links for 2010-02-04: iPhone and Android; Kindle going after iPad?; Why Microsoft is 'faling'; AR parody

• Is Android buzz starting to tarnish the iPhone's luster? - Apple missed out on an opportunity to dominate the smart phone market by being tied to AT&T and not having a few simple features (expandable memory?, lack of MMS for how long?) folks can get on other phones.  The iPhone isn't extinct, but the opportunity for Android is much larger than it might have been.
• Amazon acquires touch screen startup; Souped up Kindle being planned? - Competition is good!
• Microsoft's creative destruction - But too much or the wrong kind of competition internally is bad.
• Downfall: Gartner MQ - Entertaining parody.

links for 2010-02-03: PHP Performance; Datacenter Pods; Apple Pricing

• HipHop for PHP: Move Fast - I'm frankly surprised compilers for PHP didn't come around sooner.  But this will certainly address some performance and scalability concerns as sites using PHP look to grow.
• HP rolls out 20-foot datacenter pod - As the story notes, Sun did this a number of years ago, but I didn't see a mention of what Oracle had planned for the BlackBox.
• Thank heaven for Apple's (upward) pricing pressure - It is true, pricing is relative and something priced too low may not be considered valuable.

The Vancouver Olympics are 10 days away

The Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC, Canada are only 10 days away!  It has been only 18 months since the Beijing Olympics, but thanks to the switch in the 90's to have the winter games during the "off" even years, we get to experience all that is the Olympics again.

Unfortunately, something that seems to come up every time the Olympics come around is the subject of drugs and doping.  The constant battle of the testers to catch up with the latest drug or masking technique continues with the cheaters usually being half to a full step ahead although someone usually gets caught and the testers can declare victory.  Given this, I was pleased to see that Italy will fine any athlete caught doping $140K!  All 109 athletes going to the games will have to sign a statement agreeing to pay the fine if caught.  From the story:

CONI president Giovanni Petrucci says the committee has added the deterrent "to show how serious Italian sport is in the fight against doping. Whoever doesn't sign won't go to Vancouver."

Other Olympic Committee's would be well served to follow Italy's example as a further deterent against doping.

But enough about the negative aspects of doping, what about the games and sports themselves?  In the United States, we'll get a steady diet of the glamor sports of figure skating, alpine skiing, speed skating, and hockey, but we'll get helpings of bobsled, freestyle skiing, and unfortunately snow boarding (how this became an Olympic sport I'll never know).  Interested in something else?  Good luck finding it on NBC, but that may actually be a good thing (see below).

For those of us living near the Canadian border, we are lucky enough to get CBC and additional coverage that way, but that could mean just adding curling to the list above!

For the US viewer, there will be a number of interesting stories including:

• Can any of Rachel Flatt, Mirai Nagasu (both US), Carolina Kostner (Italy), and Miki Ando (Japan) challenge Mao Asada (Japan) and Kim Yu-Na (Korea) for gold in women's figure skating?
• Can Yevgeny Plushenko (Russia) complete is comeback and win gold or can Jeremy Abbott, Evan Lysacek, Johnny Weir (all US), Patrick Chan (Canada), and Daisuke Takahashi (Japan) unseat him?
• Will Lindsey Vonn continue her domination and be the story of the Olympics on the slopes?
• Will the networks get what they want and have the US and Canada vie for the gold medal in hockey?

There will be many more stories I'm sure, and we can depend on NBC to show us as many of them as they show the sports in action.  Which brings us to the television coverage.

It appears that, as was done for Beijing and prior games, NBC will elect to show us plausibly live coverage of all the key events and perhaps more, instead of giving us live coverage.  Sure, a few events may align with the eastern time zone to be shown live there, and the lower tier events NBC doesn't really care about may be live on secondary channels, but much of the coverage won't be live and worse, the events that are live will only be live in the eastern time zone and those of us on the west coast only a few hours from the events themselves, will have to wait 3 hours for all that coverage whether taped or live.

