Tech Know Files

Google DART

2011-10-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

Google has finally announced DART. There's been leakage about DASH / DART for a while, and it looks like Google is really committed to it. It's a simplified language for web development, designed to scale well from widgets to large web applications.

Well, at least that's the theory. But the principals the Google team are trying to implement are exactly what the web needs. A language which runs server and client side is sorely in need and I think that's what people like Brendan Eich are missing:

"There’s a better-is-better bias among Googlers, but the Web is a brutal, shortest-path, Worse-is-Better evolving system."

As the creator of Javascript he certainly deserves some credit, but let's be realistic here. ECMAScript has been under discussion for years. The last standard was eventually simply trashed and we're working with a cut-down standard thrown out to address a few small issues. And the standards body is now telling us that the next version .. 'Harmony' is going to be any better? All this for a language originally designed by Netscape behind closed doors, and submitted for standardization post-facto. Worse-is-Better? Sounds like Brendan is saying 'mine is better'.

"What's wrong with playing hardball to advance the web, you say? As my blog tries to explain, the standards process requires good social relations and philosophical balance among the participating competitors"

This explanation coming from someone whom originally developed Javascript behind closed doors with a ninja release in Netscape Navigator 2.0, then took part in internecine standardization fighting with Microsoft resulting in different dialects of the same language for different browser manufacturers. The point here isn't to bash Brendan, the point is that no matter how rational Brendan's arguments are, his life's work is on the line. If someone comes out with something better .. well, Javascript could very well lose it's pre-eminent position on the web.

To me .. I'd say "Good". Javascript is one of those many languages where the syntax is so obscurely different to other languages that programmers must actually learn the language in order to use it ... winging it is incredibly difficult. Javascript is king of the hill by default, not by design nor because of it. It's never going to disappear from the web now, it's just too entrenched, but I'll happily welcome anything which comes along to displace it.

The web used to be a democratic place. Just about anybody could throw up a website, even a relatively clever one. The accessibility of the LAMP stack has made the web what it is today. The obtrusiveness of Javascript makes complex web applications costly to develop, thereby limiting the accessibility of the web.

"Google's approach with Dart is thus pretty much all wrong and doomed to leave Dart in excellent yet non-standardized and non-interoperable implementation status"

Brendan doesn't seem to understand what DART represents. The corporate desktop was conquered by Visual Basic, the web server was conquered by PHP. What these two languages and development platforms have in common is the simplicity of design and accessibility of language and structure. If Google can manage to accomplish the same thing with DART, all of those developers who wouldn't consider attempting to write complex web applications in Javascript may very well use DART.

DART's future all hinges on Google making DART readily and easily accessible. Whether DART becomes a standard will rely upon it's depth of penetration in the marketplace. This will all depend upon whether Google can spoon-feed this language to the novice application developers of the 'internet as a platform' era. If the VB coders of old find their home on Google DART, well .. the sky is the limit.

Google has never proven itself a fundamentally strong builder nor proponent of developer tools, hence I wouldn't be surprised if the Googlers fall on their DART. It would be extremely wonderful for the internet if we could dispose of obscure languages and the unnecessary client / server division in 'modern' program logic.

Sony's Sinking Ship

2011-06-10T01:02:00.000-07:00

Jeepers, are we seeing the slow death of Sony Corp.?

Sony breaks it's original Linux support promise and it's uber secure overpriced piece of heat spewing gamer ware is owned pretty badly. So they sue some hackers for apparently no good reason, annoy anonymous badly enough to suffer serious PSN DDOS problems then proceed to get seriously hacked in what appears a targeted operation prior to a massive earthquake and tsunami combination blasting a huge amount of Sony's production into oblivion. The PSN takes a month to bring back on-line when it's immediately compromised again prior to the compromising of it's movie site by an anonymous offshoot calling themselves lulz security.

But you can't keep a good company down .. Sony is still creating overpriced pointless low demand consumer gear apparently for markets that don't exist.

Thankfully we can watch the outstanding demise of Sony's share price with unprecedented accuracy.

Ever since shopping for a specific Sony product about 6 years ago, I've wondered how this company can stay afloat? Their cameras are never as good as the competitors, televisions are twice the price of comparable models, gaming equipment is lack-luster, laptops are overpriced and generally outdated, support staff are careless and script fed, warranty policies years behind the rest of the industry and their overarching corporate ideals are monopolistic, unrealistic and uncaring.

Sony is a corporation of the 21st century. Self-delusional of it's own power, greedy beyond reckoning and reckless with anything not directly affecting it's bottom line. Sadly in this case, it certainly seems that Sony is going to slowly slip beside the wayside in the wake of the next generation of technology leaders. With it's wide diversity of products and markets, this isn't going to happen quickly.

But here's hoping that it will happen. After my bad experiences with Sony in the past, I certainly won't be giving them another red cent .. and I encourage everyone else to also vote with their wallets.

Only in it for the Lulz

2011-03-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of commentary and discussion lately about Anonymous. This erstwhile group of hackers and activists were recently targeted by HBGary Federal (a security investigation firm) for what was apparently a publicity stunt to attempt to demonstrate the power of social media analysis when used to identify targets who wish to remain anonymous. Naturally the most powerful demonstration of these investigation techniques would be to identify the members of anonymous itself, who are obviously all anonymous..

Aaron Barr, the (now former) CEO of HBGary Federal recognized the power of such a demonstration in the eyes of the federal government and how much business this would drum up for his well-connected yet fledgling security company. The results were rather fascinating. Firstly, Aaron may or may not have identified the members of Anonymous, there were flat denials from the members ... but this would be the case regardless of the accuracy of the investigation. One member did note that Aaron identified his girlfriend. So while it may or may not be a very effective tool, it is at the least, a window into the world in which we live.

The response from Anonymous was direct, unrelenting and a tiny bit scary. A small team from Anonymous essentially took control of and shut down the HBGary computer system, publicly embarrassed HBGary (many times) and pressured for Aaron Barr to be fired. He eventually quit.

Not to be demeaning here, but elite hackers hardly hang around in open chat rooms discussing who they're going to hit next. Elite hackers are never seen, heard nor discovered and often don't even communicate with others about their conquests. They're also generally nothing to worry about, in the sense that they're driven by curiosity and a desire for knowledge and perhaps even power? Regardless of the skills of the Anonymous crew, they don't fit the traditional stereotype of the benevolent nor self-serving hacker. The behavior of Anonymous has been deemed hactivism and there is lots of discussion about the values, merits and detriment of such action.

'In it for the lulz' is the Anonymous catch cry. It's all fun and games. Again, this is a contradiction in and of itself. Anonymous declared war on the church of scientology. Apparently a unified response to an organization for which the Anonymous members had more than a little dislike. But if organizing global protests against massive religious groups and targeting large organizations is all for the lulz, then I just don't get it.

Whatever the motivation and cause, Anonymous currently has the governments, corporations and religions of the world on the back foot. The question isn't really whether what's happening is right, wrong or left but whether what's happening is the leading edge of the wave or the trailing crash of the foam. Should these HBGary like organizations get lulzed out of their false sense of security, we may well see a real world response. If they snooze too long, then in the years to come we may end up looking back at Anonymous as the founders of our new global moral consciousness.

Microsoft Can Soon Take Your ARM

2011-01-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

And finally, some news worth blogging about. On the same day, Nvidia announced a new ARM based processor and Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will support the ARM architecture. What an amazing coincidence?

It's fair to assume that there has been some collusion here between Microsoft and Nvidia. Nvidia has been selling the Tesla supercomputer systems for a long time and it's reasonable to assume that this latest ARM processor is a natural extension of that direction. So it seems less than likely that the two companies have been working together for long and more likely that this is the direction which Nvidia was heading, and Microsoft has jumped on board later into the game.

There's been much speculation about the purpose of the new chip but it does seem (re: CES announcement) to be targeted more at the desktop / small office server market. There's no question mark as to whether Nvidia are capable of building a graphics chip nor computer chip set. The only question mark over this project is whether Nvidia are capable of effectively integrating ARM cores into their GPU's? Given Nvidia's track record, it seems highly unlikely that this announcement would have been made if the product wasn't close to market.

So how effective will a multi-core ARM CPU integrated with multiple Nvidia GPU's be? That remains to be seen, but if the performance / power consumption of the Tegra CPU doesn't resemble the Tesla supercomputer, I'll eat my shorts.

Intel only just released it's own decent integrated GPU solution (after a decade of dragging their heals) and it makes one wonder if the decision was based on some insider knowledge somehow leaking from Nvidia's offices? Once again, the timing appears a little too co-incidental.. Intel managing to make it's Sandy Bridge announcement a mere 2 days before Nvidia pulls it's new processor out of the bag and more notably, 2 days before CES 2011.

No, there's no doubt in my mind that the Nvidia processor is going to knock people's socks off. A lot of writers are talking about this chip like it's going to be the chip to integrate into people's television sets or integrated media box solutions. This may well be the case, but my gut is telling me that this historical view of how ARM chips are used is looking like poorly thought out reactivity. Tegra is clearly the successor to Tesla, of that there's little doubt. Microsoft working to support the Tegra platform is a clear indication that there's a wider market here, certainly for small business servers but more than likely desktop and portable systems.

And this is a particular clincher for Microsoft and may well turn out to be the savior of the monopoly. Once these 'Tegra Inside' systems start selling through storefront providers, software manufacturers will need to port their software to a processor agnostic architecture. There are many, many packages built using the .NET platform and similar to Microsoft Office, these will be fairly simple to port to this new architecture. If the price / performance entry point of the Tegra is competitive, then some of the business market will also be interested in using the platform. This combined with the HPC market and enthusiast / power user market will likely see a largely commoditized processor / platform / chipset available at increasingly competitive pricing levels.. hence, used widely. How does this save Microsoft? I'd imagine that the ARM version of Windows won't support legacy API's, hence Microsoft can finally secure their operating environment by ditching the age old legacy support chain dangling around their neck. And if Windows 8 does support the legacy API's then adapting applications to the architecture will mostly require a simple re-compilation.

It looks like Nvidia is seriously in a position to challenge Intel and they certainly seem to be making a run at it. Even a total failure of Nvidia to enter the desktop / SME market will leave the new integrated core as (most likely) the undisputed HPC king and likely champion of integrated media chip deployment. The move is far more risky for Microsoft as porting and supporting ARM Windows is undoubtedly no small task. Microsoft does however have strong relationships with computer suppliers and if committed to the challenge, then the architecture migration is likely to succeed.

Most importantly for us people out in user land, we're going to have much faster, more capable, more powerful commodity equipment available to us and improved competition in the processor / board market. If computer hardware gets much cheaper, computers will start getting thrown in for free when you purchase your copy of Windows.

The Google NaCl

2010-12-08T14:02:00.001-08:00

NaCl is Google's experimental 'Native Client' technology. It's similar to Microsoft's ActiveX, designed to run native code on the operating environment via the browser.

It's currently at it's experimental stage, but I reckon Google is serious about this. Ever since the Chrome OS announcements I've wondered "But why would anyone want to use a computer which has less features than a comparable computer?" .. perhaps because Google has a way to add features to the computer, but in a secure fashion. If Google controls the base libraries on your Chrome system, and there's a safe and secure way for application developers to integrate with these base libraries via the browser, then a whole lot of new facilities can be exposed to the browser and Chrome OS.

So it's starting to smell like the Chrome browser will be an OS and the Chrome OS is just a browser with a bunch of additional supporting libraries.

A good idea? Perhaps. Perhaps it's a very good idea .. if it's secure (which is a big 'if'). But if you're going to be running native applications (via the browser, a desktop shortcut ... whatever), won't there by necessity need to be things like disk access? Network access? Device access? The sort of things which expose security holes? Hmmm, let's not look too hard at that for the moment.

What problem is Google attempting to address here? The post says that for certain operations, native code will be faster than Javascript. But isn't that also a misnomer? I wouldn't mind waiting for a file upload if the server is going to encode my video at much higher speeds than my pathetic little netbook could ever encode at. Faster connectivity is an ever growing trend and Javascript performance is coming on in leaps and bounds. Spending time building something to workaround problems which will soon be gone seems (to be quite frank) stupid.

Finally there's no defined standard for implementation. There's been no industry discussion. Google has decided to unilaterally make something which it's apparently expecting others just to pick-up and use without any good reason. It's the chicken and the egg. Nobody is going to bother to build the plugins and applications for a plugin architecture that isn't universally available or going to be universally available. And let's be honest, even if Chrome OS is an unprecedented success.. there's still going to *have to* be a massive amount of people using Linux. After all, who's compiling these plugins with the modified gcc? Unless the modified gcc is a browser plugin itself and distributed with a Chrome IDE?

There are some extremely fine things which Google has accomplished in the past and I continue to be impressed with the Google approach to giving it a try. But this NaCl is dead in the water without universal browser support. There will be niche uses for this technology where other technologies just don't meet the requirements, but niche is the key word here. Even if this makes it to release stage and finds incredible cross browser support from Google's competitors, it's still a niche market platform. This is the kind of bad API idea that's given Microsoft reams of security problems because whilst it has little value, it just can't be blown dead because a niche group of people will come to rely upon it.

Google, you should concentrate on writing applications and not platforms. Do what you do well, don't try to redo what others have done badly.

HP's new Hurricane Tablet with WebOS

2010-05-26T04:25:00.000-07:00

Gosh but I just love to see news like this. HP is apparently releasing a WebOS tablet.

And this is great news for a number of reasons..

Firstly we're going to see a device competing with the Apple iPad. I've not yet used the iPad but seriously doubt that it's a dud. The problem with the iPad is that it's all Apple. If you could load another OS on there, it's probably extremely tricky to accomplish and wouldn't have much application support. There's probably a jailbreak out there for the iPad to allow the loading of non-Apple guaranteed apps, but there's only a small collection of those also.

Without knowing what sort of application support WebOS has, it's kind of hard to make a comparison. But I really don't care.

This is a (or perhaps the) mainstream producer of commercial and home computing devices pushing aside Windows in favour of a different OS for mainstream consumption. And apparently, for the first time in about 10 years, Microsoft doesn't have a response. There is *no* Windows multi-touch operating system. If Microsoft doesn't get it's skates on, and pronto, everyone who wants a slate and doesn't buy Apple will pick up one of these HP beasties.

And HP is good at integration ware. There's going to be software all over HP PC's to help people make the most of their shiny new slates. This is going to introduce people to another option.. an operating system that's not Microsoft.

