Just a couple news shorts:
This started me thinking, just when did I start to dislike Apple so much?
Android now #2 best selling mobile OS
This conclusion is based on sketchy data gathered from surveys, not from actual handset sales, but still, it shows that Android is poised to become an unstoppable force.
It seems the lessons of the past are not so easily learned. Time and time again DRM encumbered content has tried and failed to catch on with consumers. Yet, the megalomaniacs in the entertainment industry just can’t get their head around the concept that people would rather own the things they pay for.
So, according to this story on the BBC, once again they have formed a consortium to develop, yes you guessed it, yet another DRM scheme.
Here is my “bold” prediction; while they waste time arguing about how to deliver content online, the entire Internet will “solve” that problem for them in much the same way Napster “solved” online music delivery.
Can you believe it’s 2010 and the entertainment industry is just now starting to talk about how to deliver content online? Seriously?!? Where have these people been for the last 10 years?
I thought the music industry was a bunch of arrogant ignoramuses but at least in 1998 the music execs could make the excuse “hey, we’re baby boomers! We know nothing about this interweb thingy.”
No excuse for that now.
The rumor mill is churning over reports that HP was so dissatisfied with Windows 7 on it’s upcoming Slat device that it’s killed the project and is in the process of switching to another OS, possibly Android. This despite the fact that Microsoft already championed the device at CES 2010.
In my opinion, the only thing giving this rumor credence is the battery life issue. HP can’t release an “iPad killer” with less than 1/2 the battery life of Apple’s product. This means switching chip sets to something more efficient and that results in dumping Windows7 since it only runs on Intel.
You know Apple’s “coolness” factor is in serious jeopardy when you’ve become the target of ridicule on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. A partial transcript:
“Apple – you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn’t supposed to be this way – Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the fuck is going on?!”
It’s becoming more and more clear that Apple has become arrogant and out of touch. Case in point, Steve Jobs actually had the gall to state that one of the main reasons Apple won’t allow Adobe Flash on the iPhone is because Flash is “not open”.
Let me get this straight… You won’t allow Flash on your completely closed and proprietary iPhone platform because Flash is closed and proprietary?!? Only someone who is completely oblivious to the way Apple acts and is perceived in the real world would make a statement that ridiculous.
So if Steve believes Adobe Flash is doomed because it’s closed and proprietary, what is he predicting for Apple? Again, clear evidence he is out of touch.
Just a quick follow up to my post from yesterday about just how disruptive Android is going to be. I spotted a story today on Engadget that talks about how Motorola is planning to put Android on it’s set top boxesматраци.
As an interesting side note; the article correctly points out that it’s even harder to deal with cable companies than cellular companies. But, keep in mind, cell companies are only now starting to bend since Apple demonstrated it had the power to transform their business.
Cable companies are still arrogant. They sit on their comfortable monopolies printing money paying little attention to emerging trends and doing no innovation. Do they not realize that TV over IP is about to transform broadcast and cable? If we could ever get decent bandwidth, who would need cable?
If anyone had doubts about the impact Google is having on the mobile space, the Mobile World Congress (MWC) should have put those doubts to rest.
Ad revenue from Android phones are the fastest growing segment of the mobile ad space and mobile carriers are starting to make some disturbing pronouncements such as Vodafone chief Vittorio Colao declaring that they may start to charge search engines for access to their network. Cell phone carriers are true “bellheads“. They just can’t fathom a network where they don’t control every aspect of it. I’m just dieing to see what happens when Vodafone cuts off their customers from Google (”What? Your network doesn’t have ‘The Internet’?!?!).
But I digress. The point of this post is that even though the iPhone still gets all the media attention, Google’s Android is the one gaining market share and making the most waves in telecom circles.
And it won’t stop there. Android’s openness is poised to make it the most disruptive technology this decade. Unlike the iPhone which only runs on devices developed, sanctioned and released by Apple, Android can run on anything. Soon it’ll be popping up not only on phones, but netbooks, laptops, TVs, desk phones and absolutely anything that device manufactures want to put an interface on.
Android won’t just challenge the smart phone market, but it has the potential to make inroads into every consumer technology out there; tipping over everyone’s apple cart as it goes.
It seems that with the launch of the iPod in 2001, the whole world forgot that until that point, Apple had not had a hit product since the Apple IIc. In fact, the company was such a looser it was flirting with bankruptcy. Failure after failure meant things were so bad that in 1997 Apple had to be bailed out by Microsoft, a fact that causes Apple fanboys to cringe to this day.
Sure the Macintosh generated a lot of hype, mostly on the back of the famous Ridley Scott directed “1984″ commercial that launched the product, but it never had any significant market share and Apple did nothing significant in the 1990s. It’s only accomplishment during that time seems to have been influencing the design of Microsoft Windows.