In this day and age of ESPN.com, Twitter, e-mail, Facebook, etc. it is just silly for NBC to think that folks can really hide from the results and thus the drama they are trying to hype will be lost with folks knowing the results.  That alone may cause some to not tune in, but also with so many having DVRs/Tivo/etc. now, if NBC isn't showing it live in the first place, many (I know I will) will simply record NBC's coverage and watch it at our own speed.  Then we can skip the ads and avoid the "up close and personals" which also defeats the purpose of NBC trying to get everything into prime time so they can sell those ads.  Perhaps those of us doing that are in the minority and NBC is really appealing to the average TV viewer who will tune in.

For a longer and more eloquent rant on the subject, see Bruce Jenkins article.

Thankfully, in addition to having a DVR, I will have access to CBC and I expect while they may not have as many total hours of coverage that NBC claims, they will show more events live and I plan to take advantage of that.

What do you think?  What are you looking forward to from these Olympics?  Leave a comment!

Let the games begin!

links for 2010-02-02: Google Web Server; Flash required?; BEP/CEP

• Google mystery server runs 13% of active websites - Pretty amazing considering no one outside of Google runs the Google Web Server.  A lot of folks are using Google to host their sites/blogs/etc. (this blog being one of them).
• Is Flash required for a rich web experience? - I have to admit that the lack of Flash on the iPhone is annoying at times, so I'd have to think it would be a lot more often with the iPad.
• Business event processing and SOA: Joined at the hip - Sun had a cool CEP engine in OpenESB, not sure what will happen to it now.
• Windows Azure too expense for small apps - If true, missing out on an opportunity to get customers when they are small and growing.

links for 2010-02-01: iPad ads and Flash; Personal Cloud; Nexus One and AT&T

• Apple iPad ads show Flash - There's an oops.  How about just adding support for Flash?
• Do you need a "personal cloud"? - We are increasingly moving in this direction.  For those tech savvy enough, they can more or less do it today.
• Nexus One for AT&T on its way - Good news for those wanting to stick with AT&T instead of switching to T-Mobile.

University of Washington Invitational Indoor Track Highlights

Being in Seattle, I'm fortunate to get some great indoor track action each winter as UW hosts a number of events at Dempsey Indoor.  Two weeks ago they held the UW Indoor Preview and yesterday was the UW Invitational.

I was there yesterday and being a fan of distance running, was excited to see that Olympians Galen Rupp, Chris Solinsky, and Jen Rhines were all scheduled to run.  Flotrack and Runnerspace were there too and had some good coverage and videos.  But I have my own video of a few races from a different angle (see below).  Flotrack's are better, but hey, I was there and took it so you get it too.

First up was the men's mile with Rupp and Solinsky.  Both of the headliners started out mid-pack but moved up so that they were at the front with a lap to go with Rupp leading.  Coming off the turn with just the straight to go though, Solinsky had taken the lead and would go on to hold off Galen 3:55.75 to 3:56.22.  An outstanding early run for both as they do some under distance racing in preparation for the outdoor season.

In the women's 3000, Jen Rhines and Amy Hastings were the class of the field and went to the front and alternated taking the lead up to 1 lap to go.  With a lap to go, Rhines took off and gapped Hastings, but at the top of the straight, Hastings started to gather her in and with Rhines moving out into lane 2, Hastings had an opening and was able to eke by winning in 8:58.45 to Rhines' 8:58.47.  A great race.

Last, and less than 2 hours after finishing his mile, Rupp came back in the 3000 set to face Scott Bauhs and Aaron Braun.  The three of them separated themselves from the pack mid race and with a lap to go it was the three of them right together.  Braun got a bit of a gap on the back straight, but then Rupp and Bauhs made their move and as they approached the finishing straight Rupp had pulled alongside Braun with Bauhs close behind.  In what may have been his one mistake, Bauhs tried to get in between his competitors but there wasn't room and he had to make a second move outside and came up just short to Rupp's 7:51.48 in 7:51.65 with Braun just 0.03 back at 7:51.68.  Another great race!

From the interview with Galen, it sounds like he'll be in Boston next week to run the 5000 against Lagat and others.  And there will be action back at Dempsey in 2 weeks and I'll try to be there again and post another report.

