I once read that Bill Gates considered his greatest achievement to be the separation of hardware and software. He must have said it pre-2002 or so, as Google evidently has no record of it, so you’ll have to take my word for it (or ask him yourself). Then a couple of weeks ago, in the run up to Google’s the-end-of-the-Internet announcement, Eric Schmidt snapped at reporters who suggested that the success of Android made the ChromeOS strategy questionable. Mr Schmidt offered that ChromeOS is for a different category of devices.
This is why I was impressed by Android and baffled by ChromeOS. Android seems to me to be a huge step forwards for a sector that was fraught with fragmentation. ChromeOS, meanwhile, appears to be a backwards step – sure, it will be cheap (at least unless hardware OEMs succumb to patent claims on some of the underlying technology, which makes the Oracle-Google spat over Java all the more interesting), but still, as far as I can tell, a netbook running ChromeOS is a netbook that does less than the same device with Ubuntu, or, let’s say it – good old Windows XP.
And then, I saw this sign in Dixons in Birmingham Airport. They had a rack of the-computer-formerly-known-as-netbooks, only now, they’re apparently, “Web Browsers”.
Woah. This is probably about the first thing that makes me think Google’s efforts to blur the OS / browser distinction might bear fruit. If the whole category of device is classified as a web browser, users might not feel that an OS that is only a web browser isn’t such a lemon after all.
Worth noting that this was Dixons: DSG International, one of the biggest players in retail electronics in Europe (El Giganten, PC World, Dixons, Currys). Wonder if this name will catch on? And if so…what will us browser makes call our software?
“It seems to me that it’d be a better world for software freedom and free *nix in general if the Solaris die-hards sucked it up and helped work on Linux”
-and with words like that, who wouldn’t want to join the Linux community? Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier is still bashing the OpenSolaris project. I truly believe that some competition between open source operating systems is a good thing, and I am amazed that this is a controversial opinion with some.
Saying it out loud: IBM is moving to Firefox as its default browser | Blog | Bob Sutor
“While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be. We’ll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox.”
Interesting interview. “When Steve says Flash is stuck in the PC era he must mean that the Flash business model of free players, open content and affordable technology has been eclipsed by the closed, highly-profitable mobile platform of censored applications that Apple is building with the iPhone.”
Not often that I find I warm to Eric Raymond’s writing, but this was a sane and helpful analysis of IBM’s apparent declaration of an end to 5 years of patent peace.
Alex Brown, who presided over the ISO vote in April 2008 that ratified the spec as ISO convener of the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting, accused Microsoft of acting in bad faith for implementing a “transitional” variant of the OOXML spec and not the strict version in Office 2010.
The transitional version is based on a copy of the spec rejected during a vote of ISO members in 2007. The spec was re-drafted before it was accepted in 2008.
“If Microsoft ships Office 2010 to handle only the Transitional variant of ISO/IEC 29500 they should expect to be roundly condemned for breaking faith with the International Standards community. This is not the format ‘approved by ISO/IEC’, it is the format that was rejected,” Brown wrote.
Online reviews, especially those solicited by Amazon and their ilk, tend to be pretty useless. Most people that are compelled to write a review of something seem to do it out of a particular love for that thing, or conversely, because of a particular axe to grind. You see few 3/5s on Amazon.com, and I recently trawled all the reviews available on Guitarcentre.com and found little that did not represent amazing value.
For all of this, I could find little online in the past year to feed what I freely admit was becoming something of an obsession with the Hagström Viking semi-hollowbody electric guitar. I think I first read that these instruments were being reissued in late 2008, but you don’t see many in the wild, nor indeed, many reviews.
So, why the obsession? Well, I tend to be a fan of semi-acoustic guitars in general, although very few ever seem to match original Gibson models. But just a quick glance at the Viking tells you how much character it has, and if Hagstöm cannot boast the heritage of Gibson, the Viking can at least call upon quite some pedigree of its own. Secondly, Hagström is a Swedish brand, originally producing all their guitars from Älvdalen in central Sweden until the early 1980s (a casualty, it seems, of the trashy Strat copy business that sprung up at that time). And lastly, today’s Vikings are really, really cheap. I determined that if I got one, I would provide as full a review as I could – what you now see before you.
