Neo1973: long-distance contender to Apple and Google?
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Inside the mobile matrix, part 1 If you're a developer working with mobile devices few decisions will be more critical than the platform you choose to focus on. With the correct choice, your skills and creativity may pay off both financially and personally when thousands of users enjoy something that you brought into the world.â¦
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Exploring PDA 'transmission technologies', apparently
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By CHRIS BLACKHURST AS I WRITE this, mid-morning, I check. I've already used Google more than 10 times today. Is there any other product quite like it, anything so ubiquitous, so taken for granted? There's the phone, but I can switch the network. Petrol? I never bother with the brand.
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[&lt;a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/qualcomm.html"&gt;Qualcomm&lt;/a&gt;] has single-mindedly focused on its patented Code Division Multiple Access cellular technology, which is only now starting to bring useable wireless data links to mobile enterprise users.
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Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.  Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere." Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages. And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?  The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.
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A Q&amp;A with OpenMoko on its upcoming Neo 1973, called a hacker&#39;s answer to the iPhone.
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Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment. Yesterday, Matt Tucker from the OpenFire community, said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task." To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it. Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today. I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another. Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.
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Will the search engine leviathan end the hunt for a commercial hybrid? In Autopia.
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Banners hanging at&#160;Macworld Expo&#160;on Monday read, &quot;2008: There&#39;s something in the air,&quot; suggesting wireless news to come in CEO Steve Jobs&#39; keynote Tuesday morning.Faster cellular service for the iPhone is already on its way later this year, AT&amp;T&#39;s top executive reportedly said in November, but Apple could go beyond that plan and extend high-speed wireless WAN (wide-area network) capability to its MacBook notebooks and even a rumored &quot;ultramobile&quot; computer.Many consumers have been clamoring for more speed on the iPhone since it was announced a year ago with support only for Wi-Fi and EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution), a version of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) that generally runs below 200Mbps. U.S. iPhone carrier AT&amp;T Wireless and other operators around the world already have a set of faster systems called HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) that can deliver more than 1Mbps.At the same time, wide-area wireless has been moving into PC notebooks and smaller PC-like devices. The big notebook vendors, including Dell, Lenovo, and Hewlett-Packard, have rolled out products with built-in 3G. And the Asustek Computer Eee PC and some other small UMPC (ultramobile PC) devices are slated to ship with WiMax.Apple hasn&#39;t made the leap. Mobile Mac owners can hook up to Wi-Fi hotspots but have to buy dongles or other add-on devices from third parties to get fast wireless elsewhere. Offering a built-in 3G card would give MacBook users access to broadband in far more locations.However, that leap would take Apple into a market that hasn&#39;t attracted a large percentage of notebook buyers, analysts said.At least in the U.S., 3G radios are associated with a particular carrier and usually sold along with two-year data contracts. Users keep notebooks longer than they do phones and don&#39;t want to lock them down to a particular carrier, said Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin. In addition, many notebooks are purchased by enterprise IT departments, which demand more flexibility, Golvin said. He doesn&#39;t expect to see another iPhone phenomenon.&quot;I don&#39;t think that laptop users would be as interested in aligning themselves formally with one particular carrier,&quot; Golvin said. One alternative would be to build in a chip that could handle more than one carrier and 3G technology, he added.Avi Greengart of Current Analysis believes Apple&#39;s proven ability to streamline could change the picture.&quot;They have not been in the forefront of 3G on notebooks. However, it wouldn&#39;t surprise me at all if they came out with a simplified offering that just made a lot of sense and became the catalyst, as the iPhone is,&quot; Greengart said. Apple simplified the iPhone experience for customers by sticking with one carrier and letting subscribers sign up with AT&amp;T through iTunes.Apple could also jump-start the market by offering an alternative to the expensive monthly service model that carriers typically use, said Gartner&#39;s Ken Dulaney. Most consumers don&#39;t travel frequently enough to justify spending US$30 or more per month for cellular service on their notebooks, but they might be willing to buy a system with built-in 3G and pay for service as they need it, he said. Verizon has a little-known offering like this, in which users can pay $15 for 24 hours of service, according to spokesman Jeffrey Nelson.Because of its greater mobility, a rumored Mac that&#39;s smaller than a notebook but bigger than the iPhone would be an ideal candidate for 3G. If the company unveils it on Tuesday, that product could lead Apple&#39;s new wireless charge.But that &quot;something in the air&quot; could be a number of other things, too, analysts said. Apple is expected to make its SDK (software development kit) for third-party applications on the iPhone available next month, Greengart said. And the iPhone could gain GPS (Global Positioning System) capability, or some iPods could get Wi-Fi, he said. As always, it&#39;s all speculation until Jobs speaks.&#160;
