Ahead of the Curve | Tom Yager

Apple's iPhone contracts leave developers speechless

Tom Yager — 2008-07-23T03:00:00-08:00

Apple's free iPhone SDK may be the most hazardous download on the Internet READ MORE

Apple's MobileMe: Mobile life without Exchange

Tom Yager — 2008-07-16T03:00:00-08:00

BlackBerry Internet Service works, with catches, for professionals. Will MobileMe work for iPhone pros? READ MORE

AT&T lays down the law for Apple

Tom Yager — 2008-07-09T03:00:00-08:00

Apple, welcome to the handset business. Apple's sweetheart deal with AT&T, which grossed Apple an extra $360 for every iPhone sold, is over. AT&T will buy iPhone 3G wholesale, mark it up and discount (subsidize) it for new customers buying a 2-year contract. Apple's net is the margin for the sale, period. There's no more monthly start-up stipend. That's how it works for other handset manufacturers, and as odd as it seems after a year of special status, AT&T is turning Apple into one of the herd. Apple saw this coming, and it has spent the past year setting itself up for life after AT&T's unique generosity. I've seen it written that this apparent $360 drop in revenue per iPhone will hurt Apple. The naysayers aren't doing their math. I estimate that, compared to iPhone, Apple will clear an additional $100 in wholesale price from AT&T for each iPhone 3G sold. Apple's sales volume will explode at AT&T's subsidized prices, so component and manufacturing costs will plummet as Apple crosses higher volume discount thresholds with suppliers. The high cost of AT&T "enterprise" coverage plans that permit access to Exchange Server e-mail will steer professional users, as well as consumers, toward... READ MORE

Symbian Foundation might save Symbian's future

Tom Yager — 2008-07-02T03:00:34-08:00

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... READ MORE

RTFM: Good advice in troubled times

Tom Yager — 2008-06-25T03:00:00-08:00

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... READ MORE

Digital TV foreshadows erosion of Internet rights

Tom Yager — 2008-06-18T03:00:00-08:00

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... READ MORE

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

Tom Yager — 2008-06-10T14:06:19-08:00

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... READ MORE

AMD shakes PC notebook status quo

Tom Yager — 2008-06-04T03:00:00-08:00

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... READ MORE

One switcher's tale: Once you go iMac, you never go back

Tom Yager — 2008-05-28T03:00:00-08:00

I've been relating the story of a professional colleague who, some months ago and under semi-voluntary circumstances, made the switch from Windows to the Mac. Her twisted arm now nicely healed, she has not only switched, she has an unshakable conviction that even the fastest, newest PC would be an embarrassing hand-me-down next to a mature Mac. If I were to swap her early model MacBook for a quad-core PC desktop, she'd accept it with the graciousness one brings to the gift of a fruitcake (or one from a fruitcake), and then covertly scan eBay for a PowerPC Mac. It is not the particular machine or its performance to which she has become attached; indeed, the hardware is, to her, invisible. The Mac platform is home to her now, not out of religious devotion or some wish not to disappoint me, but because it clicks with both halves of her brain in a way that Windows cannot. I've held forth with her on this subject, namely how creativity and logic get equal attention from Mac developers because Apple's development tools, code samples, documentation, and style guide naturally produce applications that are right brain/left brain balanced. Mac developers' first published... READ MORE

AMD's server roadmap burns through Intel's fog

Tom Yager — 2008-05-21T03:00:51-08:00

Intel CEO Paul Otellini's memorable "shame on us... mea culpa, we screwed up" March 2007 speech to Morgan Stanley investors came after his company's marketing fog machine could no longer conceal the truth that, depending on your point of view, Intel was peddling technology that it knew to be somewhere between four and eight years behind AMD's. AMD told you so, and so did I, but Intel's marketing is capable of overpowering reason. Intel manages to thrive by setting expectations that match its technology, and raising those expectations every two years by just enough to make you see your Intel-based PC or server as wanting. Otellini got stuck apologizing because AMD got a chance to show buyers Opteron's potential. The market's expectations followed, as they naturally will when people buy technology that never needs replacing. Given the choice between buying well and buying often, the market chose the former. Intel's smokescreen is back in overdrive. Those who do a light amount of homework before buying are getting Intel's same old message: Higher clock speeds, bigger cache, manufacturing process shrink, and faster front-side bus make the world go 'round. That latest speed bump makes your one year old computer look... READ MORE

