July 02, 2008

Symbian Foundation might save Symbian's future

How many mobile device manufacturers does it take to keep the most successful handset operating system alive? If you guessed "one," you're right. If you guessed "five," you're right. If you're confused, you're in good company. Nokia recently acquired Symbian Limited, the developer of the Symbian mobile OS licensed by Nokia, LG, Motorola, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson and used as a system software component in their mobile platforms. Perhaps it's just me, but I find this story remarkable on many levels. Knowing no more than the single fact I've presented, it might appear that Nokia, which already held a controlling interest in Symbian, is moving to pull the rug out from under its competitors. It turns out that Nokia's not the latest antitrust bad boy. Put a cape on Nokia, because it is a champion of corporate trust, or whatever anti-antitrust works out to be. Symbian Limited's engineers will wear Nokia badges, but every line of code they crank out will be turned over to Nokia’s competitors, and later, to the world. Nokia will bring Symbian's development operations in-house, but Nokia won't own Symbian's intellectual property. With the purchase, Nokia simultaneously established the nonprofit Symbian Foundation, whose members include five... more

TAGS: Mobile devices

June 25, 2008

RTFM: Good advice in troubled times

Don't search for answers. Reach for knowledge. Back when five bucks' worth of dinosaur squeezings bought you a misspent weekend, working in technology required desks, and the reason for desks was to have a place to lay out your manuals. Massive hole-punched tomes ending in "Guide" and "Reference" were techies' bread and butter. It was so taken for granted that you had manuals that RTM (we'll go F-less now that we know what we're talking about) became shorthand for "go look it up; you might learn something by accident." Sounds haughty, doesn't it? It often was. RTM was a blow-off when uttered by wizards and gurus who had no penchant for teaching. These snobs missed out, because nothing tops the feeling of accomplishment shared with someone you've mentored, and that road has to start in a book. I'd loan them the book and tell them where to start. I knew that anyone who borrowed the book would show up shortly with their own copy and a fire in their eyes. Glancing over at my bookshelf now brings to mind the delivery of a System V UNIX from a company called SCO. The box was bigger than the company, and infinitely... more

TAGS: IT

June 18, 2008

Digital TV foreshadows erosion of Internet rights

With regard to the free exchange of information over the Internet, we, the people, have mostly managed to hold our ground. We can thank activists, hacktivists, legislators saying "no, thanks" to money from the entertainment lobbies, and forward-thinking artists and content distributors--I'm proud that writers and publishers took the lead on this--who recognize that reach is the currency of the digital age. We should take as a warning sign of descent down the slippery slope toward the loss of Internet freedoms Internet providers' arbitrary blocking and throttling of BitTorrent traffic. The rationale points to the bandwidth wasted by BitTorrent. That doesn't ring true. There are other flavors of traffic such as VOIP, streaming news, advertising and entertainment, photo galleries, remote PC access, Usenet repositories, denial of service attacks, and spam that consume beastly amounts of bandwidth, but somehow none of these warrants detection and control at the provider's end of the pipe. It makes one wonder, what's so special about BitTorrent that it cries out to be controlled in such a radical manner? That's an easy one. The entertainment lobby (my shorthand to avoid spewing the alphabet soup of movie, TV, and music trade groups), having failed to get the... more

TAGS: General

June 10, 2008

Can anything beat iPhone? Handset makers, here's how.

One of my live blog entries from the keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference had a one-line body: iPhone competitors, it's over. It doesn't excite me to say that. I don't like seeing any one player rise to lord of the realm. At least theoretically, a cornered market isn't good for buyers. But make no mistake, Apple entered the mobile market to corner it, and at this moment it's largely unopposed. If you wonder how Apple got there so fast, consider the zeitgeist that Apple tapped: Most wireless customers are sick of their wireless carriers. After years of overbilling, lousy support, spotty coverage, being locked out of bargain rate plans available only to new customers, and worst of all, being stuck with carriers' anemic hand-picked catalogs of devices, customers wish wireless carriers would just go away. [ Get the full scoop on Apple's mobile empire-in-the-making in his Enterprise Mac blog's deep dive essay. ] That's what Apple did. iPhone makes wireless carriers go away. At first, carriers went through the motions of negotiating with Apple to retain ownership of subscribers. But then a funny thing happened. The most possessive of all carriers, AT&T, discovered that it doesn't really like taking... more

TAGS: Apple, Mobile devices, iPhone

June 04, 2008

AMD shakes PC notebook status quo

At the logic level, MacBook, the benchmark for success in mainstream notebooks, is unremarkable -- indistinguishable from every PC notebook built on Intel Core 2 and its chipset-integrated graphics. Why, then, can't anyone with the same parts list emulate Apple's growth in an otherwise stagnant notebook market? Because Apple painstakingly hand-optimized its OS for a tiny variety of hardware architectures, presently Intel Core 2, while Microsoft wrote Vista to run on absolutely everything. No PC notebook maker can take the proprietary route that Apple plays to such advantage. Microsoft can't crank out proprietary cuts of Vista for each notebook vendor's choice of suppliers. The best hope is a hardware architecture that's optimized for Vista. Not only that, but optimized for 64-bit Vista running on a battery. That radical objective drove AMD's design for the total notebook platform nicknamed Puma, and now dubbed, temporarily I hope, AMD's Next Generation Notebook Platform. This platform's Turion X2 Ultra 64 CPU is not cut from the common cloth of adapted desktop platforms like Core 2 that rely on machinations of the OS to balance performance with battery life. The combination of Turion X2 Ultra 64, AMD/ATI scalable graphics technology, AMD's M780G bus interface, and... more

TAGS: AMD