And that's the important point. Many modern operating systems (OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris etc. etc.) are very nice and easy to use, but people don't realize it because they're so used to using Windows that they won't even try. Ever met someone who's bought an Apple laptop and used bootcamp to load Windows onto it as dual boot then never used OS X? And this despite OS X being faster, better, more secure and having better applications.

I'd guestimate that Microsoft has 1 year ... maximum to get Windows 7 running on a mutli-touch tablet, or the monopoly will begin to fold. And Windows could never die overnight, but using a different platform that's better than Windows will open people's eyes to new possibilities. And this being the only other serious tablet out there... well, people will come.

Let's tip a glass to HP!

iTunes and the TV Revolution

2010-02-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

Apple is in talks with major television stations to better try and monetize content through iTunes. No doubt this will be a series of on-going talks. There are lots of very, very, very good reasons why dropping prices would be an excellent idea, and you've got to wonder what planet these television executives are living on. Reading some of the commentary makes you perhaps think it's a planet that doesn't have an internet.

The Music industry was first to suck eggs on this issue for two reasons. Firstly, the CD was horrendously overpriced so people didn't want to pay for it. Secondly the size of digital music downloads is a great deal smaller so it makes them easier to download, even with a relatively tiny internet connection. The first point is different for television because the content is also available for free. The second issue is becoming less of a problem because people are generally acquiring more bandwidth to their homes.

And let's face reality, this is the future. The internet is only 20 years old and people are already using it as a key information, entertainment and communication resource. Want to bet that in 10 years 50% of the population won't be using the internet for all forms of entertainment and communication? I won't take that bet. And this is really how the 'television' industry needs to start thinking.

The 'television' set is morphing. Very soon it's going to (obviously) be a flat screen internet appliance. The winner in this new market is going to be the company that delivers the content to this device. The traditional television executives have already missed this boat. Steve Jobs is the captain, and this call from Apple isn't 'Lower your prices!' ... this is the call for 'All aboard!'. Apple is making it easy for traditional television producers to migrate to this wonderful new platform which will allow them to globally monetize their content.

And what response is Apple getting? Not "Thank you Apple, please make us squillions of dollars", nope the response is "We'll think about it". Hmmm, think about staying in business for the next 20 years?

Here's a hint guys. The music industry is being cannibalized by independent content producers, what do you think is going to happen to the 'television' industry?

“If you took five things at Wal-Mart and sold them for a nickel, they’d sell really well, because they’d stand out. But if you took everything in the store and made it a nickel, nothing stands out anymore. Essentially all you’ve done is lowered the value of your content,”

A perfect quote. So if (for example) Australian or Canadian television producers start selling their content for a nickel on iTunes, they'd really stand out? The Wal-Mart example assumes one very key factor, you can only buy things from Wal-Mart. The traditional US television networks aren't the only content producers in the entire world and this will become more obvious in the coming years. If you don't lower the value of the content, the market will lower it for you.

Television is no longer a monopoly. A broadcast license from the FCC doesn't mean a damned thing on a global free-for-all communications network. Right now, the traditional television content producers have a huge head start on the competition. To maintain the existing content monopoly, the content must quickly become pervasive for consumers. IMO you shouldn't just be lowering prices, you should be figuring out creative ways to get an entirely new generation addicted to your shows. Because there's a whole generation coming that won't even understand the concept of scheduled broadcast television.

And this is where the content industry (not music, not television, not books, not movies but all content) is failing time and again. A 12 year old child can produce and sell music on the same scale as a billion dollar multinational corporation. Similar resources are becoming more and more accessible for movies and serials programming. If you don't compete you won't have any chance of winning.

The Wholesale Application Community

2010-02-15T16:45:00.000-08:00

Not-Apple mobile phone manufacturers of the world unite!

Since Apple is making a shed load of cash with it's app store, other mobile phone manufacturers are going to try to do the same thing. So everyone has rallied around this wholesale app community to try and bust off a bit of the cheddar. There's some really big names here and it might convince people that there's a future in this market, but unfortunately it's just not true.

The other mobile phones of the world are still running their long standing proprietary operating environments, which have proven profitable so aren't going anywhere in the short term. So any application is going to need to run on multiple devices with varying hardware, different development tool kits, differing development skill sets and so forth. Unless some sort of operating environment unity can be found, then the applications available here (regardless of vendor support) are going to be fragmented and disparate.

And this is really why Google created android. To try to help the mobile phone manufacturers of the world unite around a single platform. An open platform using standard technology and a unified hardware architecture. Unfortunately, company and international politics unite to mock serious competition, and we'll see a plethora of mess represented in this wholesale market.

If there could be a clearer representation to the world that mobile phone manufacturers and vendors just don't get it, I can't think of it. You can't compete with seriously inspired innovation with seriously uninspired collaboration.

What Apple is providing is inspiration. To developers, to users, to the marketplace. Devices which really are fit for purpose. Not just something that is able to achieve the functions it supports, but something readily usable for the functions it provides. The leagues of Mac developers working on the iPhone are hopeful to become wealthy from their efforts, and some will. There just aren't going to be leagues of developers willing to write software for a much smaller market segment when a larger opportunity is awaiting.

People criticize Apple for the restrictiveness of the app store, but the truth is that even with the high levels of scrutiny and restriction the iPhone is the most accessible mobile phone development platform ever sold. Over time the platform will just open up even more.

Looking at this venture makes me wonder why any company would seriously pen their name to the bottom of this list, against the likes of Google and Apple combined. Mobile phone manufacturers of the world unite? ... Mobile phone manufacturers of the world fragment.

Feedback to Jim Zemlin

2010-02-01T18:49:00.000-08:00

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux foundation, has remarked on Steve Jobs and the iPad launch and compared it to Linux devices. It's very honest and kudos to Jim for being honest about the issues at stake. Without an honest understanding of the situation there's nowhere to move.

There are some statements I'd call mistakes and I'd like to list them methodically and explain why:

"Linux *can* compete in one area. $499 - $829 may be a breakthrough price for Apple and their margins, but it’s no comparison to the price competition Linux-based devices can offer"

If it's no comparison to the price competition Linux devices can offer, then why is Jim comparing it? Because it's exactly what consumers will do. But it's not about the cost, it's about the value. People will spend money on good products, and the less of a margin that needs to be spent, the more good products people will buy. And Jobs knows this. He knows that his tablet competition is Linux and he's winning the war before the battle has started by setting a price almost everyone can afford, and most people will be willing to spend.

"Apple products command a premium and Jobs will never cannibalize their pricing power"

He just did. Everyone was expecting a $1000 device and was delivered a $500 device. If you look back through the years you'll find that Apple's prices have been steadily reducing for about 10 years. As sales continue to increase, economies of scale will continue to affect pricing. And it appears, that sales will continue to increase and the market for Apple products will expand.

"The Linux ecosystem needs to do better competing on “magic.”"

Ahaa, but there is no magic. Only thoughtful design, a cohesive architecture between software & hardware, a coherent vision and a high bar for objectives. Jobs is demanding, always has been. Linux is accepting, always will be.

"Apple is the most locked down closed system imaginable, from the software ladened with DRM, all the way down to the custom silicon they use for their Apple A4 chip"

And despite all of this, just about nobody buying the device (similar to the iPod and iPhone) will care because Apple integrates the DRM, custom chip and in-house built operating system in such a way as to create the best device for the consumer.

"Commercial success is important, but freedom is also important."

A political hat tip to the zealots. But IMHO this point is right on the money. Great ideas and great implementation come from great vision and leadership. Democratic leadership creates mediocre solutions and pragmatic implementations, it's the nature of the beast.

"So my question to you: How can the Linux community get better at creating magic?"

Bat's wings and beetle dung? ... Just kidding.

Truly wish I had an answer to this one. My gut says that a community co-exists rather than compels while my heart says that communities are compelled by the interpersonal relationships which they engender. Perhaps from the Linux perspective, products are less about customers and more about contact.

Theories on Long Term Software Viability

2010-01-31T16:09:00.000-08:00

I'll try to express here my views on long term and short term software viability and maintainability with a focus on the development process and attitude toward code structure. Hopefully all of this is self apparent.

Software isn't simple. And there are really two minds on how to take software. The monolithic and the functionally decomposed approaches. The theory of monolithic code is that the tighter the code is, the less code you have and the easier it is to maintain. Functional decomposition is the theory that by breaking the code up into little functions you will eventually have to write less code in order to accomplish the same thing because everything is facilitated by underlying functionality.

It's quicker and easier to create monolithic code, or at least, it's initially quicker and easier. As the application starts, the monolithic code base can be hammered out without a great deal of thought. Hence more code can be created much faster because it requires less design. This results in a faster start up time for the software, from starting to 40% of the functionality, it's quicker to deal with monolithic code.

Creating a decomposed code base takes time and careful planning. The underlying classes / libraries need to be well thought out and carefully built so they can be re-used commonly. It takes longer to create a decomposed code base because of the thought and care that must go into code design before writing. Creating new decomposed software is more time consuming from starting to 40% of the functional base.

The second half of development will most likely see the software in functional use. This is where the tables turn because the monolithic code is more truncated and interconnected so more complicated and difficult to maintain. The decomposed code base utilizes functional isolation, hence can be enhanced and tested with greater efficiency and reliability.

I like to think of the monolithic code as 'programming' and the functionally isolated code as 'software engineering'.

Businesses will mitigate the cost of programming by using cheaper staff, automated testing, heavy documentation, frequent release schedules etc. Businesses will mitigate the cost of engineering software by obtaining VC funding or running on high cost business models. Neither approach is perfect but long term viability is obviously more important than the short term viability because all costs are in development, product costs are minimal.

And this is the key to making software. To be successful (regardless of the business model) the focus of building the code must always be building code that is economical to maintain. If this means making the code slower, then buy a bigger computer. Computer equipment is cheap and getting cheaper by the month, whereas human time is expensive and getting more expensive by the month.

It seems that so many areas of business have recognized the efficiency benefits of computing, with the exception seeming to be the software industry.

The Apple iPad Experience

2010-01-28T14:51:00.000-08:00

Loads of web savvy technophiles are reviewing the iPad with zeal. Most are somewhat disappointed, but not terribly shocked.

It's a nice looking piece of hardware, unfortunately the software limits it's functional application considerably. Only being able to install apps from the app store, having that dinky on-screen keyboard. The iPad is going to be jail-broken within seconds of it's release. And somebody is going to figure out how to get Linux loaded and somehow drive that lovely touch sensitive screen.

It supports multi-media and people will use this device a lot in flight, where it will be very welcome. But you're not going to sit down at home in front of your 100cm plasma and watch the latest star trek film on a 10" screen with dinky little speakers. It would be handy in a train but who's going to carry a 10" device in a carry bag just to watch movies on the train? I'll tell you who'll carry it, somebody already carrying a bag it'll fit into ... ie. somebody carrying a laptop with them.

But to my mind, the biggest failing here is the choice of the custom arm chip. Who cares about an extra 2 hours of battery life? If it was running even a dinky little x86 chip, it would be an excellent Windows gaming system... think MMORPG's where the keyboard and mouse are really a barrier to playing the games. A touch sensitive Windows system which was light enough to use for hours on end and sold at around $600 would be a very hot item for a large gaming audience.

But instead... ho-hum. We get a dinky little iPhone OS ARM based 'device' rather than a tablet computer. It's cheap, and that might be it's real saving grace. At $500 people will just say 'what the hell' and buy the base model. The 3G connectivity won't be a big seller, because it's not a primary mobile device. If it's an over sized iPhone, why get a second data contract and carry a large bag with you when your iPhone is 'good enough' and already in your pocket?

This is a device for the polo-necked sweater crowd. But it's not just a niche market, because the price is so low. The iPad will be a family facilitator. This will be the second or third computer in a family household, so the kids can play games while the parents check their e-mail or google recipes. The iPad is going to sell, no doubt about it, it's just going to sell to a different market than the current range of Apple goods.

And maybe that's the point. Whenever Apple comes out with new gear, you've got to keep a single question in the back of your mind. Is Steve Jobs an idiot? The answer is no, never and probably never will be. This product might appeal 'somewhat' to the tech savvie PowerMac wielding OS X command line loving avid technophile, but it's going to appeal a whole lot to the mum-and-dad, big-fat-mortgage, why-can't-I-just-buy-a-computer-that-works market. These things will sell like hotcakes but more importantly, the iPad will introduce a whole new group of people to Apple, it's brand and it's device quality.

The iPad is an exercise in marketing Apple branding to a wider consumer audience. And you know what? It really does epitomize the Apple good-design, simple-to-use, instant-on, out-of-the-box beauty of the Apple brand. And with Apple's pricing slowly dipping lower and lower over the last 2 years, there's a whole new market of sales for Apple's real hardware which is about to explode. Hold your breath everyone... Steve has finally taken Apple mainstream.

Chrome Google Insider

2010-01-20T16:48:00.000-08:00

There's a rather nice interview with the Chrome OS engineering director over at ars. This is such an unusual interview that it's really hard to explain. It's very candid, honest and to the point. It provides technical direction and gives the reader a real understanding of how Google operates and what's going on in the minds of the people developing Chrome OS.

The Google guys seem to have the right idea about the OS. Trying to make everything simple and seamless. And if this can be accomplished then the environment may even have a future. It's a very difficult uphill battle, because there are so many elements to integrate into the operating system which must be improved from the best operating systems of our era. Things like file and device security, external plugins, application toolkits... the list could potentially be endless.

The surprising impression throughout the interview is that Google is really just winging it. Slapping about with a little side project to see how much enthusiasm it might generate, and how realistic it could become.

As a commercial developer I'm quite stunned by the development approach. Time and cost aren't really taken into consideration. The developers are creating little changes to check them out, dropping and picking them back up again. All of this to apparently see what might work well, and the things that actually work are punched out to the Beta users to see how it fairs in the real world. It's a very user focused kind of approach, but more than that, it's really hinging on the gut instincts of the people making the software. And it make sense if a business can trust it's people.

And perhaps even despite all of it's flaws, the Chrome OS might become something because the developers are focusing so carefully on the user experience. There are obvious massive benefits to the successful widespread deployment of a cloud operating environment so it would be great for this to work.

Once again we're seeing another attempt to blur the line between what's sitting on your desk, and what's floating off in cyberspace. And while the web apps might be beautifully strong and resilient, there's also an added level of security holes when the web must be able to access the local hardware. Perhaps it's the right approach and the Chrome OS team can engineer past this potentially massive security hole? The cynic in me recognizes the high demand for malware, botnets, on-line fraud and other nefarious activities so can't help recognizing that where there's a will...