It's quiet, it's green, it's the rack o' my dreams

Tom Yager — 2008-05-14T05:00:00-08:00

When I refer to my lab, I use the term loosely. It's a 10-by-10-foot working space whose smooth walls channel the sound from every device with a fan straight into my ears. I share that room with every server I use and test. Of these, an 8-core Xserve is the only box that stays on 24/7, and I wish I could say I've gotten used to the noise. I haven't. While the Xserve idles at a pleasant noise level, as soon as any computing load kicks in, the fans spin up. When they do, they find a frequency resonant with the part of my brain that tells me that if I value what's left of my hearing, it's time to leave the room. The necessity of working with rack servers that get louder with each generation has made noise the primary governor of my workflow. Of rack servers, Xserve is relatively quiet. Apple's design favors ergonomics, but this Xserve is configured with 8GB of RAM. For contrast, consider the four-socket, 16-core, 32GB 1U Barcelona rack server that AMD recently shipped to me. At idle, that machine is as loud as Xserve is at full tilt. My 16-core Xeon rack... READ MORE

The Green Delay: A timely proposal for IT energy conservation

Tom Yager — 2008-05-07T10:06:05-08:00

"I hope I'm dead before I'm 50." This was said in an entirely unemotional, matter-of-fact fashion by someone who had gotten a poorly timed, age-appropriate, red state public school treatment of both sides of the global warming debate. Is it, as was presented, more likely that natural cycles and the law of averages are to blame for melting glaciers and freakish weather? Either way, his lesson came one day before the horror in Myanmar. It awakened memories of Thailand and New Orleans. It put a different timbre to the voices decrying $120-per-barrel oil when the solution that seems so obvious to a kid--if you can't afford it, don't buy it--isn't on the table. This young man knows me, and he knows that I take as a point of pride that InfoWorld is uniquely outspoken on matters of green computing, and that my dedication to that cause predates InfoWorld's. When I write about it, I stay away from suggesting that there is any sort of "save the planet" global imperative that should drive IT toward consolidation and the purchase of more energy-efficient equipment. By pursuing energy-conscious policies, what a company conserves is capital. As energy prices inevitably rise, kilowatts, BTUs,... READ MORE

The view from Microsoft's Live Mesh and Apple's .Mac: Shared disks and remote desktop access, no VPN required

Tom Yager — 2008-04-30T03:00:00-08:00

Apple's .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way. Old-schoolers will tell you that there are only two places your important data should live: on your meticulously secured network behind a paranoid firewall, or at Iron Mountain. One must heed the old schoolers, for they shall keep the bitemarks off your backside, but their advice must be tempered with modern reality. Having data live exclusively within your domain presents thorny operational problems when two or more people need to get at it. If you want to selectively share files with temporary staff, business partners, external software testers, or employees who are on the road, you've got to find a way to publish it with a combination of easy access and tight security. If you've shared business data that can't easily be placed in a shared Exchange folder by putting it in a password protected zip file and stuffing it in your Yahoo! Briefcase or its like, you'd hardly be the first. Nor would you be the first to stay on the phone with that remote user until they verified... READ MORE

For server power measurement, there's only one shortcut

Tom Yager — 2008-04-22T11:52:19-08:00

On this Earth Day, let us examine the criteria that IT brings to its purchases and arrange to make power efficiency a top priority. All it takes is the will, a little homework, and the embrace of the delusion that there's any fit and fair way to compare the power consumption of two similar pieces of equipment. [ Discover the techniques used by InfoWorld's 2008 Green 15 winners to make their IT more energy-efficient. ] Last December 27, SPEC announced the availability of its SPECpower benchmark. One would think that having the heaviest of the benchmarking heavyweights pour concrete on that most slippery of metrics would give us something to go by. InfoWorld has been waiting for its copy of SPECpower, which SPEC acknowledges is a first step, since January, and I have a guess as to the reason we're still waiting. Perhaps some members of SPEC, which is primarily a consortium of vendors, have encountered the same issue that I have: Power measurement is only 5 percent process. It is 110 percent policy. The total exceeding 100 is appropriate, because like the predator/moron mortgages in which all American taxpayers are now unwilling investors, power benchmarking creates a debt that... READ MORE

Back to the Mac

Tom Yager — 2008-04-16T03:00:00-08:00

Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all, the new MacBook Pro. It was difficult seeing InfoWorld pick up reviews of these from sister publications, but I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I can't very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded what's presently sold. I found enormous value in my time away from Mac. I made the kind of discoveries I used to make routinely before I took on the Mac as a specialty, and as I take... READ MORE