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Geotagging could spur a new generation of services.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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(InfoWorld) - Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies. Taking the stage at MIT's EmTech Conference (formerly known as the MIT Emerging Technology Conference) on Monday were top researchers from Cisco, HP, and Intel who shared their visions for the products of tomorrow by unveiling some of their leading areas of study and experimentation today. From the growing impact of mobile computing devices to the push to make IT eco-friendly, along with new efforts to take advantage of parallel data processing capabilities, researchers from the three technology bellwethers spoke of commons threads woven through all their work and in what directions they believe the results of those efforts will subsequently drive future technologies. Following a panel discussion on social networking tools that also focused heavily on the impact of mobile devices, Andrew Chien, vice president of research at Intel, said that the chip giant is also focusing heavily on the changes in IT usage and consumption that are being driven by handheld machines. However, despite the rapid development of the mobile space, Chien said Intel feels that wireless device, applications, and service providers are still falling short in terms of how "intuitive" and "seamless" their technologies currently work. "We have a healthy amount of concern about the amount of effort that these technologies require from all of us today," said Chien. "To that end, we're very excited about the idea of inference in the context of small mobile devices, about the richer senses and analysis of data that can be realized based on the body of techniques currently lumped under the umbrella of machine learning." Among the specific examples of the types of mobile applications that Intel envisions taking root in the near future are systems that offer "seamless presentation" of more useful information than those available today's handhelds, including tools that use geolocation and onboard sensors to give users data that is pertinent to their personal condition and immediate surroundings. Both Cisco and HP also count mobility among their leading areas of research, the panelists said, with Cisco looking into ways to merge "telepresence" with its recently acquired WebEx collaboration tools, and HP working on ways to more tightly link handhelds with back-end datacenter systems. Prith Banerjee, only six weeks into his new post of senior vice president of research at HP's Labs division, said that the company's work in mobility, green IT, and parallelism are converging in its larger efforts to make large data centers more efficient in general. In some cases, the work is oriented toward improving performance, such as through the use of photonic interconnects -- advanced electromagnetic technologies -- to allow datacenters to communicate more quickly. In other cases, HP Labs is looking at datacenter power consumption, using sensors built into its prototype servers to reduce costs and headaches associated with cooling the massive hardware farms. The challenges of parallel computing As for parallel computing -- roughly defined as the simultaneous execution of numerous program instructions on multiple or multi-core processors -- Banerjee said that HP is hoping to use its research efforts to help clear some of the software programming obstacles that exist on the market today. "We're very aware in our research of the challenges of making parallel software applications; we need engineers who can start writing code designed for multi-cores and to help transition software designed to run on a single processor," said Prith. If some of those roadblocks can be pushed aside, the benefits could be enormous, according to the HP researcher. "We're imaging a world where you plug in a computer and all the applications work automatically, and users don't have to worry about patches and updates," he said. "We're imagining a world where software is automatically updated and maintained so that environment for end-users will be completely automated and allow them to increase productivity. That is a very difficult problem to solve, but we're going to try to solve it." Another area of focus for all three organizations is the process of refining their internal research and development operations. Under Prith, HP will attempt to lower its overall number of research projects by folding them into larger efforts, the executive said, and Chien added that Intel is having success with "lablets," groups of researchers it sponsors at academic institutions to augment its internal R&D work. At Cisco, the massive networking company is attempting to inject an air of entrepreneurialism into areas of research that it believes can be turned into revenue-producing businesses rapidly, as evidenced by the launch of its physical security and telepresence product groups over the last several years, said Guido Jouret, CTO of the firm's Emerging Markets Technology Group. "We're trying to re-create the start-up atmosphere inside Cisco. So far, we've announced four different units, and the goal is to create one every several months," Jouret said. "We'll also continue to do small acquisitions where we can gain vital technologies or teams to help flesh out our ideas. The idea is to create an interesting mix of entrepreneurial drive." Along with security and telepresence, the company has launched a digital media group s part of the effort as well as a business devoted to replacing the static product displays found in retails stores today with "digitally-driven network displays." Jouret said that the telepresence group is working to mesh device geolocation with collaboration tools and multimedia-sharing systems. "We want to combine video with collaboration platforms for rich multimedia interaction, tools that allow companies and consumers to interact in ways that we can't even imagine yet," he said.
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"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his post Rite, Rubinius, and Everything &mdash; I think he's right.  Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius.  He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see his post on it here).  W00t!
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Novell's quarterly Linux revenue...Santa is scarier than clowns...BeOS and PalmOS people talk Google Android...dumping the Nikon D2Xs for the D300...is Sudoku passe?
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Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled.  You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more.  Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. My VarLinux.org readers posted the article, A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.
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An airfare predictor and subway guide, restaurant reviews and car sharing
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....