In the modern inter-connected world the browser is a sand boxed portal to the greater web. But what happens when the entire computer becomes the browser? Well, the computer is the portal to the greater web and ... well, imagine the potential for disaster? In the meantime the angel on my right shoulder is hoping fervently that the Googlers can pull this one off.

The Wonderful World of ACTA

2010-01-12T18:28:00.000-08:00

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is an attempt by western governments driven by industry to impose standard restrictive damages around the world for IP and content infringement. The antagonists all sing the same songs about dangerous counterfeit drugs and damage to branding ecosystems. The detractors have no reply to these claims because who could possibly not want to save lives? Which is the same tack as the 'Counterfeiting' name suggests. No sane person would be against counterfeiting would they?

And perhaps the intentions here are wholesome and good. Maybe the people who started ACTA are really interested in doing the right thing by business and saving lives. The unfortunate problem at the moment is that the key groups driving this agreement are commercial interests. Content producers are absolutely panicked about the internet and rampant theft and will do anything to stop it.

Movie previews now have security pat down checks and mandatory coat / bag / phone checking. Cinema staff are paid bounties to use their night vision goggles to catch people creating dodgy film re-productions using handy cams. The content industry is not just panicking, they're scared whit less. Fear makes both people and corporations do really stupid things like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on night vision goggles and forcibly degrading your customers dignity by man-handling them before allowing entry to a cinema.

Drafts of proposed ACTA agreements have been posted all around the place. Unfortunately I've only seen summaries and comments, but the draft content doesn't sound good. There are a slew of mistakes being made on behalf of the content industry. These include externalization of IP enforcement costs, extreme border searches, removal of safe harbour provisions for ISP's and the resulting termination of internet connectivity for users.

This is scary stuff and the time has finally arrived when the governments and corporations of the world are squaring their shoulders and facing off with the internet. Because no person wants these provisions, only corporations and governments. And this is really the horrendous part of the whole scenario. Laws are being grandfathered into nations by way of secret negotiations and not being written by the elected representatives. These secret trade negotiations are the worst sort of failure of representative government we've seen in 500 years.

The division between normal society and on-line community is growing. Those whom serve the forces of restriction, demand and penalization and those who encourage the exercising of responsibility, information sharing and morality.

High Definition Failures

2010-01-06T16:36:00.000-08:00

DVD was released a very long time ago now but people are still pretty happy with the quality of the content. There have been two significant physical formats released since but neither HD-DVD or Bluray have really helped people to take the plunge forward into high definition formats. And to be honest, this failure of good quality digital content is quite annoying.

HD-DVD was looking pretty promising until Sony got the format killed by paying off the hardware manufacturers and studios to not produce content or players. And the winner is... um? Bluray?

The largest deployment of Bluray players is the Sony PS3. In other words most people aren't buying Bluray players. Joe average really couldn't care what Sony is telling him he needs, Joe likes his games and doesn't want to pay twice the price for a movie digitized in slightly higher quality. Bluray is a failure. Sony failed again with another higher quality proprietary format. You'd think that after 25 years that the pattern would be obvious. If it's too expensive and too difficult to work with then people won't be interested.

HD-DVD was looking like a great storage format, cheap, standard and a significant improvement over previous formats. Bluray looked like a mess. Encrypted, expensive, complicated, encumbered and proprietary. But here we are! Still using dual layer DVD's on our computers and watching SD DVD's on our television sets. A technology company has willfully monopolized a market to replace a good product with ... nothing.

What's come to replace our widespread use of portable write-once DVD's? Portable re-writable memory keys. Yes that's right, Sony can not only not sell us Bluray players, disks and burners but pretty soon nobody will be buying Sony blank DVD's anymore.

And what's the value of a HDMI port going to be when few people have any HDMI content to run through it? When a new content delivery mechanism (like on-demand digital downloads, IP-TV subscriptions, SOC delivered movies) shows up and people start using it, what television manufacturer is going to pay Sony for the 'right' to attach a useless port and expensive encryption to their cut-price widescreen LCD TV?

It sickens me to read about Bluray winning the high definition format war when the truth is that Sony is holding back technology by trying to stifle standardization and competition. But thankfully free market economics wins out. Somewhere behind a desk in Japan is a very shamed executive still adamantly demanding that the free market bend to their will.

Perhaps corporations should be democratic? Remember, even society used to be feudal.

Apple TV

2009-12-22T16:51:00.000-08:00

Apple's been selling it's Apple TV for a long time. The internet connected digital TV box that currently has about as much usefulness as a lump of coal. It never really concerned me that Apple released a cutting edge product that didn't have a particularly huge market or set purpose. It's Apple.. Steve might have just liked the look of it. But Mr Jobs isn't a total nutcase, he's quite a visionary.

What would actually happen if Apple managed to get deals for distributing TV content? If there was a handful of network shows and a low subscription price then Apple could compete directly with cable providers. Sure there is a decent cable infrastructure in the US but other places really aren't so lucky.

How cable runs in the rest of the world is beyond me but in Australia we have the shoddiest cable provision you could imagine. The costs are high when compared with internet connectivity, the equipment can be expensive and the content is quite limited consisting mostly of B grade movies and endless re-runs of the same shows on multiple channels. There's only one flavour of cable and it comes with advertising built in. Not the home shopping channel, but intermissions during programs trying to sell life insurance and skin creams.

Advertising is the primary reason I don't often watch television and exactly the reason why many Australians don't have cable. But there are an awful lot of people who have digital TV's and would jump at an ad-free on-demand viewing platform even if it choked their internet connection.

My suspicion here is that many countries are closer to the situation in Australia than the US. People want the good stuff, at release time when they want to view it. Timeliness, quality, simplicity and value for money. Nobody wants to have to record programs on their jailed cable PVR... search, click, watch! Provision of a service like this would sell and Apple knows this. There's a larger market for television than music and Apple's music store has been running in high gear since inception. An on-line subscription television service with matching easy to use PVR is a killer combination, as in category killer.

Look at the boxes in our lounge rooms. Every company from Microsoft to Sony has been trying to get a smart unit onto every coffee table in the world. And the company to take the lounge room will own the next era of content delivery. And the market now spans the globe. Forget the provincial ideals of Comcast or Time Warner, these are bear corporations afraid of change and busy hanging onto existing returns. What's important about this brave new world of content delivery isn't current returns, it's the potential for returns.

So Apple has plunged ahead... driving the market once again in the direction consumers want to go. Is the Apple TV a wonderful successful shining example of Apple's innovation? Certainly not... yet. But once those content deals pass muster, ooh ahhh! We're moments ahead of world changing distributed entertainment.

Don't Beat Software Into Submission

2009-12-02T22:37:00.000-08:00

As a software engineer (read: code monkey) it never really surprises me that software can turn out really, really badly. Customers are always annoyed when software doesn't work perfectly but code is a particularly gruesome mess. It can be made horrendous with poorly applied principles, bad code design and faulty assumptions. My current employer is a particularly shining example of bad code design.

On a daily basis we code monkeys spend countless hours employing logical constructs in SQL statements to facilitate the use of a single page rendering class that provides no advantage when finally implemented. Without getting into detail, what seemed like a good idea at the time has actually proven itself to be a very, very bad idea... time and time again. And we put enormous effort into writing code to support this very bad idea because it's there and we must support consistency. In other words, the guy who had the idea is the person making the decisions.

If there's one thing in this world that really drags software down, it's programmers with egos.

And here are some of the principles I've been espoused to work under on a daily basis:
1/ The less lines of code there are, the better the code is
2/ Don't use multiple logical statements when they can be conjoined
3/ Ternary operators are powerful and should be used as often as possible
4/ Functions shouldn't be concise, small functions should be combined to create less code
5/ Business classes should extend the library class that they use the most functionality from
6/ Using memory is wrong, storing everything on disk makes the application much faster and more scalable
7/ Re-use code by creating utility functionality that has different behaviour depending upon the parameters being passed in

Since I've wasted many days grappling with a generically implemented con-joined temporary 'buffer' table structure implemented to work around a limitation in the page rendering class, I'm going to spend the last minutes of my day debunking every one of these points in the hopes that somewhere out there is somebody willing to listen to reason.

1/ Every piece of code has to be maintained. If you write the code as concise as possible, this limits the number of people able to competently maintain the code. This increases the overall development time, maintenance cost and decreases the amount of further development that can be achieved.
2/ The less lines of code the less flexible the code is because a single line with two purposes cannot be re-used for anything but the matching pair of purposes the line is written for. The more of this code you create, the less flexible your software becomes which leads to inevitable spaghetti code.
3/ Setting a variable in a ternary operator is a good thing if the condition is a function returning a true or false because then the cause is separated from the effect and can be re-used without the necessary understanding of the relationship between the cause and effect.
4/ Basic software principles identified in 1967: If your function is longer than a single page, it should be broken down. Read a book and listen to an expert.
5/ Classes performing similar operations should have common ancestry. This allows the developer(s) to read, understand and adapt business functionality without needing to understand the multiple, different, independent underlying library class implementations (which all have different member variables, error handling, return values, functions, thousands of lines etc. etc.).
6/ RAM is the fastest, simplest way to make your application run properly. Utilising RAM allows the developer to embed logic in program code rather than in database queries, meaning that an average database might be a single query with 4 table joins, rather than an 8 way union with each union containing 25 table joins. Programs written with simple data access and programmed logic are linearly scalable rather than the exponentially (un)scalable nature of complex database queries.
7/ This idea is fine for generic, non-business specific functionality like a linked list, array or XML transformation. When the functionality is business specific (like a checkbox operation, data formatting etc.) the amount of parameters or 'settings' required is ever increasing because no two operations are the same. So the utility classes are never complete and maintaining and utilising them becomes ever more complex again leading to unmaintainable spaghetti code.

There's a difference between an engineer and a programmer. An engineer finds the best solution while a programmer works at it until it can't get any better.

The Chrome OS

2009-11-22T15:20:00.000-08:00

Google has released their operating system and it looks like my expectations were wrong.

Chrome OS is in fact a glorified web browser. Driver support will be designed for specific limited hardware, the operating system is embedded in firmware and everything is designed to run in 'the cloud'. It's a courageous attempt to address current issues with operating systems and is a massive leap from existing computing paradigms.

But who would want it?

It's just a cut down version of an operating system (any operating system) with Chrome running as the browser. If the applications all run through a browser, then why not any browser? What use is a second computer that only performs a small subset of functionality of another computer? There aren't anywhere near enough applications (desktop productivity, business organisation, graphics manipulation, 3D games, educational packages) to make any computer based on Chrome OS anything but a casual toy or instant-on web browser. There's a market for these two areas, but it's at the cheap end of the scale.

The OS doesn't get any cheaper than Chrome but it's still got to run on something. In fact, it has to run on something very specifically designed for Chrome. So what we'll be waiting for now is a hardware manufacturer to design and build an internet appliance with a short shelf life for a small market segment which will be cheap enough to reach a secondary market where demand is driven by price point and usability. Well, usability is a no brainer because touch screens are still way too expensive to fit to any reasonably sized system at a neat price point so the computer we're waiting to see released is a very cheap sub-sub-notebook with a usable keyboard. I wonder if there's a manufacturing company out there called 'Bland' or 'Hopeful'?

What company is going to risk the farm designing and marketing a product for an unknown market with very low profit margins?

I'll give you a guess who's going to need to fund the release of this hardware, the company's name starts with G and ends with oogle. This is unfortunately a product well ahead of it's time... well ahead as in 10 years ahead of it's time. Tech pundits are probably relieved about not having to manually synch data anymore, but if you're a pundit... is this REALLY going to be your only computer? Will you suddenly stop using the desktop applications you've been using for 20 years? If so, why haven't you started already?

This is a glorified smart phone that isn't a phone, doesn't fit in your pocket and does less than an Android phone at what will probably be a higher price. It's not a mobile communications platform (despite communications being it's foundation), not a primary computer, not a negligible purchase and not a self-starting market.

IMHO: Don't waste your time contributing to the Chrome OS project, this particular lump of concrete may even have the Chrome browser's boots stuck in it.

MPAA, The FCC and SOC

2009-11-18T14:25:00.000-08:00

Hollywood studios have been vying for years to get the FCC to allow the use of selectable output control. SOC is when the provider of a film is able to decide what streams to broadcast to the consumer. The idea behind this is that HD content is protected using HDMI DRM which makes piracy of the streaming content more difficult. The MPAA wants this available so that they're able to turn off analog transmission and safely release HD movie content to the world without having to worry about piracy. The arguments have been circling for years, and the head of the Hollywood Washington lobby has posted to Ars to try and convince everyone that this is a good thing.

The two sides to the argument are pretty clear cut. The MPAA says that it won't release the content without adequate protection because of piracy concerns, IMHO completely justified concerns. And public lobbying groups say that it shouldn't be done because it won't be available to many, many consumers with quite new equipment because not all the home theater equipment out there supports SOC.

Both sides of the argument have valid points and are completely justifiable. The problem is that everyone is arguing about the wrong things... and here's why.

The MPAA is looking to shift the food chain along by 200 feet. ie. Make more money from the same movies by selling these movies in cinemas and through 0-day HD before releasing them over for cable distribution. The MPAA claims that this is just new content, it won't effect existing content. But this is a lie. Before rentals were released, movies reached television much earlier. Before cable there were also much higher quality (of a greater quantity) of movies available for television viewing. Before pay per view, cable movies were available earlier and were of much higher quality. So clearly with the entrance of each new sales market, the content quality of the downstream markets reduced. This is what a new 0-day HD release market will accomplish. The 0-day releases will be available for a month or two and this pushes cable pay per view back by a month, DVD release back and so on. So that indicates that the MPAA are lying... which doesn't surprise me because their goal isn't to be a bunch of nice folks, it's to make more, more, more money.

What else are they lying about? Well, I'm not entirely sure. The MPAA are VERY determined to get SOC on-line. They're still trying after being turned down 3 times and with 4 years of work under their belts. If this was just about providing a new service to a relatively small number of consumers, it wouldn't justify this expense and effort. So SOC is going to provide the studios with something much more than it first appears. What that might be must mean an awful lot of advantage to the MPAA for this amount of lobbying to continue for so long. Hundreds of millions of dollars must have been sunk into this campaign already so the returns must be looking like billions.

And don't forget that by doing this the MPAA is kicking every cinema and movie distributor directly in that place we don't speak of. These distributors and cinema operators have VERY close working relationships with the MPAA (like subsidiary companies). This new service is in direct competition with cinema releases. So in essence, the MPAA is destroying a hard won relationship with distributors and cinemas. Yes, the MPAA will take the money directly rather than getting paid (by the distributor) for the prints but until now the prints are making the MPAA staggering amounts of cash.