In 2007, Apple released the iPhone. Without question this has been Apple’s biggest accomplishment. Apple proved that with careful design, Mobile computing can be a compelling segment of the market. So what to do next?
Based largely on the halo effect generated by the iPod and iPhone, systems running Mac OS are up marginally but show no signs of displacing Microsoft on the desktop, _ever_.
Meanwhile, eReaders and Netbooks are generating a lot hype so Apple is tempted to enter that segment of the market and thus we have the iPad. As Steve Jobs infamously said in his own speech, “netbooks do nothing well”. Unfortunately, the rest of that sentence is “and the iPad does them worse.”
Basically the iPad is an over-sized iPod-touch. I don’t know anyone who uses an iPod-touch for anything useful. Furthermore, the display might be nice compared to an iPod or iPhone, but sure as heck doesn’t replace a desktop and it’s glare prone illuminated touch-screen sucks as an eReader since it won’t be visible in bright light. At .73kg, it’s three times heaver than a Kindle! Who wants to lug that around?
There is nothing an iPad does that isn’t already being done on the much more portable iPhone, or a much more versatile MacBook, or a much cheaper NetBook, or an easier to read eBook. In short, it’s an “in-between” device that’s so in between everything that it serves no purpose.
Need a truly mobile device? Get an iPhone. Need a portable computer? Get a laptop. Need a cheap portable computer? Get a Netbook. Need to read electronic books? Get an eReader.
Need to prove you’re still an Apple fan-boy? Get an iPad.
I’ve hacked up a little program to track the accuracy of weather forecasts in an attempt to determine if the forecasting computer models are flawed.
It’s no secret that predicting the weather is hard and even the experts frequently get it wrong, but I seem to be noticing that when they get it wrong, they always tend to error on the optimistic side. For example, if the 5 day forecast predicts 20C, it actually ends up being 15C. Being off by a few degrees is understandable but if it truely was a science, then it should be wrong the other way approximately the same amount of times. So when they predict 20C, half the time we should get 25C but it never seems to work that way.
I know very little about forecasting but from what I understand, all forecasters use computer models. Usually they run a few different models then set the forecast based on the consensus. If my theory is correct, my data will show that on average the forecast is always too optimistic and that will prove that the computer models are wrong.
If that turns out to be the case then it raises some other questions.
First of all, the weather modelers should already know this. They have access to all the forecast data and can easily compare the predictions with the actual temperatures and then adjust their models accordingly to make them more accurate. Why haven’t they done that?
A wrong forecast may not seem like a big deal but does it have other implications? Do the same people that wrote the software which makes short term forecasts also write the climate models that predict global warming?
It’s going to take some time to gather enough information to be meaningful (at least a year), and maybe I’m wrong? Once I’ve gathered enough data to make some pretty graphs I’ll post a link to a site where everyone can take a look at the results.
As predicted, the government mismanagement of the technology portfolio is turning into a disaster that just keeps on giving. Today, the first lawsuits was filed. To my surprise, it was one of the new entrants, Public Mobile who launched the first lawsuit (I expected it to be one of the incumbents).
Public Mobile is complaining loudly that granting Globe Alive a one-time exception to the foreign ownership rules puts it at a major competitive disadvantage. No kidding. One company can draw on a massive pool of foreign investment capital, and the rest can’t. It’s completely unfair.
Not only unfair, but bad for Canada. Since the rest of the new entrants didn’t have access to as foreign capital, they weren’t able to bid as high as they would have or buy as much spectrum as they might have to become significant national competitors.
How much higher would the bidding have gone? How much money did the Conservatives throw away at the auction by not allowing more bidders? Given that the auction went into the billions, it’s a safe bet that Canada is out “billions”. A disaster and a scandal of epic proportions.
Thank goodness parliament prorogued or the Conservatives might have to answer for their actions.
I recently had the need to query a bunch of UPSes to gather their current statistics using openSUSE. The Network UPS Tools packages (NUT for short) are available for openSUSE and that’s all you need (assuming your UPS is one of the supported ones).
# zypper install nut
Next you need to edit /etc/ups/ups.conf and make an entry for your UPS driver and serial port.
[myups]
driver = bcmxcp
port = /dev/ttyUSB0
desc = “Local UPS”
Next I started the UPS driver manually in debug mode so I could see what was going on. The nice thing about this driver is it will auto-discover the UPS serial port speed.
# /usr/lib/ups/driver/bcmxcp -a myups -D
In a separate terminal window, start upsd.
# upsd
Now you should be able to query the UPS:
# upsc myups@localhost
Because I was just collecting statistics, I wasn’t interested in using upsd to automatically shutdown servers or anything fancy but that is possible.