Tuesday Oct 20, 2009
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Tuesday Oct 20, 2009
- Street View: We can trike wherever you like - Trail view? River view? Someday, house view? Send your suggestions in.
- T-Mobile Data Loss Falsely Reflects on Cloud Computing - "We need to stop calling everything that does not exist within our firewalls 'the cloud.'" Well said.
- EU's MySQL inquiry may backfire for open source - Well written article, but is MySQL an exception or will what the EU is doing become the new rule?
Thursday Oct 15, 2009
- Google Wave: The moral equivalent of sliced bread - Interesting back and forth between ZDNeters.
- Mono-mania: It's risky business - Good read on how Samba and Mono are different when it comes to patent protection.
Monday Oct 12, 2009
- The T-Mobile-Microsoft Sidekick data disaster: Poor IT management going mainstream - Ooops. But is this really cloud? Or just a regular data center not being backed up? James Governor's 15 Ways to Tell Its Not Cloud Computing may help answer that.
- Apple versus Microsoft: The top 20 stolen ideas of the OS wars - It is interesting to remember where some of the features that we take for granted came from.
- Sun, Oracle chiefs vow: Sun technologies will live on - It was great to see Scott on stage and Larry went after IBM.
- Windows 7 boots 42% slower than Vista, says study - Ouch, are the claims of it being faster just smoke and mirrors? More concerning, "By the end of a simulated two-year period, Windows 7's startup times increased more than 330 percent."
Friday Oct 09, 2009
- Mickos letter to EU: Approve Oracle-Sun deal - A good read that (IMHO) accurate outlines the situation.
- Dell creating Android phone? - Interesting move, but surprised about this: "Interestingly, Dell is splintering the Android stack and shipping the phone with modified or missing Android libraries, making it a bit harder to program. The tipster reported that some apps won’t work on this version."
- AT&T ends iPhone VoIP restrictions; Skype set free - Great news.
Friday Oct 02, 2009
- IBM Challenges Google's Webmail Dominance - The price is right, but it admittedly has fewer features than Google. But both are a lot cheaper than the offering from Microsoft according to the article. This is a clear indication though that IBM doesn't consider cloud e-mail only for consumers and doesn't want to cede that market to its competitors. For those interested in such things it does support IMAP IDLE and they do have a free trial, but you have to call to sign up. Now isn't that old school.
- Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype - I have not tried it (I'm open to an invitation anyone!) but this makes it sound like it is far too busy an interface to deal with for any type of quantity of groups/friends/messages. But it is early and I'm sure Google will improve it.
Thursday Oct 01, 2009
- Prepare to freak out! iPhone developers are using apps to pass your phone number to telemarketers - See this too. It appears it is easy enough to do through the API or sending an SMS that this would have been exposed earlier. Did Apple's review process just miss this one? Even if there is a purpose for such and API, you'd expect a pop-up like there is for sharing your location with an app so the user could approve the use.
- GM, eBay pull plug on online car sales experiment - I hadn't taken a look, but if I was car shopping I would have.
- Microsoft vs. Google: An e-mail showdown at L.A. City Hall - The future for commodity apps like e-mail is the cloud, but is it ready for the City of Los Angeles?
- Life With Snow Leopard: One Month Later - Nice but not compelling according to this review
Thursday Sep 24, 2009
- Starbucks App Uses Your iPhone to Pay for Lattes - Limited to Seattle and Silicon Valley for now, but still a creative idea. Soon you'll be able to leave your wallet home and just take your iPhone!
- Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program - This is a great idea to jumpstart use and adoption, but the restrictions are pretty strict (build web-sites, less than 10 employees, can deploy to only 1 quad CPU box). And do you really want to get locked in to a technology that you know you will be paying for in a few years when there are open-source alternatives?
- Layer 7 introduces Securespan Gateway AMI for Amazon EC2 apps - A great offering for those that need this type of security for their cloud based applications.
- Google suffers 2nd email disruption in a month - I'm a Gmail user and did notice the disruption, but its free and isn't causing me to look elsewhere, ..., yet.