I hesitate to say that the MPAA are simply acting out of fear because it would be wrong to assume that their lobbyists and legal counsel are stupid. Greedy, monopolistic, self-righteous and vicious aren't beyond the realms of possibility but stupid... never that.

Something stinks about this whole campaign and the FCC needs to VERY carefully review what the MPAA are trying to get passed. There's definitely a plan here and it has very, very little to do with pay per view home distribution of 0-day movies. The problem is that the arguments are all centered around what the MPAA wants everyone to be arguing about. They don't raise the real issue. Somebody picks up on a minor side effect of SOC and the MPAA focuses everyone's attention on this by arguing adamantly about it, knowing all along that this is distracting everyone from the real issue(s).

What's the real issue?

Karmic Koala :- Installation

2009-11-04T20:19:00.001-08:00

Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is the latest and recently released version of the bright spark in Linux desktops. I've slapped the desktop installation onto the old Toshie to see how it handles in comparison to other less desirable operating systems.

Installation is a doddle. About the most difficult part was getting the wily old Toshie to boot from the cd-rom drive. Everything is smooth, apparent and very clickable, great for anyone who's sick of text based interfaces. A minimum of questions are asked during installation... like 'Where in the world are you?' so the clock is right and 'Who do you want to login as?' and 'Can we just go ahead and wipe the entire drive?' rather than demanding specific partition formatting options. Installation was simple and only stopped once to ask questions. From that perspective, who cares how long it took? But for the pundits, I think it came down to about 45 minutes.

Having not looked at Ubuntu for some time, I'd have to say that I still dislike Gnome as a desktop interface. It's done very well, a completely clear desktop, minimum of menu options and yet still clear and easy to use. But there's something about the way the Gnome menu options lay off the left side of the menu bars that just smacks of incongruity. Secondly, the thoughtful pauses of the Gnome GUI allow the user far too long to remember how comparably fast KDE really is. Well, I can at least be thankful for the lack of gaudy graphical embellishments.

Will the Gnome spoil this as my operating system of choice? In all likelihood. Ever since Redhat 5.2 I've not found an answer to that infernal question, "What were they thinking?".

But perhaps in this case, the desktop will just remain a place to park the icons in between programming sessions. Gnome will get the benefit of the doubt in hopes that Ubuntu contains graphical system configuration controls that work, responsive applications, software installation that doesn't require prior training in martial arts and perhaps even a neat substitute for Expose which being missing has left such a large hole in my love life.

Watch this space.

7 x The Windows

2009-10-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

Raise your hand if you love Windows 7?

Brazil! Put your hand down immediately. You too China. And Finland if you don't stop playing up you'll be sent to the CEO's office!

Microsoft has been working on making Vista stable for a few years now and they've finally accomplished it. It's called Windows 7. I haven't had the mis-fortune of having to use it yet and I'm hopeful that my blissful ignorance will last.

Why you might ask? If you put me in front of a Windows 2000 system I could tear that thing a new one. Windows XP wasn't too far from it so it wasn't that hard to hit the same notes. Windows Vista was a whole new operating system. Not just an update (like everything else for the previous 20 years) but a completely clean, spanker. I'm so glad that I never had to seriously touch that bloated piece of ripoff merchandise. Unfortunately the big M has gone and built another operating system that's just like it .... only more bloated :(

Apparently Windows 7 has a fast install, a handful of nice features (like keyboard window arranging, a useful (taskbar) menu system, some nice updates to included base software) and quite a few updates that make little sense. The Control Panel looks even less accessible than it's been since default XP, the start menu is being forced into a configuration designed for people who don't bother managing their applications, the security system has got all-new bypasses built in so people don't complain to Microsoft about endless security warnings (and malware has a new entry point... thank god!), there's a new 'ribbon' API and yet another device management interface that is incomplete, inconsistent and basically unusable.

If (when?) companies don't upgrade to the 'new' API's (ie. stop building custom device management tools, installation software, VPN tools, Wireless access software, virus scanners, menus, windows etc. etc. etc.), what happens? How do you spell fragmentation again??

Here's the problem with the Windows... are you ready? Yep, OK. It's not a platform like any other operating system has ever been, it's actually everything to everybody. It just doesn't do any of it well. A mediocre media player, a dodgy firewall, crumby browser, combustible security system, horrendous menus, non-existent support... this could go on for days.

I don't WANT to use Windows 7. I never even thought about using Windows Vista and even everyone's favourite, Windows XP, looked bad to me. I'm downright sick of learning all about and then wrestling with Microsoft's latest 'technology', the time would be much better spent learning about Linux / Unix, where knowledge is power and it's usefulness doesn't fade. And this is a dilemma I've been wrestling with for a long, long time.

Mac hardware doesn't seem to be currently very usable, Linux has never given me goosebumps like it seems to give other people and Windows has always sucked. What's the alternative? I could run OS X86, freeBSD, Ubuntu... I'm going to have to try a few different operating environments.

Kick the tyres so to speak.... because I need a beacon to shine the way ahead. Are you also lost in the murky comfort of Windoze?

3D My Web

2009-07-15T00:46:00.000-07:00

On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal. But hardware accelerated CSS transformations are actually really big news. And this isn't a specialist vendor technology that's going to be marginally successful.

Yeah, yeah. 'So what' right? Facebook will look a little k3w1'r and there's going to be a new wave of websites with pretty interfaces?

Nope. This is actually a revolutionary step through Alice's looking glass. This simple little piece of functionality crosses the boundaries between what a traditional application can do, and what a web application can do. Currently all of the graphics in web applications is mock-up stuff. A little animated GIF for progress, a set of filling boxes for loading, a splash of flash. Take your average corporate website, go ahead and remove all functional limitations... a page on which just about anything is possible. And an operating environment that is truly ubiquitous suddenly, every computer has the same features because every browser supports the standard.

Since computer inception, everyone has struggled with what a computer is, does and how they should work. The first mainframes used dumb terminals, desktop systems rapidly replaced these and now we're (slowly) moving toward to a more functionally derived re-definition of the division between client and server. The era of the small office application server is slowly disappearing into the nether regions of computing history because any browser, anywhere will soon be able to perform any function from any server using even the laziest connectivity. But this new computer isn't dumb, it's still a fully functional computer... but the functionality of the application is declared by the 'developer' rather than the instructions written by a developer.

Confused?

Database systems used to be sequentially based. Software would instruct the computer to 'open file' then 'read first record', 'second record'.... 'close file'. SQL changed this, you just say 'database, get the data for client ABC123' and the database handles the heavy lifting as best it can. 3D graphics are currently sitting at the sequential phase (for lack of a better term). The hardware has to be told how to do everything. CSS 3D hardware accelerated integration is changing that. People will soon be able to declare what they want done, rather than how to do it. Commands like 'spin' or 'flip' or 'run' could be combined with animated vehicles or people.

An over-simplification?

But that's the point. Can you really over simplify 3d graphics? Let's hope not. Right now there's way too much script with way too many holes, clashes, possibilities and cost. Bring on the web as it should be, I'm excited!

Chrome, From Browser to OS

2009-07-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

Google is making it's own operating system. Is this evolution? Revolution? World domination? Can Google succeed with it's operating system plans? What is the definition of success? Do we care and is this something we actually want?

It's a sign of the times that Google is expanding from the web to the desktop. From internet domination, to internet expansion. This isn't the creation of a new product or market, it's extending a market with great untapped potential. The operating system will be open source, and Google plans on collaborating with the open source community in order to get Chrome OS up and running. That makes Chrome OS less of a product from Google, and much more in service to Google.

Google knows how to make software, succeeds where others fail and now that the decision has been made, will undoubtedly throw the required resources at the project to make Chrome OS work... resources which Google has.

Looking at the quality product that Chrome the browser is, you'd have to assume that Chrome the operating system is likely to be of high to very high quality. It will be based on the Linux kernel, so will have exceptional driver support. That means that moving from a Netbook to a Desktop will be a short hop, step and jump. The aim from Google's post seems to be the production of something simple and safe. Functionality is really up in the air, but who knows where Google is coming from or headed on this road.

But I'd feel like a fool to suggest that Google is going to put together a glorified web browser powered by remote applications, and primarily using centralized storage. That would be highly unlikely because the market isn't ready for that right now, and won't be for some time to come (if ever). And the googlers rarely bet in the wrong direction, so such a public announcement and huge profile project will provide more than currently meets the eye. This means that a desktop application stack will be needed.

The applications will be limited by the GNU (or otherwise) infrastructure that's sitting beneath the Chrome hood. It's going to be essential for Chrome the OS to provide the essential desktop tools which open source developers use. Supporting popular desktop software will also hinder fragmentation on this new Linux derivative, which will be key to widespread adoption. The last thing people want to see is 200 derivative Chrome OS's that muddy the water for Joe Average User. And he's the consumer target for this work.

An operating system your mother would love.

But re-thinking the operating system isn't a direct thought process like building a browser. The web browser has a specific purpose and fairly well defined set of functionality. Comparing the work of engineering a browser to building the better operating system is a comparison between science and art. The next generation operating system can't just be a better Linux environment. The next generation operating system has to break through years of user experience and provide real additional facility for far lower cost and much greater ease of use. But don't get me wrong, my hopes are high.

The current environment is rife for operating system change. Even the people who loved Windows are hating it now. There are loads of people with bad desktop Linux experiences and loads of others who are switching to Apple to escape the torrent of computer problems that have plagued them for a decade. Any sort of contribution to operating systems from Google has got to be very welcome, let's all hope that the contribution amounts to more than white noise.

If some lovely Googler reads this please (please (please)) abolish shared libraries, they're a throwback to the 80's.

Jammie Thomas :- RIAAl Liability

2009-07-07T00:33:00.000-07:00

A quick re-cap. Jammie Thomas was 'caught' by the record industry sharing 24 songs on the internet. She didn't settle for thousands of dollars, but instead fought tooth and nail. A federal court awarded the record industry 1.92 million dollars for her copyright infringement. No, that's not a typo.

A single mother shared a few random songs on the internet and the justice system has fined her 1.92 million dollars. The fact that a judge has to be asked to label these statutory damages as unconstitutional is inane. But this fine isn't really a problem for Jammie, because there's no way in hell she is going to be able to pay out. This fine is really a problem for the plaintiff, not the defendant.

It's outstanding media manipulation that allows a massive trade organization to get away without this raw and blatant injustice reaching the mainstream media. But since there are so many people rallying around Jammie and people across the internet all feeling her pain, how long can the 'industry' keep this from leaking out? The truth is that as mainstream media becomes less and less relevant, the power of these organizations is also dwindling. There's manipulation of content on the internet, never doubt it, but since there are so many sources of information no false source survives past their own stupid greed.

The movie industry in Australia lobbied for copyright infringement fines to be DRASTICALLY increased in the last few years. The deterrent now sits at about 1000 times the level of fines in the US!!! So if some Australian were to infringe like Jamme, would they be fined 1.92 BILLION dollars?

The truth is that the only real harm occurs when one group tries to profit from another at the unreasonable expense of the former. If children are exploited in sweat shops producing goods that are sold at ridiculous profit margins. Or if consumers are exploited using inflated physical media prices fixed by a monopolistic group. Or if Jammie was to copy the physical media and profit from it with no recompense for the content owner.

RIAAL Mistakes

2009-03-24T02:07:00.000-07:00

Call me slow, but while showering this morning I figured out what happened to the music industry. This is a little bit of hubris talking because there's pretty much no evidence for anything here. It's just a theory... a theory that fits the facts.

The music industry has been catastrophically effective. Marketing to children and teens is not particularly difficult... with more focus on teens. The desires and motivation of teens are very apparent, as is their own sense of self worth. The music industry markets primarily to teens and young adults with a focus on sales. What is derived from this by the target audience is not the concern of the seller, it's a market of buyer beware.

The reason that most younger people prefer music or films to painting, literature or sculpture isn't because music resonates more keenly to a younger demographic, it's because the target market of music is a younger demographic. An industry musician on a morning television program commented about how the music industry was looking for new angles on promotion and was using television programs for musical cross promotion. It's an angle. A way to make music penetration more thorough and bond with it the emotions being portrayed within the program. It works on the sub-conscious of the viewer, them not realizing that the music they are listening to is sub-consciously linking in their mind to the feeling of 'love', 'hope' or 'courage'.

The music then lends positive re-enforcement to the listener, which heightens their desire to purchase it.

And this was the thread of thought that lead me to realize where the music industry failed, and continues to fail. If you had to name the major failing point of the music industry in the last 20 years, it would be obvious... NAPSTER. It's a boring story to recount, so if you don't know about it... go and read. What happened?

It's pretty obvious with a little thought, deep thought but still little. People had grown up being marketed to by the music industry. As in the example above, their desire was heightened by the marketeers. When a new album was released, everyone simply had to have it. Every teen purchased CD's and many people kept on with this trend well into adulthood. So what do you have? Simple, a massive desire for music and musical products.

So what's the one thing that satiates desire? ...Gratification. You get what you want. Now imagine having someone serve you up a tool that delivers exactly what you want, when you want it and instantly.

“Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright.”
- Bill Bryson

Excuse the diversion... I've got to re-enforce my sense of self worth by quoting apparently clever people on vaguely the same subject matter as I'm jibbering about.

I've seen television advertisements for albums with a strong voice over saying "What you want", "The must have album" and "The greatest album from the greatest artist of our time". Everyone who's watched television in the last 20 years has seen this heavy handed marketing. Perhaps it raises the desire? Isn't that what it's talking about? Describing to the audience precisely what we want, what we need... what we must have.

But where does the gratification of our desire come from? Do you choose a trip to the record store, an overpriced purchase and a trip home? Hell no! I want it now, fast and perfect.

The music industry has learnt how to build desire, now it's time to learn to satiate that desire. What would be the best possible outcome of buying a CD... perhaps free concert tickets and a chance for a backstage pass to meet the object of my desire? What about a live show, simulcast radio / tv / on-line performance? A signed disk? A photo of me and the star with my signed CD, ooohhhh, I'd be out to buy one of the first 500 CD's in a flash.

The desire of entire generations has been sharpened to such a knife point that we all WANT, often without understanding what it is that we want. And where is our satisfaction? It's the person, group, organisation, company or government that can provide our satisfaction who will win the day. Perhaps it will be an enlightened NIN or a re-incarnation of the Nazi party... or more likely, something in between.

Linux on the Desktop

2009-03-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

It's been some huge amount of years that Linux has looked like the next big desktop operating system. And all of the many, many Linux variants are still fulfilling their wonderful niche market of computer geeks and budget driven users. Unfortunately, the more you weigh down your ship the slower it cuts through the water.

