is the largest, most complete guide to using, configuring, tweaking, and understanding BeOS — the world’s most efficient and intelligently designed operating system. BeOS is optimized from the ground up to excel at handling high-bandwidth audio/visual tasks (some call it “The poor man’s SGI”), and is radically fast, no matter what you’re doing. But being media-optimized doesn’t mean you can’t get your daily work done in BeOS too — the system makes even general productivity tasks a joy, thanks to features like fine-grained pervasive multithreading, a fully scriptable architecture, a sophisticated inter-application messaging model, symmetric multiprocessing, and real-time handling of all tasks.