- AT&T iPhone's to get MMS - Not that big an issue for me, I just e-mail photos. But I will give it a shot and do my part to contribute to overloading AT&T's network.
links for 2009-9-24: Palm vs Apple; Cloud/Amazon toolkits; How the Spaceship Got Its Shape
- USB group none too happy with Palm's iTunes hack, either - I wonder if Palm even tried arriving at an agreement with Apple? Would Apple even consider it?
- As Eclipse Kits for Cloud Arrive, Amazon Deployment Wins - Forrester's John Rymer takes a look at some different kits mostly for Amazon.
- How the Spaceship Got Its Shape - Great historical read for those space or aeronautical buffs out there.
Wednesday Sep 23, 2009
- Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this - Good read, although the comments seem to challenge how big a part XMPP plays.
- Space Station Fly-Around - An impressive and educational animation.
Tuesday Sep 22, 2009
- The 10 biggest moments in IT history - With all due respect to COBOL, #1 has to be the ARPANET which led to the Internet.
- Wireless service boosters: A good idea but we shouldn't have to pay extra - Consistent with my rant on the same subject. And this adds to my argument in that AT&T benefits by taking traffic off their network.
- Was Apple a "Liar Liar" to the FCC about the Google Voice app? - Google fighting back in the battle for public opinion.
- Now In Europe: Amazon SimpleDB, CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing - I hadn't looked deeply before, but surprised there was a gap until now.
- Comparing langugaes - Java certainly isn't dead, and is in fact more used than C according to this report from the great folks at Ohloh.net. Python and PHP still growing but interesting Ruby seems to have dipped in the past year.
Monday Sep 21, 2009
- Dell to buy Perot Systems for $3.9 billion - Dell needed something other than low margin and susceptible to downturn PC sales, Perot is strong in Healthcare and Government, hmmm, those are growing.
- How to save the PC: A petition to Microsoft and Apple - Partitioning is a good idea, but introduces having to get partition sizes right. And on Windows, a separate partition for apps doesn't really work given how apps have to install things in the registry too. Another solution, and one I hope you are all doing, is just to have regular backups you can restore from.
Friday Sep 18, 2009
- Joltid vs. Skype: Is there a workaround? - How can eBay have exposed themselves to this?
- Google Docs tool used by 20% of companies - "The study's main finding is that about 1-in-5 companies reported that Google Docs is "widely used" in their workplace, however possibly as a complement to Microsoft Office." But if you are just looking for a free alternative to Microsoft Office, try OpenOffice.
- Do you really need Office? Really? If the Feds don't, do we? - "For 95% of what we do, though, Apps does the trick quite nicely and allows people to work together in really nice ways."
- Android vs Maemo - Interesting read for those that haven't heard of Maemo (Nokia's Linux based OS).
Friday Sep 11, 2009
- Report says IBM is switching from Microsoft Office to Lotus Symphony - And it isn't about cost, the story says, rather it is about ensuring documents are stored in open formats (ODF). I wonder if IBM had bought Sun if StarOffice would have been the choice or an approved app?
- Motorola's big Android bet kicks off - New phones on multiple carriers. Competition is good.
- Sprint unveils unlimited mobile calling, data, text, MMS for $70 - And Sprint is competing on price!
- 9/11 - Let us never forget.
Thursday Sep 10, 2009
- iPhone OS 3.1 now enforces Exchange encryption policy, may block pre-3GS iPhones - Let me preface this by saying I am no Exchange expert, but how can Exchange have a security policy that it allows clients to ignore?
- Google Voice and Gmail are sort of merging - A couple nifty new features.
- Global CIO: Oracle Nailed By EU Protectionism As HP And IBM Raid Sun - An interesting viewpoint.
Wednesday Sep 09, 2009
- Microsoft trains Best Buy Linux assassins - First, Microsoft clearly sees Linux, particularly on netbooks, a threat. Second, shouldn't BestBuy focus on selling what customers want rather than one specific vendors products?
- OpenID, meet the U.S. government - Will this help jumpstart the use of OpenID?