And here's the true paradox of modern computer operating systems. The more features anyone tries to add, the slower the operating system goes. It probably comes down to system architecture. Start with good foundations, and the world is your oyster. The poorer the foundations, the less likely the operating system will be able to grow. After redhat, woody, gentoo, mandrake, suse and linspire I gave ubuntu a try. Not a very decent try, just a kick around. It's fat. There's nothing to say that big can't be beautiful but it's definitely not a lightweight.

Compared to the 'competition', Vista, it probably is lightweight... but is it competition? Does the average computer user really consider using Linux in place of Vista?

The truth is that the lightweight competition for Vista is Windows XP. And that's the market that's being created by bloatware. It looked like the next great Windows would be the next big thing... at least until the netbook market (finally) exploded.

And without any warning, we immediately see mainstream equipment being sold with Linux installed on it. And what's the competition for Linux on the netbook? It's a machine that's double the price running the 7 year old Windows XP. And here's the true test of Linux usability. People prefer to choose a less powerful, more bloated, less featurefilled operating environment at twice the price. It's the same stench as all other Linux on the desktop projects. It's cheap, but undesirable.

When you're running an Atom processor with light RAM, integrated graphics and low storage capacity... there aren't that many options. But unluckily Microsoft has made Windows XP still available, keeping control of that mindshare which Windows Vista is threatening to kill. Is Windows 7 going to solve anything? Absolutely not. Netbooks can't be sold at competitive prices with the hardware required to run an even more bloated operating environment. And don't go into denial hardware manufacturers! Netbooks are primarily selling as cheap laptop replacements. When they start to crack 80% of the price of base laptops, they'll stop selling.

The only question that remains is where do you want to go today?

Linux wants to go mainstream. There are distros that are good and others that are worthwhile. IMHO, the major massive stumbling block that Linux distros keep tripping over is shared libraries. Installing a Linux application (any new Linux application) is a nightmare because of dependencies. Create as many tools as you like, if a special tool is required to install an application there's a fundamental problem. The same can be said about installing 2 applications that have dependencies on different versions of the same library. Windows has had and still has the same problem with shared libraries and backwards compatibility, but why in god's name does even a netbook need to use shared libraries?

Computers, even netbooks, are VERY powerful. When a computer that fits in your pocket ships with half a gig of RAM, for gods sake... just statically link the libraries. Apple has pretty much overcome this fundamental problem with modern operating systems by treating an application as a bundle. One icon might mean 500 libraries, but really... who cares. Drag, drop & execute.

It's not really pleasant that the majority of computer users have the expectation that their systems will be simple to maintain and use, but it's a reality. And why not have that expectation? I don't care what version of JRE or C the application needs, in fact... I don't care that it needs it. Just make it work and stop complaining about what *needs* to be installed to make the application work. Otherwise the solution will just become another application... or operating system.

What Makes Tech Great?

2009-01-10T02:50:00.000-08:00

There's always a low flying buzz about what's hot in tech today. Like the OQO model 2 with it's (OMG) OLED display. Or Microsoft's visions for the future but what is it that really makes tech noise, tech buzz?

This is a question that has me most befuddled.

Several years back I pestered the modern laptop manufacturers to build a real mobile laptop. Not a portable computer you could take with you and use when you arrived, but a laptop that could be used 'on the go'. It was so easy to criticize the tablet manufacturers of the time for the processing bricks that were on sale. And behold! Just as I'd hoped for 3 years ago, a whole slew of low priced, mobile, powerful interweb connected handheld devices.

After pestering all the makers and finally purchasing a miniature little laptop ... I just don't use it like I'd hoped. In the several years of ownership, there's only been one occasion when having a laptop in my pocket has actually been of some sort of use. It was very geeky to pull out your miniature laptop to dump your photos onto in the middle of a museum, but well ... it is practical right?

So the UMPC has style and price point. Similar to mobile phones. While Sony and Palm were creating the smarter, better more fully functional mobile phones, motorola cut their legs out from under them with sexy looking flip phones that had poor features and weren't durable. Microsoft continues to develop terrible operating systems with sexy menus. There's an awful lot of marketing that continues to screw up technology.

And this isn't only relegated to the commercial sector. Tons of open source developers get together.. so Linux (I'm sorry, GNU / Linux) must be good, right? Actually, the vast majority of Linux distributions are only fit for use in places where people don't see them. And yes, there's always things you need your ugly sister to do but just because she comes cheap, is that a reason to hire her? How can Apple create an entirely new OS (not new now, but you know what I mean) in a year but Linux still not have a GUI interface where text fits on the buttons?

Not to be ungrateful (heaven forfend) but shouldn't us tech geeks ask for more? What about some real inspiration, development in new areas. Give me an electric car, a home fusion generator, a hamster to power my refrigerator. Stop making 20 different styles of computer headphones and 60 different styles of computer mice. Start making computing helmets with screens and speakers and spatial mice.

There's a very low bar in technology today and people are eating the sand. This is probably sad only from the point of view of the avid technophile. It seems to me that we're renegging on our responsibilities to future generations for not demanding better tech.

Is Salesforce a bubble company?

2008-10-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

Salesforce might be a market leader but for a generation of savvy consumers, you'd hardly think that it will be worth a footnote mention in the history books.

Those who don't read it are doomed to repeat it. That's the quintessential phrase of a misunderstanding or lack of knowledge of history. Microsoft has buried numerous companies like salesforce just by leveraging. Taking on Microsoft is a bad move. There's a strewn road of various editors, productivity applications, database engines, operating systems and court cases that prove without a doubt that Microsoft can and will fight dirty to win.

Microsoft doesn't hate everybody, they just love monopolies. And why wouldn't any business love a monopoly? It should be a target for any market. No doubt that co-operation is important and a fundamental principle of economic development. Once past the co-operation stage, it's devour and self gratification time. Corporations are the fat rich bastards of the modern era, and luckily we can all take a bite of the pie.

Marc Benioff looks like he's squaring off salesforce against Microsoft, but to what end? CRM (salesforce's NYSE company code ... catchy eh?) has been fluctuating based on buyout rumours for a rather long time. Even though the rumours seem to be false (reflected in the massive drop in share price), we can assume from their silence that salesforce is open to such ideas and as such, could well be a bubble company.

Looking at Marc's comments, you'd have to wonder whether there is a lot of sanity floating around salesforce at the moment. A company that's all about love with a CEO squaring off against the 800lb gorilla for no good reason ... ie. Microsoft is a purveyor of generic productivity tools, not CRM software. This smells like company share price panic. The market is twisting in the wind and it looks like Marc might have just lost his cool and ranted out loud to the analysts at his conference.

Don't worry Marc! Even with a 50% share price fall, the glass is still half full.

But no doubt this is an over-analysis and Marc was only joking about the whole thing. Microsoft "hate everybody" and are "all about tying people into Microsoft products and services" but he really does love them. Truly he does.

Google's Shiny New Browser

2008-09-03T03:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the chrome. A quick summary for everyone who doesn't want to read about it:
- Built on Webkit (aka Safari, aka Konquerer)
- Multi-process rather than multi-threaded
- K3w1 new site memory features
- Really fast javascript VM
- Special whiz-bang window-less web application mode
- Google gears built in!

Okay, so when you first hear about this the alarm bells really start to ring. OMG! What planet is google taking over next? The intentions aren't immediately clear ... but it looks like this is the project google has been incubating to bring gmail from beta to live. You know, that e-mail service google has open to hundreds of millions of people? Yeah, THAT beta service!

Everyone is talking about this like it's a shot across the bow of the big steamboat Redmond, but that smells like hooie. Microsoft has a large share of the browser market but that's by default rather than design ... and it's a shrinking share at that. This isn't about removing Microsoft from web browsers, it's about bringing quality TO web browsers. The more internet use there is, the better google does. The better the internet is, the more it will be used ... so google tries to improve the internet for Joe Average because Joe is worth money to google. So the timing of the release is timed around the IE8 privacy mode release ... but chrome wasn't written because google is scared.

Google's gears might have been included as an afterthought ... or perhaps this browser is to show off gears to the development world? Every developer loves a new browser right? Well, every web developer would have noted this news which has raged to just about every location Microsoft doesn't own. Even the mozilla foundation are talking about it. Kudos to google on a great Beta release announcement, everyone is watching in earnest :-)

Some of the features are pretty cool, and the intent smells fresh and wholesome, like google really does still care about making money the traditional google way. The most interesting twist of this new browser is that the code can be grabbed by you, me ... anybody. Which means that the other browsers already holding large market shares can just integrate google's changes immediately. So perhaps we'll see a faster Firefox and Safari ... the latter almost being certain and probably before chrome reaches final release stage. But google will still probably bring chrome to final release stage, at least until the other browsers catch up.

Anyone used an iPhone? One of the perplexing things on the iPhone was a YouTube 'application'. YouTube application? Isn't that a website? Well yes, just like google or gmail are websites ... all owned by google. Even Apple is turning google websites into applications, what will google do?

Well this is really the point isn't it? There's been lots of attempts (over the last ... 10 years or so) to turn desktop applications into browser applications. To blur the line between what is 'the internet' and what is your 'desktop'. Think active desktop, XAML, XUL, .NET, Silverlight, Dashboard, ... heck, even the windows (and linux) file explorers have this blurring built in. But what sort of application is flourishing? ... browser applications like gmail, youtube, myspace, facebook, google, blogger etc. etc. etc. Despite all of their limitations and nastiness, simple browser based applications have gone (and continue to go) a lot further than anything more clever or fully functional.

So google takes the simple approach. Make a set of tools that let developers do something that can already be done ... just make it easier. Then provide a platform to remove everything but the application from the window and vuala! Simple websites become web applications.

It doesn't take a visionary to see the benefits for google in all of this, but it's still a huge surprise. There were rumours floating around for a very long time but it didn't seem to make a lot of sense for google to get into desktop applications. I'm still hopeful that I'm not the only person here to miss the point.

Google isn't thinking about moving into desktop applications, google is thinking about extending web applications ... it was just necessary to create a platform to facilitate this. The chrome on the armor is really Android. Let's stop mincing words here, Android uses (or will use) chrome as the basis for it's browser. If people are going to get comfortable with a google browser, it's going to be while using their shiny new smartphone. It doesn't currently ring true that people will bother to load chrome on their PC's as a result, but just wait until your smart android shows you the power of gmail.

Color Me Green, a New Experimental OS

2008-08-07T04:19:00.000-07:00

The monster of modern desktop operating systems is apparently throwing money at the development of a Windows successor, code named Midori. This hyper connected internet OS built on managed code will apparently be able to run within Windows or a virtual machine, on x86, x64 or ARM architectures. A major focus of Midori will be on concurrency, based on an asynchronous only architecture. Parallel use of local and distributed resources with a component based and data driven application model.

The operating system apparently includes something called the Asynchronous Promise Architecture which will abstract details of physical machines and processors and behave consistently across local and distributed layers. Along side this will (naturally) be a programming model and platform stack. This will all be based upon services being provided across a trusted distributed environment. The programming model will assist developers to better utilize both local and remote resources.

Midori will post clear boundaries between processes to enhance inter process communication stability. It will enforce good coding on developers and aims to have strong notions of immutability. Multi master replication of complex data and variable wide variety power management features for a wide range of devices.

Beware! This is an incubation project, so when it fails, this may well become the next Cairo. Why would it fail?

Automated multi master replication of complex data isn't possible. Computers aren't decision making machines so can't attribute value to shared data. Is Joe User's document edit from New York more important than Sally Go Lucky's edit (on the same document) in London? Sure, an operating environment can identify when multiple edits have been made, and can even merge complex data ... as long as the edits are disparate. But when the edits are on the same data, human intervention (or automated data loss) will always be required.

Next port of call is yet another entirely new API. Is the 11th (or thereabouts) time the charm? There have been so many improvements to Microsoft's API since it's age old inception, yet applications still persist using the original API. This is an enormous thorn in Microsoft's side. The absolute success of Windows has meant that it continues to carry around baggage from 1986. It's this baggage, more than a lack of ideas, that holds Microsoft (and Windows) back. No business rewrites software that is fit for purpose, so even if Midori takes the world by storm (so far unheard of), the old API must survive and people will continue to use it for legacy software. Midori's programming model is starting to look like yet another API.

Simplification of the multi processing model for developers. As a systems software engineer with over 10 years experience in every commercial environment in use today, let me say that I can barely understand parts of Microsoft's Midori explanation let alone whatever it is that is highly unlikely to be released as a production development platform. Multi processing can be simplified, most definitely, and this is a good thing. The downside is that in order to provide this and be a serious asynchronous platform, the entire multi processing model must be both simple and fully accessible. It sounds like Microsoft has focused on creating something usable rather than workable.

Process isolation to maintain stability during inter process communication. Is Microsoft STILL trying to make a driver model that doesn't crash the operating system? Why are the problems in the Microsoft OS always caused by somebody else's poorly written code? Driver certification programs, managed code environments, user driver models ... urgh. What's the most insecure desktop environment in the world? Which operating system released in the last 10 years received the poorest user reception based on stability issues? What operating system has had the most listed security flaws in history?

Abstraction of process serving over a trusted network environment with applications written to make allowance for latency issues ... a fine idea for the future really. Think about what's going to be available in 10 years time. People think about modern network latency, but when fiber runs from one computer to another, latency will be measured as a heartbeat of what it currently is today. And fiber isn't that expensive, so it will only be a short while before it criss-crosses the globe like strands of hair. Here's the kicker for this issue. This is a Microsoft trusted network ... you know, like MSN was supposed to be or DCOM tunneling didn't quite manage or Microsoft domains never quite became or SOAP service integration is still struggling with. One big happy Microsoft network where everyone knows everyone and all are friends.

So the timeframe for Midori is some time after Windows 7, ~10 years. What this operating environment offers is a laundry list of solutions to problems we're facing today. In 10 or so years we should be far removed from these issues, otherwise we'll truly deserve Midori. But there's always hope. There's bound to be an ARM based net linked toaster or washing machine that will need an operating system.

Argghhh. Why do people eat up this 'news'? Why can't wealthy corporations bribe the news media? Oh, hang on ... ignore that last comment.

CuiLater

2008-07-29T05:18:00.001-07:00

cuil is yet another search engine from a group of people with plenty of experience in the area. Ex google staff have gotten together and improved upon the google model to create something better organized, with greater coverage and top notch efficiency.

Kudos to the effort, it's a fine model. It looks sharp, is easy to use, has effective results and is well arranged. cuil is young of course, so you can expect minor imperfections to be refined as time goes on. The question is, is there valid motivation for cuil's time to continue?