I took the plunge, then, breaking the golden rule (try before you buy) and ordered a Viking online. It saddens me to think that local guitar shops will suffer, but I was able to save about €200 doing so, bringing the Viking in at around €600. If I compare to my other semi-acoustics:
The Epiphone Sorento (on the left) cost €700 in 2002, and the Gibson ES-335 was $2,000 in 2007. The Hagström Viking is on the right.
the Viking is very competitive. Looking at the other two models, the Epiphone is Korean made, and retains a very faithful 1950s shape to it. The Gibson is the “dot” model with only a “satin” finish, making it just one step up from a studio model, but it is made in US. The Viking, by contrast, is the deluxe model, which was around €100 more than the standard. The components are mostly manufactured in the US, the guitar is assembled in China (and it is of course, still designed in Sweden).
There is one very important difference between these guitars: the Epiphone is a true hollow-body, while the Gibson and the Hagström are semi-hollow bodies (meaning that the neck is a single piece that continues through the length of the body, making two small sound compartments, rather than one large one).
Appearance
I tend to look at a lot of guitars, and love-at-first-sight with anything that is not a Gibson tends to be rare for me, but I will admit, it was the Viking’s looks that ensnared me.
The Viking immediately gets placed in the ES-335-clone camp because that is essentially its capability (semi-hollowbody, two humbuckers, two cutaways, dual volume and tone controls). And yes, the 335 is a design classic (and without wishing to give too much away, remains my ultimate guitar). But the Hagström is daring, has its name splashed over its (daringly shaped) pick-guard and has a tighter body shape. The body is more squat, flaring lower down, and the horns are slightly pinched, giving the whole instrument a slightly more “attacking” feel, compared to the ES-335′s more feminine shape:
While the Gibson feels fairly timeless, the Hagström is more of a style piece, having something of a 70s feel -the Guild Starfire (no longer in production since Guild were bought out by Fender), has similar lines to the Viking. But it is not the body shape that really stands out on the Viking. It is the sheer quantity of design and accoutrement.
For example, the Viking sports a luxurious tail-piece and bridge:
proudly showing the Hagstrom crest and boasting “Swedish Design”. The very distinctive bridge anchor is not in fact unique to Hagström – Rickenbacher have similar pieces – but it is an obvious indication that the Viking is its own guitar.
I bought the slightly upmarket Viking Deluxe which has block inlays and is available in a natural finish. The finish is impressive – thick and even lacquer and showing off two beautifully flamed pieces of maple. This model also has unusual f-holes (unusual in the sense that they are not a lowercase ‘f’ any more, but more like an “s”). Compare the Viking’s flame top with that of the (more expensive) Epiphone:
Both the Gibson and the Epiphone have single-piece tops, but the Hagström has by far the better looking wood. I think the Epiphone’s sunburst is great, (and the Viking is available in a truly horrid amber sunburst) but neither the Epiphone’s wood grain nor finish are anywhere near the Hagström’s standard.
The Viking’s delightful narcissism is properly reflected in the headstock.
The depth of detail and willingness to be different – the wave shape, the sculpted tuning-knobs and the fleur-de-lis all speak of self-confidence. The Viking is not imitating anything – it almost feels like it is daring other guitars to be so stylish.
Function
There does come a time when you do need to stop just looking at the Viking and play it.
Hagström do the eminently sensible thing of having a technician set up the guitar before they ship it. So, the guitar that came out of the box was very, very playable. My only quibble would be a slight buzz on the lower E string which I might get around to adjusting.
The guitar stays in tune very well and the tuning pegs have a nice feeling of even stiffness about them, and my only real concern at the moment is the lead plug which already appears to be coming loose. It can be tightened, but an electric guitar with poorly-installed electrics is very close to becoming an acoustic guitar.
Most importantly, the Viking’s neck really surprised me. First, it is both shallow and narrow. I have quite big hands and like both the depth of a Gibson’s neck and the width of a Fender neck, so I was apprehensive, but as I note, the guitar is very easy to play (easier than, say, the Gibson which does ask more of you). The neck has no dead-spots and I only registered a very little buzz on one string. Up the neck, the fret spacing seems as perfect as my ear can tell.
What is really interesting about the neck is (stop yawning) the structure and composition. There is some discussion of this on the Hagström site but nothing there actually tells you just how good the neck is: I have never played an instrument that offered so much real sustain (I say real sustain as opposed to the artificial, electronic variety or indeed, the overdriven feedback kind). The guitar really encourages left-hand vibrato and just seems to resonate with the body extremely well. The Hagström offers more sustain than the Gibson then, and has me working on my technique in anticipation of further rewards.