Here is the video with highlights from all 3 races:

Welcome to my new blog

I created this blog awhile ago and decided it is about time I posted an entry.  I actually created it to be a place for my personal blogging as I've had a work blog at Sun for quite some time and I created a dedicated blog for my computer ratings as well.

What will show up here?  We'll see as time goes on, but it will likely include rants and musing on many topics related to technology, sports, the blending of the two, and anything else that comes across my mind.  Take a look at my Sun blog for past entries I've made.

If you are into Twitter, you can follow me at @ktschmidt or @computerratings.

Stay tuned for more!

Web Apps vs Native Apps: Will we ever fully switch?

When Apple introduced the iPhone, the story was that we didn't need native apps, instead the Web was the application environment and apps should just be written to run in a browser (Mobile Safari).  This didn't last too long as Apple succumbed and the App Store was born and by all accounts, other than developers who can't get their apps approved, it has been a wild success.  I have to wonder though if Steve intentionally made the whole process somewhat onerous to try to encourage folks to still write to the Web as a better and preferred way to get apps to the device.

The success of Apple's App Store has led to other "app stores" or "marketplaces" from mobile phone providers to carriers to the Java Store and more.  So it isn't terribly surprising to see Intel launch a netbook app store, although I have to wonder if the motivation is just to keep up with the Jetsons or if this is the right model for netbooks.  After all, isn't the point of the netbook to leverage Web applications?  If so, is having a store for native apps really needed or desired?  It would seem it is just giving users a crutch to avoid making the transition to the world of applications on the Web.

So why is this?  It is a combination of several things including more developers being comfortable and adept at creating native apps, HTML5 not being ready yet (an excuse for the original iPhone, less of one now), and users being familiar with native apps or fearing not having access if they are out of range of the network so thinking they have to have them.

But there are significant advantages to a world of Web apps.

For developers, while it may never truly be write a single Web app and use it from any device, there is a whole lot more reuse and leverage from creating apps for the Web rather than creating N native variations.  Particularly when platforms like the iPhone refuse to support Java or insist on requiring development in Objective C.  Being able to have an addressable market of multiple mobile and desktop platforms is a huge advantage over targeting one specific platform.

For users, using Web apps allow access to the same app and data from any device without having to perform complex and error prone synchronizations.  Whether you need to access your e-mail, calendar, documents, games, whatever, being able to do so from multiple devices should be a huge benefit if users can just get over the notion that they don't have the app in their possession on their device.

So when will the transition occur?  It will happen first with mobile and lighter weight "netbook" type of devices.  These are (or should be) designed for the Web and will have less storage and general horsepower to run native apps and so are well suited to it.  It perhaps will take something like Chrome OS to do it as other Windows, Linux, or OS X based devices will always have at their core an OS built for native apps.  Chrome OS will change this as far as we can tell.

In the mean time, go ahead and make it a point to ask "could this be a Web app" when creating that next application.  You may be surprised what is possible and how many more devices and users you can reach.

iPhone Voice Memo App Broken

One of the cool features of the iPhone OS 3.0 was the built-in Voice Memo app.  No longer would I need to deal with a separate app and having to transfer the files around awkwardly as they just sync with iTunes nicely.  WooHoo!

Well, it was a woohoo for only a bit, as I discovered this weekend that the Voice Memo app seems to stop recording around 25-30 minutes now.  A bit annoying as this caused me to miss about 10 minutes of what I was recording as I didn't notice it right away.

"Why might this be the case?" I asked.  A bit of Googling revealed this thread on Apple's discussion forum where the consensus is that OS 3.1 broke this and introduced somewhere around a 74.3 MB file size limit.  Depending on what you are recording this causes it to stop somewhere between 25 and 35 minutes it would appear.  Worse, reports are that when it stops you can't start recording again for a minute or so.

So, what was a cool app that solved a real use case is now useless for anything that might go over 20 minutes.  Back to using 3rd party apps as it doesn't appear Apple has even acknowledged this issue let alone said when it might be fixed.  Has anyone else ran into the problem or found a solution other than a 3rd party app?