There are a few things very obviously missing which get an awful lot of attention in google. Firstly, the image search. It's not something everyone uses but it's users tend to use it an awful lot. Secondly, and more importantly, is the local search facility. The local search started out small, but has expanded with google maps and the integration of business information. Local search has been copied by numerous companies (at least in Australia) but nothing is as popular as google's local search. The local search is rapidly replacing the local phone book, which is a great thing! One place to visit for all your information requirements.

Is this a digression? Probably ... but only a little.

The point is that because people are comfortable with google (or yahoo, msn ... whatever your engine) they'll be happy to keep coming back ... even for other facilities. Search is an abstract concept that people needed to get used to. Google made searching simple, efficient and quick. Despite a barrier to adoption, people are happy and confident with their search engines. It's going to take something compelling to make people switch.

So lets review cuil. It's a keyword search, with text based results, wider search than google and very few additional facilities. So the most compelling change here is the scope of the search.

If most search engine users don't move past the third page of results, is there a lot of value having 200 results pages instead of 50 results pages? And if the new engine has less additional facilities, it's really only going to be an adjunctive stop (at best) for a limited number of users.

However unfortunate this may seem, it's a lesson that has to be learned by so many people and companies. There's a pretty darn good search engine out there that has basically wrapped up the search market and just seems to keep getting incrementally better. Okay, so it's not perfect but 99.9% of the world's internet users don't need perfect, they need simple and there's nothing simpler than a complete lack of options.

In modern society, people are far more specialized than ever before in history. When you spend all of your time looking at widgets, all you'll be able to think about will be how to improve widgets. It's quite possible (and from my experience, common) for widget makers to never stop and ask if the widget is already good enough.

It's a myopic view of the world. Spend 10 years improving a search engine and you'll come up with some ideas that will be viewed by your employer as extraneous. If you're really unlucky, you'll find somebody who'll fund the development of your marginal improvement to the most successful user service ever. Call me a big fat old cynic, but if Microsoft is losing 1.2 billion per year with it's internet services, is it possible that existing markets might already be sown up?

Bye bye Wild Willy Gates

2008-06-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

Surely you've heard by now eh? Good old Wild Willy Gates is taking leave of the company he founded, in favor of a life dedicated to charity and good humanitarian stuff. The plans were announced about 2 years ago, but it's still worthy of a little reflection.

There's a little bubble of stuff about Willy showing up around the traps with his passing quietly into the night, but not a lot of meat and potatoes. So here's a Wild Willy history lesson, for the uninitiated.

Willy studied for a while at Harvard. During his tenure, he played around with various minicomputers but was particularly entranced by the Intel 8080 commodity processor and the Micro Instrument and Technology Systems (MITS) Altair 8800. He and his school buddy Paul told a little white lie to the MITS director, then proceeded to make it come true. This resulted in the forming of Microsoft, in partnership with MITS, to create and distribute the Altair BASIC interpreter.

He and Paul (tiny, tinpot Microsoft) then entered negotiations with the (then) massive beast, IBM. IBM was desperately searching for an alternative to CP/M after negotiations with Digital Research had failed. With some careful negotiations and only a little slight of hand, Willy and Paul managed to get IBM to sponsor the development of PC-DOS. It wasn't a lot of money but Willy kept hold of the copying rights of PC-DOS which allowed it to become MS-DOS and was the foundation of Microsoft as we know it.

Willy started to lead Microsoft from both the technical angles and business perspective. The drive was on to develop and market Windows, Willy's equivalent to the Apple graphical desktop. Windows didn't really take off very well (although it was far from a failure), and was just another application to be used as it fit the purpose. At this stage, Microsoft's main market was still software enthusiasts. So Willy took on another IBM contract, this time to develop a graphical OS for IBM's computers, OS/2 was born. If you lived in this era and developed software ... OS/2 was beautiful.

Microsoft eventually had differences with IBM over OS/2's development and the IBM development team moved their focus to the development of the Windows NT kernel and code base. In the meantime, the MS-DOS side of the business started to fully integrate computer hardware and software into the operating system, creating a commodity computing environment. Windows 95 was born from Willy's desire to pitch computers to everyone else, not just the enthusiasts. Understanding the mentality of computer users in this era is extremely difficult with a modern perspective. Computers were the toys (and perhaps tools) of people who liked to tinker with their machines. Everything on a computer was explicitly placed there by the owner, there was no obfuscation of files or protecting you from your own machine. You made it the way you liked it, and you used it just that way.

Windows 95 was the turning point that changed everything. Other people could suddenly use computers, and enthusiasts had their machines hijacked. Willy's Windows 95 marketing campaign made Microsoft and crushed OS/2. Love or hate Windows 95, within a year you really had no choice but to use it. Willy beat the hell out of that old horse. Windows 98, R2 and finally (hallelujah) ME. This was around the time that Windows 2000 (based on NT) was coming into it's own. There were no real competitors in the server space, so businesses started to migrate on-mass. Sure, it was painfully expensive and not as reliable as other operating systems ... but everyone was using it so you had to as well.

After Willy sensibly killed off the 9x / ME strain, the OS teams were merged up for the development of Windows XP. XP became the Windows 2000 that Windows 2000 should have been. Enthusiasts hated it, everyone else loved it. You'd be hard pressed to find a home computer today that runs anything but Windows XP. Bare in mind that up until this point, everybody loved Microsoft ... Windows was the bomb.

At about this stage, Microsoft's more dubious (yet inventive) marketing techniques became public knowledge. Other things like antitrust cases were fired up, security institutes started warning people about using Microsoft products and everything generally started to go down hill. But Willy's little company was still pressing on, and he released his trusted platform initiative. Willy needed back your trust, the trust built up by years of publicity, marketing and development.

Enter the birth of Longhorn. Longhorn was the OS slated to tilt Windows in the right direction. Revamp the API, improve the file system, re-integrate the operating system far better into it's environment. It took many years, but in the end, Longhorn (Vista) didn't deliver. It didn't deliver on the Longhorn promises and the things tallied as having been delivered were buggy, slow and inept. Some time shortly before it's launch, Willy decided to retire. Shortly afterward Willy divested himself of his majority stake in the company, feeding the funds off into his own charitable foundation.

There's been a lot of negative publicity for Willy over the last 5 or so years. It's probably well deserved. There's likely to be nobody else in the world who has had such a single handed impact on the lives of billions of people. And as any consummate politician would say, if you're pleasing everybody all of the time ... you're lying. To top it off he's the richest man in the world so that's going to annoy just about anybody else. The future for Willy is now his own and I dearly hope that his foundation can do some great things in the future. Regardless of how you might view Willy personally, his work has definitely earned him his place in the sun, good luck to you Willy.

The future for Microsoft is far murkier. A company not known for software quality with some particularly poor releases under it's belt is losing it's key inspired leadership. Tomorrow will be the first day of Microsoft's future. It could be rosy and it could be bland. History teaches that monopolies which lose their edge and can't move on will fail, and those that accept the loss and find new markets will succeed. Microsoft has left companies in it's wake that resemble both the former and the latter.

Given Willy's amazing abilities, success, vision and drive ... all backed up by a raft of proven accomplishments, could their be anybody worse for Microsoft to lose? Come 7/1/08, Microsoft is definitely a weaker company.

iPhone 2.0

2008-06-10T01:23:00.000-07:00

If you don't love apple, then love it's products. But this post isn't about Steve Jobs, it's about the iPhone.

And thank god they're being released in Australia. For those not in the know, Australia is a small backwards country in the southern hemisphere containing roughly 20 million people where cabling is made from copper, major telecommunications companies could kindly be described as humorous and the technology for sale is mostly out of date. With a few exceptions, one of which will soon be the iPhone.

Love or hate Apple, this is some tool. Before getting onto the really cool stuff, let's have a look at the techie things that don't matter to most people. It's got 300 hours of standby and 5 hours of talk, USB re-charging, 3.5 inch multi-touch screen, support for stacks of audio and video formats, 8 or 16 Gig of storage, 2 megapixel camera, HSDPA, bluetooth and WiFi. It's simple, thin, light, powerful and cheap ... my favorite combination.

Full office file compatibility, usable web browser and good e-mail client. Really cool sensor based screen rotation, turn the phone, see the correct angle. It looks sharp, it's lite and has a great interface.

I'm sold!

So to recap a little, Apple made a mobile telephone that sold so much better than anticipated, they had real difficulty keeping up with demand. You've got an unprecedented market success, what do you do? Obvious really, more than marginally improve the product and release a second generation to a much larger market than the first. Oh! And don't forget to build in a bunch of software compatibility and security features that make it attractive to the corporate market. Heaven forfend that the iPhone 2.0 wouldn't hit every mobile phone market in the world.

Don't waste money on any other brand mobile telephone, because here is the prediction of the year for you. 80+% of people willing to spend money on a mobile will be buying Apple telephones.

Granted, there are lots of people who just want a telephone as a telephone ... for emergencies and such. This group of people are still going to be using whatever gets thrown in for free with their plan, and this isn't a criticism. People who use their phones for just about anything except just using a phone will want an iPhone. The only question is, will they be willing to pay for it?

History points to the iPod market where despite being much more expensive than the competition, the iPod sank everything else out there. A mobile phone isn't an iPod (except for the iPhone), not every person using a phone is young and up with computers. That's about where Apple hits a brick wall. Let's get a little reasonable here, this isn't a telephone for retirees ... this is a new generation telephone. And aren't those non-techie types nearly extinct these days?

That was both a little cruel and to the point. The point is that there's a shrinking section of the market that will respond to the other major telephone manufacturers and a growing section of the market that will respond to Apple. Sure, there'll be the odd blackberry pundit who won't give up until RIM goes broke ... but odd is the operative word here. This isn't just another product in the Apple lineup, this is another foundation of the company. The iPhone will strengthen Apple in a similar fashion to the iPod. This is a category killer, every manufacturer will copy it ... and probably fail dismally.

The iPhone is part of a much larger strategy that you can almost clearly understand. The problem is it's stuck somewhere inside the Steve Jobs reality bubble ... and that damned thing is about as clear as gold.

AMD's Got Game

2008-05-19T23:50:00.000-07:00

Tech is a long and hard road, with many pitfalls and possibilities. AMD has found and lost itself so many times that you'd almost give up on the company altogether. Then something extra-ordinary happens, and your faith is renewed. You could liken it to a religious experience, but I've long since given up my AMD fan boy cap.

AMD is launching a new program to label gaming rigs based on the specs of the machine. So a team of people at AMD define a minimum machine spec and any computer that matches the spec can bare the 'AMD Game' logo.

The idea of having the experts define what constitutes a decent gaming setup is fiendishly sensible. It really should have been done years ago. There's nothing worse than shopping for a gaming rig. Figuring out what's good, what you need, what it costs and how it's going to perform is an exercise in serious pain and frustration. There are people who are really 'into' knowing how much cache they have, which processors utilize it and for what ... me, I like the games. It's pretty likely that about 80% of the population is on my side of the fence, where the grass is starting to get a little greener.

The consumer problem here is a matter of trust. Machine labeling has been abused by manufacturers so much that there isn't a chance in hell that people wouldn't check the specs on (for example) a 'Media Center' PC before shelling out the cash. Is it possible that AMD can turn around this trend? Lets hope so.

It's a small niche for AMD, but a worthwhile one. For those tech savvy people who lived through the P4 boom (or perhaps more accurately, spin), this rapid period of expanding architectures and re-usable system boards is obviously just buying a certain other x86 manufacturer some breathing room. A combination of monopolization and rapid development has seen AMD trodden on in all of it's expanding market segments. It would be nice to see AMD trounce (practically) uncontested through a large section of the market.

These days my cap is tin-foil rather than fan boy. It's a pragmatic attitude to support the underdog in a market which has proven many times over that competition results in growth and monopolization in stagnation.

What's Right with AJAX?

2008-04-23T03:42:00.000-07:00

After having the dubious pleasure of searching about for an appropriate AJAX toolkit, it seems that there's something wrong in the wonderful new brave frontier of web kits.

It's a little hard to quantify. I didn't really spend all that much time looking at toolkits, but it seems that the toolkits are all technically focussed. Tools to make a widget spin and dance, tools to make a connection pump and flush. But what about the real software things that application developers need to use? Screen design and event handling.

At a little function some weeks ago, I ran into a former colleague. Actually, he was a former boss and despite my being a complete bonehead while working for the guy, he was very polite and nice. He's trying to get some AJAX stuff up and running. Since that's somewhat of an area of expertise for me, he was trying to cajole a little information. He's a true programmer and a curious guy, always inventing work to do so that new technology can be included.

After a little thought, it was apparent. What can you say to help a beginner to get going with AJAX website design? There's no definitive guide, no absolute toolkit and no really correct advice.

My own project is running with mootools. It seemed the simplest thing that could be used as a basis for AJAX software. Other kits had integrated PHP with related Javascript ... a sort of "it's easy! Just include this, add this line for each function and call this routine before executing the javascript module on page 16!". Easy? Ever used VB5? Now THAT was easy.

It's endearing to see so many people so enthusiastic about AJAX. But it's also horribly painstaking. A simple little search will locate at least 50 different mature AJAX toolkits, but unfortunately most are subsets or supersets of other kits. It's tempting to think that I could do a better job and should start writing a toolkit immediately! How could it not be better?

Simple answer really. It wouldn't be better by simply existing. The waters are way too muddy already. All of those inspired toolkit creators would be better spending their time focusing on the same goal ... or basket weaving, whatever takes your fancy.

In other areas of science, what tends to happen at this point is a symposium. All the greatest minds get together, exchange information and have a general whip around that helps to bring all of the jigsaw pieces together. It's perhaps an out-dated concept with the wonderful interenet and all that modern communication type stuff eh?

What About the Artists?

2008-04-14T00:32:00.000-07:00

A few short weeks after the proposed music tax Ethan Caplan (VP of Technology at Warner Brothers Records) posted a page on society and art. It's quite well written, specifically designed and is well deserving of a systematic analysis.

"The focus though has always been on a very small situation: how to ascribe value to music, and how to prevent that value from being diminished by the notion of Free."

This guy is a senior executive for one of the largest music distributors in the world. Ethan isn't talking about ascribing value to music, he's talking about stopping the devaluation of Time Warner's music business ... and the sentence is carefully worded to make it appeal to the reader.

"How do you value art?"