Build Quality
If the Viking is sounding too good to be true, then read on. I was actually quite relieved to see the flaws in the build quality (and, surprisingly, component quality), because I wanted to know just where it was that my money was not going. So happily, it does not take much digging to see the corners which are cut in producing the Viking. The crest itself actually contains a flaw in the mold (between the upper stanchions of the letter H).
A peek inside the f-holes s-holes shows that the wood has been fairly roughly gouged to fit the wiring in, and there is quite a mess of glue inside.
The bridge-piece had not been terribly well cast:
And the join of the neck to the body showed a little distress:
If these things seem trivial, they are, but it is worth noting that these kinds of details are perfect on a Gibson.
And there is one thing that no blog can convey. Even at 3 years old, the Gibson still has a soft, sweet smell of maple wood. The Hagström, by contrast, smells entirely of glue.
Sound
So, let’s say it: the Hagström sounds great. It has a bright twang, a reasonably soft neck pickup and plenty of bite on the bridge. I play exclusively with a clean sound, so I have not gone looking for much crunch, but even at the slightest hint of overdrive, the Viking performs well. It might not have the Gibson’s manageable power (and by the way, I have played a few unmanageable Gibsons too) but it has plenty of body. It sounds authentically like a semi-acoustic, much more so than the relatively weedy Epiphone Sorento.
And yet, and yet, if we compare with the ES-335, the Hagström, inevitably, comes up short. Same amplification, same licks:
and the Gibson’s tone is markedly more distinguished: more warmth and sweetness which lend more sympathy and authority to the playing.
Overall
The remarkable thing about the Viking is that I find myself comparing it not to a guitar in a similar price bracket (the Epiphone Sorento), but to an instrument that would cost up to five times as much, the Gibson ES-335, and it certainly looks like an instrument in that range, at least at first blush.
I cannot score the Viking better than the ES-335 because, in the end, it is all about the sound. And what’s more, the ES-335 is an icon to me, and to many other guitarists.
For all that, anyone considering a semi-acoustic should consider a Hagström Viking. It really is a lot – a lot – of guitar for your money (for the price of the Gibson you could buy a Viking and a high-end solid body and still have change) and still seemingly a relatively well kept secret. Hagström are to be commended for this instrument.
It’s been on of the most hectic months for me in my time at Mozilla in preparing for the browser choice screen. Johnath provided the details of our submission to Microsoft for the browser choice screen itself (browserchoice.eu), but I wanted to provide an update and a big thanks to everyone who has helped us get off the ground.
Microsoft asked us to provide a product description in 140 characters in 23 languages. Now, I find it hard to sum up Firefox in a tweet, but we needed to. A big thanks to both Jenny Boriss and James Hopkins at Critical Research for helping us figure out what we felt we needed to cover. Being Mozilla, of course, we wanted to provide more than 23 languages – we felt that there are more like 33 languages widely used in the European Economic Area (plus Croatia and Switzerland, where the browser choice screen is also available), but for now, 23 seems to be the limit.
We also wanted to create a specific “learn more” page for people using the browser choice screen – people who might not have installed much software for themselves in the past, and who specifically wanted more details on Firefox. For this reason, I felt we should have a slimmed down version of the Firefox pages that we have on Mozilla-Europe.org and Mozilla.com today, and give people a chance to really make it specific for their country. Here is where I was pretty much overwhelmed by the localisation community at Mozilla. In just a couple of days, we have had 27 localisations of our “learn more” screen.
A huge effort and thanks to all who took part:
Basque: Julen Ruiz Aizpuru
Bulgarian : Ognyan Kulev, Mihail Chilyashev, Pavel Peev
Catalan: Toni Hermoso Pulido, Eduard Gamonal
Croatian: Sasa Tekovic
Czech: Pavel Cvrcek
Danish: Jesper Kristensen, Søren Munk Skrøder
Dutch: Tim Maks van den Broek, Wim Benes, Ton Kessen, Laurens Holst, Mark Heijl, Ben Branders
Estonian: Merike Sell, Otto de Voogd, Sander Lepik
Finnish: Jussi Bergström
French: Cédric Corazza, Goofy, Jean-Bernard Marcon, Philippe Dessante, Nicosmos, Alexandre Lissy, Benoit Leseul, Céline Demange, Daniel Schroeter
Frisian: Wim Benes (again)
Gaelic: Kevin P. Scannell
German: Archaeopteryx, Robert Kaiser, Michael ‘Coce’ Köhle, Kadir Topal (now a Mozilla employee – congratulations!)