What a simple question, and fundamental to the future of the music industry. Before the corporation, art was valued based on quality. Regardless of what the particular quality was (ingenuity, beauty, incite etc.), the quality defined the value of the art. After the corporation, mass-production has reduced the quality in some forms of art based on it's level of mass-marketing appeal and the potential for profit.

Does a video clip of a half naked woman dancing in a box while lip syncing the words to commercially appealing digitized music tracks constitute art? No, certainly not. This is marketing. The marketing appeal is included as an integral (if not core) part of the creative process. The artist has little or no input into the music which they deliver. If the music isn't being created by artists, then it can't be called art.

"Art is a complicated notion in the sense that it is the translation of the internal dialog within the creators core being into something that can be consumed in either representational or non-representational form by others."

In the sense of a music producer and distributor, the 'creators' referenced above is a corporation. A corporation, whilst having the same rights as an individual, does not possess a similar set of attributes. A corporation lacks emotion, understanding and conscience (amongst other things). A corporation is respectful of it's shareholders who are interested in making money. Hence the representation of the internal dialog of a corporation is by definition, a representation of greed. The representation of the music industry's internal dialog has been exceedingly clear for the last 25 years.

"The value exchange of music was rooted on the rights of the writer, the compensation for the mechanical reproducer and the acknowledgment of ownership by others who present the music. These things, 80 years later, still apply, but have had additional complication by digital vs. analog representation."

Indeed, completely accurate. The unfortunate additional complication in digital representation is that a 12 year old child can produce and distribute professional quality music with rudimentary equipment. This eliminates the responsibility and rights of the reproducer and presenter of the music.

"what is the value of the piece of art? Now its a digital artifact, but the same question applies."

The value of anything is as defined by the market place, what somebody is willing to pay for it. Mugging digital consumers on the side of the information super-highway isn't going to make everybody else passing by give a coin to the mugger.

"How does an artist make art a living, and likewise, how does an artist value their own art to the point where it is a mechanism by which they can make a living?"

Artists have a long and sordid history of starving for their work. In particular, there have been numerous world famous modern musical acts that lived in horrible conditions because they didn't have a means to capitalize on their music. Currently there are many musicians doing very well for themselves independently. Not to mention a few more notable successes netting millions in days. The internet provides a mechanism for artists to capitalize on their talents. Traditional industry support just isn't necessary anymore.

"until we remove the pro-ignoramus politics that have invaded the US in the past 20 years"

Absolutely correct. The proliferation of trade agreements to restrict the digital distribution of music. The global copyright acts that damage an artist's ability to reach their fans and restrict massive areas of research. Big business having such an in-ordinate political impact on legislation being passed by the houses of government. Purposefully expending billions of dollars to stagnate economic growth.

All to support an out-dated business model that has no chance of survival because it adds no value to the process. What's next Mr Music Industry? Going to open the world's biggest leech farm?

Windows 7 "Vienna"

2008-04-08T00:56:00.000-07:00

There are times that I just love Bill Gates. As Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs said in Made ... "That Bill Gates is a bad mutha f#%$@".

Recap a little into memory here. Wild Willy spent years swinging Windows like a baseball bat and using powerful marketing to make a mint. Wicked release schedules, dazzling eye candy and race like product development. Finally, he listens to all of the nay-sayers and the company spends billions of dollars and years of effort on a product which, when finally released, is almost universally hated. Of course, Bill hasn't been keeping any secrets about what he thinks of Windows Vista, and good on him... that's bold, more power to you.

So he's talking up the next version of Windows. Why? Because the current version is so terrible that nobody wants it. Vista is the biggest piece of bloated rubbish ever created, and saying that is almost embarrassing because it's so obvious. But people are *still* buying it... never underestimate stupidity.

In credit to Wild Willy, he's on the ball. He knows that Vista sucks, he knows that people hate it and let's be honest, he hates it too. He's put Vista behind him and he's once again setting back breaking development schedules that won't give his staff time to make that much of a mess ever again. This isn't a formal release schedule or some sort of public relations announcement. This is a legendary confidence man playing the game he plays best.

Businesses and governments have just seen that first Windows service pack released and it's time to evaluate Vista. Naturally, it sucks. It won't run on standard business hardware, all the computers need replacing, it's horribly expensive and none of their existing software will work. Likelihood of migration? 0.00%. The only people migrating are the people with no choice or those without enough common sense to plan ahead.

So Wild Willy stands up saying "Don't go, I understand your pain. The next version of Windows is already on it's way!". He's implanted an idea into the corporate mind ... "I can stay on XP until Windows 7 is released". With a single statement, millions of migrations away from Windows avoided ... cha-ching!

I'm not a Microsoft fan-boy, would never pay money for Vista and have never bought into the eye-candy. So it pains me to say this, but credit where credit is due. Microsoft have really dropped a brick with Vista and Wild Willy has maintained excellently.

Microsoft is playing down Windows 'Vienna', now known as Windows 7, leading people to believe that Windows 7 will save them from having to touch Vista. It's hard to say where things might go from here, but reverting to the XP code base would definitely be a good start. Of course this will never happen, so the most realistic option will be a Windows Vista without the baggage.

There's nothing wrong with stability releases! The best Microsoft OS ever is Windows 2000 and that was (pretty much) just a stability release. It cut into whole new markets and was a pivotal turning point for Microsoft as a company. Wild Willy knows his business and our next Windows release will be the eminently sensible '7'.

Am I Adam?

2008-03-27T00:05:00.001-07:00

If I take a bite of the Apple, shall I be forever expelled ~~from~~ to Eden?

We all know how monopolies run. You get some entity (person or company) by the shorts and slowly tighten your grip. There are so many people with iTunes installed on their computers that Apple decides to leverage it's market share in digital music software to influence it's market share in web browsers. And this is all that there is to it. It's market grubbing monopolization.

If Apple listed Safari in the download list (complete with inaccurate description) and allowed users to select it, this would be marketing, perhaps dishonest and the worst kind of marketing, but still ... marketing. Apple listing and selecting the browser without interaction is the use of force. iTunes interrupts you to tell you what you should download, and embedded amongst security updated and new codecs is an entirely different application.

When an application interrupts me, there's a reasonable expectation that the interruption is related to the application causing the interruption. If I click on 'install' without reading the entries, my expectation is that the entries will have an impact on the application which is raising the update requirements. Hiding an entirely new application in the list is dishonest, dis-reputable and not worthy of Apple or Steve Jobs. This is very close to the same behavior Microsoft was guilty of when IE was bundled with the operating system.

The thing that is horribly hard to figure out is, why the hell would Apple bother?

When OS X was first released, Apple (for business reasons) really needed a good browser as a substitute for Internet Explorer. So Konqueror was used as the basis for Safari. It held it's own, met the needs of lots of users and allowed Apple to ditch Internet Explorer. Great! Job done!

Years later, Apple is still developing Safari. An ever growing proportion of people are using Firefox and Apple is still pushing Safari. It doesn't make Apple any money, so developing Safari is an expense without income. In other words, a waste of money.

Doesn't make any sense? Oh contraire.

Never forget when you deal with Apple (as Apple repeats endlessly) that they're a hardware company. All of the software is simply to facilitate the sale of hardware. Without iTunes for Windows, iPod sales would be pathetic. Without OS X, Apple computers wouldn't sell nearly as well. But because the hardware and software work so well together, Apple sells far more units.

But the Windows Safari roll out is a different beast. Safari doesn't directly sell hardware, it's just a web browser. This isn't an exercise in direct hardware sales, this is an exercise in branding. Apple wants people to get comfortable with Apple software, to be attracted to it's appearance and be willing to use more of it. Of course, the only way to use all the Apple software will always be to buy an Apple computer, that isn't going to change.

These marketing tactics offend my sensibilities ... but I do actually *like* OS X and the related software. And I'm sick of hearing complaints from people about OS X being different from Windows.

Windows = *horrible* (common knowledge)
Not Windows = *not horrible* (not common knowledge)

Accepting change is rarely easy and breaking bad habits is a lot harder, for people and companies. That's why I always like to keep an eye on the worst thing a person or company is willing to do. Once you know that, you know how low they'll go.

Attract me? Shorten your skirt!

2008-03-22T04:25:00.001-07:00

For some time now, I've been watching (with eager anticipation) the rise of the cheap laptop. Laptops will (of course) only be ubiquitous when somebody comes up with new battery technology. But for the moment, the current low cost laptop debacle is extremely interesting.

At first, there was one. OLPC ... progenitor of the low cost laptop. A healthy not-for-profit organization completely geared toward creating laptops for low tech countries ... educate the world! That sort of thing. OLPC had a spat with Intel (over some damned thing) so Intel spent a lot of money and effort creating a competitive product for a charitable organization. But the charity really did deserve it ... go Intel!

Okay, so enough of the fun and games. Intel's system doesn't 'really' get anywhere, but flogging a dead horse isn't going to hurt the horse, so you may as well push it wherever you're able. Hence Intel targeting 'new' markets for the third world laptop. But hold on, ASUS has beaten Intel to the punch (enter the eepc) with a small form factor machine that costs a minute amount of comparable small form factor machines (bloody ASUS, what do I do with my Libretto now?).

So what is Intel doing?

What surprises me isn't that companies and the tech news aren't asking this question, what really surprises me is ... how could this happen without serious competition? ASUS was just market grabbing. ASUS was known as a board manufacturer, and expanding has been difficult. Particularly after the history of laptop brand entry (with related poor quality) and the burning of the private parts of a doctor (some years ago) due to heat dissipation issues with early models. But finally, ASUS has won the minds of a group of consumers! More power to them. This is what competition is about.

But on the other hand is Intel. A former processor and chipset manufacturer moving into the laptop market by leveraging their existing (massive) processor and chipset fabrication business. Where is the HP, DELL or Linovo ultra cheap laptop? Why is such an important, emerging market segment being ignored by the major laptop producers?

Given that Intel can produce laptops at a price point to satisfy low cost markets, you've got to assume that other companies can as well. Whatever Intel's failings might be, they don't include completely irrelevant profitless market decision making.

Which (most unfortunately) can lead to only one conclusion, laptops are horrendously overpriced and laptop manufacturers (/ distributors) want it to stay that way. Why throw away 120% profit in exchange for 20% profit? That's why we're not seeing realistic price points for laptops in the market place. Laptops have been reaching mass-production cost reduction price points for a very long time, but prices are still crazy.

Nope, it's a corporate world out there. Pointing out to Apple that their laptop prices aren't balanced across currencies, or trying to get Dell to sell you a laptop without an operating system is very similar to banging your head against a brick wall, but without the satisfaction of knocking yourself senseless.

I suppose this only leaves one question unanswered. How long before Intel (household name and world renowned market leader) starts seriously producing laptops?

AOL Mistakes Social Network for a Business

2008-03-17T01:35:00.000-07:00

Kudos to the Bebo team, they're smarter than they look :-) Husband and wife duo Xochi and Michael Birch have sold off their website to AOL (parent company Time Warner) for $850,000,000 dollars.

Some quotes from the AOL team:
"This is a tremendous acquisition and one I think is game-changing for AOL,"
"Bebo will be the cornerstone of our strategy."
"In terms of Bebo, we think it is an excellent asset at a great price."
- Randy Falco, AOL Chairman
"The distribution aspect of linking up with AIM and ICQ is an extraordinary opportunity for us,"
- Joanna Shields, Bebo President
"open to any strategic moves that make sense."
- Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner

Firstly, let's get started with Randy Falco's comments on the Bebo acquisition. Randy refers to this as a game changing acquisition for AOL. Naturally, if you lost every match for 3 years, you'd also want to change games. The interesting part is that Randy refers to this as being game changing, so AOL is still playing an old game and just getting started on the new. Apparently, insolvency didn't shock the AOL team into the practical needs of a real world market place.

Randy's reference to a strategy has me a little perplexed. There seems little logic to a shrinking, broke ISP spending $850 million of it's parent company's money to purchase something which (at current rates of return) will pay itself off in about 20 years. 20 years ago, I was using a commodore 64 with a magnetic tape drive. Now, I have a portable and silent computer about 500 times as powerful on which I can access information worldwide without a cable. If the face of the internet hasn't changed in 10 years, every person on the planet would be shocked.

And is Bebo an excellent asset at a great price? What asset? It's a company name, a bunch of servers and a notoriously fickle group of information consumers. Given it's general popularity, it's very unlikely to die overnight. Having said that, Bebo is only 3 years old. The obvious cause of it's success are the startup owners who will (apparently) now be moving on. So what do you buy when purchasing a social website? It's not a purchase of loyalty, society or software?

Joanna from Bebo may be the president, but she definitely has no say in this decision. So she (naturally) keeps a straight face. Whatever AOL tell her about their plans, she'll be enthusiastic. She probably enjoys being president of a company, and even if she doesn't enjoy the work, I'm guessing she would enjoy the money (or need time to find another job). No criticism here! Whatever Joanna's motives, it's the same thing I'd do in her position.

Jeff Bewkes is the unfortunate inheritor of this tragic debacle between Time Warner and AOL. There have been serious rumors circulating about a deal between Time Warner and Yahoo. Time Warner would bail out Yahoo, and offload the slowly dying AOL onto them. Not a bad idea really, admit to the mistake of purchasing AOL and see it off in some style. Give Yahoo some room to expand in new and interesting markets. The Yahoo team are probably even creative enough to prop some life into AOL yet.

If a chain of 5 fast food restaurants were for sale and combined, they profited around $5 million per year, would they be worth $850 million? No, of course not. An $850 million restaurant purchase would be for an entire chain of restaurants that made a profit of at least $50 million per year. Bebo is currently looking like about a 0.5% return per annum. Give me $850 million and I'll get you an absolute bare minimum of 10%, no hesitation. Give a 10 year old child $850 million and they could get a 5% return!

So it's obvious that this purchase is based on estimated or future returns. AOL expect to make good returns from Bebo in the future. Now, you can map a vague impression of what 40 (or more) million people will do over the course of 5 years or so, but given the incredible amount of variables involved, there's no way to be sure.

Given that obvious fact, this is an $850 million dollar leap of faith from a company that:
- Went broke
- Got saved from bankruptcy
- Wasted billions of Time Warner's money
- Has little or no apparent future
Who is authorizing this purchase and why would a public company be allowed to make such a leap of faith without consulting share holders?

Note that the Bebo owners chose to take their payment in cash. No stock trading deals here. Very clever, they understand the risks involved. After all, they understand the market. If the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, the Birch's are probably the most capable web business development team in the world. So why would a failing internet business (AOL) pay no attention to this?

Someone shouted Web 2.0, and hundreds of people wrote books. Every developer from here to Hocksnard started learning how to squeeze an xmlHTTPRequest object through an IP keyhole to make cumbersome and hard to maintain websites which were termed Web 2.0 applications. But this is just the same smoke and mirrors of the first internet bubble, only now, the suckers are companies and not individuals.

Web applications are a great thing! Probably the best thing to happen to computers since they were invented. I write web applications. They're much more complicated, cumbersome, difficult, costly to develop, hard to test, problematic to debug and irritating to work with than any other platform I've touched. But my clients, just don't care. These are problems for the supplier because the supplier writes, tests, maintains, updates, deploys, debugs and hosts all of the software. The client needs three things, a basic computer, an average internet connection and a telephone to call the supplier when the software isn't working.

So what's the difference between me and Bebo? The software I work on is built to purpose, people pay for it and it's the backbone of business. It has a real business model that facilitates efficiencies and hence, companies are willing to pay for it... income. Real income, not intangible marketing revenue based on the whims of consumers.

So is Bebo going to be the platform for some future internet revenue making model? Wanna bet?

Is Microsoft Antitrust Worthy?

2008-03-11T00:06:00.000-07:00

There's a new marketing arm of Microsoft, the interoperability pages. For the record, I'm not a big fan of Microsoft products.

Having said that, I'm also quite against the complete waste of money that has been the Microsoft bashing performed by governments. For several years, huge sums of tax payer dollars were thrown at the Internet Explorer case only to have it (basically) dismissed as soon as nobody was watching. Anti-competitive legislation in free markets is similar to fitting a speed limiter to a Ferrari. Why not just let the competition shake everything loose?

If governments are really worried about competition, start competing. Would there have been anything wrong with the US government funding a startup to create the better browser? Imagine what the court costs could have achieved if even a 10th of the money was thrown behind Firefox. This sort of approach really has the potential to effect change. Fining very successful companies really has the potential to ruin economies.

It's a very weak system. It looks good on paper, but what have the huge Microsoft antitrust cases done except waste an awful lot of resources for very little gain? Federal and state governments can file suit against large corporations but the fines levied don't actually help competition and they do actually hurt business. Individual businesses won't often file suit, you've got to be realistic. A business that got beaten up in the market place by a larger player isn't likely to have the resources to knock them out in a protracted court case.

So if antitrust is going to be dealt with, deal with it using a little common sense. Maintaining a fair and even market is the important part. Any 12 year old can tell you that 96% of desktop computers have Microsoft operating systems on them, a court case isn't necessary to prove it. What's needed is to get different operating systems onto 50% of desktop computers. If the courts want that operating system to be made in the US, they'd better start looking for solutions rather than proving problems.

Airing Out Ideas

2008-03-03T15:48:00.000-08:00

Apple are very bold with their plans, and I love it. Apparently, I'm not alone.

When the air was launched, the nay-sayers were up and running before poor Steve Jobs had taken a breath. Some of the more frequent comments were 'it has no ports' and 'the battery life can't be that good' and by far my favorite 'it will be very popular with the polo-neck sweater crowd'. And still, despite all of the tech pundit commentary, the MacBook Air is apparently selling and probably faster than polo neck sweaters. And this is a highly customized Rev A product - an area Apple isn't strong in. Can't wait to see the sales levels when the Rev B is released!

The pundits will need an explanation, and here it is. When you have to carry a computer, there are lots of things you rarely need. A disk drive, a firewire port, an ethernet interface and a DVI adapter. What you really need is a fast processor, reasonable storage, lots of RAM, light weight, usable keyboard and a durable case. I don't need my laptop to be a desktop computer squeezed into a laptop case, I need it to be a laptop. If I want a powerful desktop, I'll buy a powerful desktop. 99.8% of the time when a laptop is mobile, features just don't matter, your sore shoulder does.

And the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. They may or may not be flying off the shelves, but they are selling and selling well. In terms of features, the air is expensive for what you get, but hey, it's a Mac ... accept the design costs or move along. What you can't buy from other laptop makers is a ~1kg laptop that's actually usable.

It's inspired purpose built design and if Mr Jobs isn't recognized for his inspired design then why is Apple doing so well?

The same pundits who complained about Apple removing the floppy drives are the same group complaining about the loss of the extra sockets, points, lights, bells and switches. It's alright to be impressed by good design without wanting to purchase the product. Personally, I'll be buying something from the MacBook Pro range just because I regularly use 2 USB ports and my DVD drive, the Air would be a little inconvenient. But in fairness to Apple, it was a very close call.

Regularly purchasing laptops has been something of a hobby for the last 6 years or so and I've found that there's very little to inspire a buyer. Black or silver boxes with lots of holes around the sides made of poor quality plastics with weak screen hinges, hard to identify switches, fans that sound like a jet launching and all recommending and coming pre-installed with operating systems a computer pundit would never choose to use.

There's a turning point slowly arriving. The era of computers becoming more powerful is slowing down. As computers become more connected and the applications we use require that connectivity, the gray metallic boxes of computer history are becoming less and less desirable. Any machine with any operating environment and a decent connection will become the rule of thumb. Purpose built, sturdy, serviceable equipment that meets connectivity requirements.

Patently Confusing

2008-02-28T19:20:00.000-08:00

Just in case you've been living on the moon for the last 10 years, software patents are a large and contentious issue.

The new End Software Patents (ESP) group is made up of all the usual suspects, except after 10 some odd years, they've figured out that there's safety in numbers. IANL and the details of software patents are probably more complex than I'll express here, but too often the news surrounding software patents ends up getting too detailed, so I'll express it in a fashion that makes sense.

Anyone can file an idea for a software invention without having to write software that uses the invention. You have the rights to that idea, and it's basically up to you to pursue anyone who uses your idea in a software implementation. So you contact the USPTO and file something that 'uses a combination of clicks and mouse gestures to make a digital animal move across the screen from left to right', or something to that effect, then sue everyone who tries to use a mouse to make an animal move across a screen.

Since ideas can be patented, people (and companies) are patenting any idea they can come up with. The USPTO is so overwhelmed by the amount of patents coming in that they just pass anything that looks reasonable and let the Federal Circuit courts (created specifically to address patent issues) deal with the ramifications.

I'm interested in the whole debacle because it's not entirely clear what the motivation behind software patents is. Corporations should dislike it because they're the ones writing and selling software and hence, being sued. Open source developers dislike it because they suddenly have to defend their creations. The USPTO should dislike it because it's weakening the patent system. The government should dislike it for the same reason, and because it weakens the technology industry (by shifting billions away from companies). Market traders and investors should dislike it because it reduces company returns. So who is making out?

It seems that the people making out on patents are not the little guys who invest in large companies (or the companies themselves) but the moderately wealthy individuals or small investor groups who are able to afford myriads of patents and obtain funding for the subsequent legal disputes. Other people are filing patents defensively, to get in before the competition so that they don't get sued. Each company is walling themselves in behind a defensive patent collection that threatens every other company because everyone has long since been forced to use patented ideas, it's just not possible to swim in the ocean without getting wet.

So it's safe to assume at this point that the current state of the patent system is undesirable for the vast majority of parties and an unintentional mess.

I'd say that the most difficult patent question is, what constitutes something new and original? What's an invention? 150 years ago, (for example) the USPTO wouldn't have accepted a patent application for a screw with a thread wound in the opposite direction, even though it may have been a new idea ... it was still a screw. But apply one of these new whiz bang screws to the end of an axle and hey presto, a wheel that doesn't come loose as it turns. It was the application of ideas that was patented. The machine for raveling cotton, the steam pump or the internal combustion engine. Somebody didn't patent the idea of 'using a machine to ravel cotton', they patented the machine itself.

The fundamental principles haven't changed. Patenting the 'one click' or a 'method for streaming media' is like patenting the idea of 'automatically raveling cotton' or 'using petrol to generate motion'. Software patents are, in and of themselves, not a bad thing. The creators of Napster or Netscape deserve rewards for their work. But it wasn't the idea of a hypertext browser or music sharing tool that had the value adding impact, it was the tool itself. This is what should be patentable ... something tangible, usable, competitive and original. A collection of cool algorithms expressed as a real product which performs a function that is unique enough to be considered original.

Office Standardization

2008-02-27T02:13:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is in the middle of attempting to fast track it's OOXML standard, and Google has fired off an analysis in response to the ECMA's disposition of comments.

Let me start by saying, I'm not a fan of Microsoft. After nearly 20 years of experience using just about every Microsoft product ever released, there's only one conclusion that can be reached. Microsoft has yet to do anything properly. On many occasions, they've come close (DOS 3.2, Windows 2000 Professional, SQL Server 2000 to name a few) but each was deficient in it's own ways and more to the point, those deficiencies were never addressed.

And this is the fashion of product creation and release from Microsoft. Make it 'good enough', sell it and deny all culpability. Recent incredibly costly attempts at creating something better have had similar outcomes, so not pressuring Microsoft is obviously a good thing. The best Microsoft that Microsoft can be is ... well ... Microsoft. The finest marketer of the most exceptionally average computer software in the world.

This whole OOXML standardization idea is just marketing. Governments were dropping Microsoft's products because they 'weren't open' or 'weren't standardized' or 'weren't inter-operable' so Microsoft creates and documents a useless file format, submitting this to standardization bodies, saving them billions in government contracts. Government bureaucrats were handed a neat excuse to not attempt the daunting task of switching office productivity suites.

OOXML standardization approval will happen or not. It really doesn't matter. People, companies and government bodies are already using the new file format which was released to the wild long before the standard was even looking to be ratified. This proves categorically that Microsoft has no interest in standards, only in the appearance of being supportive of standards.

The truth is, governments weren't dropping Microsoft Office because of the stated reasons. These reasons were just convenient excuses to stop paying unrealistically large sums of money for a desktop productivity suite, particularly when the competition is free. Many countries switched because the effort involved in switching productivity suites was less costly than continuing to pay Microsoft.

Back in the good old days, all of the software for a computer used to cost about 20% of the computer's price. Today, computers cost about half as much and the equivalent software costs about 10 times as much. When Microsoft jacks up the prices high enough on the next 'newer' and 'better' and 'bolder' office suite causing large organizations and wealthier governments to decide to stop paying, the body will fall into the grave with a very loud thud. No amount of slush money can prop up that corpse.

Forget the white noise, left wing software maniacs, standards bodies and even Google's rants.

The only serious question anyone should be asking is: "Will Microsoft reduce their prices before the majority of people start using alternative software?". The realistic answer to this is: "No, Microsoft will reduce prices after the given price point has proven unsuccessful in the market place.".

Yahoo suing Yahoo

2008-02-25T23:10:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Yahoo shareholders are getting busy suing ... Yahoo?

The group managing your pension fund is about to spend your fund suing the company which it has apparently mistakenly invested in because they didn't accept the first offer in a take over bid. Now Yahoo will have the opportunity to spend flagging profits fighting the case, in order to defend the decisions of the board of directors elected by the shareholders who are suing them.

It's about time for the members of the pension fund to get together and fire up a class action suit to sue the pension fund for wasting their pension filing pointless lawsuits.

Some analysts who don't understand technology or the internet have caused a pension fund to lose truckloads of their money by investing in a flagging former internet giant. Now they're trying to recoup losses by forcing a quick settlement from a company that is busy negotiating a new deal to try to boost it's market share, staying huge for another 10 years. Yahoo isn't even dead and the vultures are already circling.

But more than ever perception is reality. If people start to treat Yahoo like a rotting limb on a tree, it might actually end up being lopped. This public display of a lack of confidence by investors will only serve to drive down the share price, thereby causing the pension fund to lose even more money. The only tiny saving grace is this pathetic hedge of a lawsuit which by causing Yahoo pain, will be more and more likely to succeed as the actual share price continues to differ from the original offer.

Question to the initiated, why wouldn't the pension fund simply sell their shares to Microsoft?

Prosecuting Music Piracy

2008-02-20T17:11:00.000-08:00

Ars has an article outlining the RIAA's attempts to convince district attorney's of how to deal with big bad music pirates.

It's a shame that the record and phonographic associations are having such a terrible time coming to terms with the modern era of digital music, once their market is gone, they'll only have themselves to blame.

This is a common enough story that hearing it again and again will almost bring you to tears. You take an established market, with one or more dominant players, and create a similar but new market. The dominant players fail to see the value proposition in the new market, make the mistake of not taking part in or fighting against it and end up spending all of their hard earned wealth going broke.

This movie may be hilarious in construct and filled full of valuable insights into the mindset of music industry groups, but it's very scary in one chilling aspect. It clearly illustrates the lack of respect which these industry groups have for the legal system and more importantly, the people who work within it. If you were a great legal mind having your house payed off by arguing copyright cases for these record industry groups, would it not disturb you that your employer thinks of people in your profession as tools to be influenced, used and discarded?

This musical migration is all about individuals. At some stage in the future, any serious legal mind won't dare be seen supporting a large music industry organization ... very similar to how serious music lovers wouldn't be seen dead buying compact disks and many true musical artists are already working independently of the established music business.

There's a new bridge forming. The bridge between artists and fans. Some highly successful acts are negotiating their way along this bridge by using customer feedback, interaction and direct on-line sales. As the marketing presence of these industry groups continues to reduce in strength, what they begin to offer is no longer a big-time success story, it's a first step on the road to gaining enough of a profile to work independently of any industry group. We're seeing the first teetering steps of the music industry associations climbing down that ladder of success.

This is a great time in history to be alive. I'm proud to be a generation X individual, and saddened that I'm not generation Y.

Microsoft spending money, yahoo!

2008-02-19T17:03:00.000-08:00

Alright, so the biggest tech company in the world is trying to buy another of the biggest tech companies in the world, so what's the big deal?

Well, that's really the point isn't it. Paying billions for a company that's been steadily dying off for many years isn't a good idea. Going into dept to buy that company is being hopeful. Buying them at a premium while the share price is at a slump might be pretty smart, but it's still a desperate reaction.

But why do it at all? Well, wild Will and his 800lb gorilla have never gotten over their failure to control the on-line market. Sure, there's a few small success stories here and there but of course an 800lb gorilla is always going to eat a lot of bananas. But can an 800lb gorilla swallow a truck full of bananas without getting indigestion?

The issue with this sort of merger is the dynamic motion of the market. Many real world companies are buying into large internet sites just for a foothold, because to them, the future is clear and they can't afford to miss the truck. It's risk vs reward. You risk spending some millions, over not getting your bunch of bananas. But our 800lb gorilla isn't happy with his bunch of bananas, he's an envious beast and wants the whole truckload.

The problem is that even an 800lb gorilla can't swallow a whole truckload of bananas overnight, and it's unlikely he can keep up with the truck.