Greek: George Fiotakis, Kostas Papadima
Hungarian: Kalman Kemenczy
Icelandic: Kristján Bjarni Guðmundsson
Italian: Francesco Lodolo, Giuliano Masseroni
Latvian: Raivis Dejus
Lithuanian: Rimas Kudelis
Norwegian: Ronny Vårdal, Håvard Mork and Bjørn Ivar Svindseth for Nynorsk
Polish: Leszek Zyczkowski, Hubert Gajewski, Marek Stępień, Staś Małolepszy, Stefan Plewako and Gandalf
Swedish: Markus Amalthea Magnuson, Hasse Wallanger
Turkish: Rail Aliev
Welsh: Rhoslyn Prys
and I think that Welsh, Galician, Turkish and Basque are all underway too. I think this is a great illustration of Mozilla’s raison d’etre. It is not the case that we have to have every language under the sun represented in the browser choice screen, but at the same time, it shouldn’t be the case that software, or the coroporations who produce it, should define which languages are and which are not on the web. These are important cultural and social artefacts. While there is a community that demands access for this language, it is our job to try to facilitate it.
So, from the 23 languages that Microsoft allow on browserchoice.eu, we still wish to route users to other locales that they might be using. I would especially like to call to attention Alex Buchanan for his great efforts in making this a reality. Right now, if you use Internet Explorer with, for example, Catalan as your prefered language, and you click on “Tell me more” from browserchoice.eu, you will get more information (and access to a Firefox binary) in Catalan.
Toni called me attention to a deeper problem here, namely that the language packs for many of the lesser-spoken languages in Europe do not modify the user’s IE language preference. Although we don’t have a single fix for that, I know that Pascal is looking into a few approache. Watch this space. Also, we are aware that browserchoice.eu is not very helpful for blind web-users. We will do what we can to address this, at least in our content downstream.
Alongside all of the people who have contributed localisations for this project (and if I forgot anyone, please give me a hard time in comments), I would also like to thank some of the other people behind the scenes at Mozilla that made this project happen. Staś Małolepszy is a geniune superstar and his incredible diligence prevented those of us less blessed from making bigger and more permanent mistakes. Stephen Donner, for helping me understand a pair-wise test case from a hole in the ground, Kev Needham for his ability to spin Firefox builds like turntables, John O’Duinn and Matthew Zeier and their teams for springing into action and Tomcat, well, just for being Tomcat.
And we might all thank Chris Mullaney at Microsoft for coordinating getting content from Mozilla into browserchoice.eu, (and for her gentle way of pointing out obvious typos). It may be an obvious point, but Windows has been the platform on which the vast majority of people have experienced computing and have experienced the web. Whatever we might think and say about Microsoft (and there have been some pretty interesting things written this week), Windows is a platform that seen a vast ecosystem of software, both Free and non-Free developed for it, and its legacy of backwards compatibility on an incredible range of hardware is one of the wonders of modern computing. Let us hope that Microsoft also finds embracing more choice benefits the Windows platform too.
Update 12/3/10: as Laurens commented, there were a number of people who contributed translations to the text on the browserchoice.eu screen. Although this is only 140 characters, this is a difficult task, interpreting an English text and making it fit. I have attempted to all all the names of those involved to the list above. Thanks again.
Watch this space… the MPL has been enormously influential, and I know that Mitchell and others at Mozilla are grappling with what FLOSS means on the web. This won’t be happening under the aegis of an updated MPL, but it is a starting point.
What I read here reminds me of Ian Murdock's original vision for the OpenSolaris distribution, that it would have a similar support model to Ubuntu, i.e. 6 monthly release cycles and then a long term support version, called "Solaris". Oracle would do well to communicate a bit more. Seems they don't understand that there is a community of people out there who need to know.
"Organizations like Xiph, Mozilla, Wikimedia, the FSF, and even On2 itself have recognized the need for free formats and fought hard to make it happen. Now it's your turn. We'll know if you do otherwise that your interest is not user freedom on the web, but Google's dominance." – I feel optimistic about this.
"Your software should just sit there and work and integrate with the rest of your software as you originally specified." – I agree with this very strongly. I find it very upsetting when software vendors – even major, respected ones – engage in this kind of behaviour.
Exciting time for those of us with a stake in the European browser market, but it should be clear that the browser choice screen goes to EU countries plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Croatia – not all of Europe. This does cover about 80% of Europe's online population though.
