Android - The New Windows

Apple did it again, this time in the mobile phone market. Back in 1984 when Steve Jobs launched the first personal computer, it was an impressive, closed and expensive piece of technology. A couple of years later, Microsoft launched Windows on top of its already popular MS-DOS and this GUI being flexible and less expensive was very quickly adopted by all leaving Apple behind with only the small high-end market.

This time, back in 2007 Apple revolutionized the mobile phone industry with the iPhone, again a closed system with a restrictive App Store but then in 2009, Google launched its Google Phone based on Android - a mobile OS similar to iPhone OS except that it is open source; therefore anyone can see the source codes, customize it and develop apps for it. Since then the popularity of Android has not stopped growing and at times even surpassing iPhone sales in 2010.

With popularity comes vulnerability! As was the case for Windows desktop, when an OS has 95% of market share, it becomes the designated target of viruses and all other spywares and malwares. So will Android when it will dominate the mobile phone market, and Android being open will make it more vulnerable to such threats. Some have already forecast the year 2011 as the year of smartphone malware.

Apple at the peak of its history

It's no wonder now that Apple has many more bright years ahead with all-time record revenue and earnings from the sales of the Iphone which almost doubled from 7.1 million to 14.1 million year-over-year, record selling numbers of Macs up 27% to 3.9 million this year and the Ipad, a gadget announced in February, launched in April and sold a staggering 4.2 million in just 6 months. The result is an all-time high share price floating above the 300 mark from just around 200 at the beginning of the year. That's up 50% year-to-date.

There's no sign of this going down anytime soon as big confusion continues to build-up in the Android camp. Because of its open-source nature, major vendors end up creating different flavors of Android for their mobile devices thus guaranteeing nightmares for Apps developers to develop and test their Apps on all Android flavors that are out there. On the other side, Iphone remain close-source with the one and only App store and pretty straightforward App development.

Last minute news: Yet another Android-based phone - The PlayStation Phone!
Of course.. why not? Since gaming on the Iphone is becoming increasingly popular, Sony definitely need to enter this market to stay in the game.

Motorola Milestone

Now that's what I call an interesting mobile phone..

Based on the open Android platform as oppose to the closed iphoneOS and hence has full Flash support.

With a full slide on keyboard and a wide tactile screen you get the best of both Blackberry and iphone-like input experiences on the one same phone.

Built-in accelerometer to detect movements that enable the phone to switch display in portrait and landscape, also great for gaming control.

A decent 5 MP camera with the indispensable flash to operate in dim light conditions.

Plays major audio & video formats.

Has WiFi 802.11 b/g in case to don't have an unlimited data package.

and it's a 3G phone.

What else would you need? It's all in there.. and is indeed a milestone. I'll buy that!

Motorola Milestone 

My words on the iPad

Everyone has his views on Apple's iPad, here is mine:-

iPad is yet another luxury gear whose success relies on how close it is to itself. It will surely and brilliantly suit all people non-techie needs and will make BUYING anything as easy as possible (That's the only revolution here). So everything will be possible with the iPad, if the solution is not available for free, you just buy the app/song/book/magazines/concert tickets whatever. This closed model is of course very appealing to all businesses and hence adopted by all.

All the frenzy around the iPad looks very promising, which means that the IT sector still has its golden years ahead.

The ban on Adobe's Flash is purely a business decision which affects directly the web landscape and that's why all the photos i posted on the blog won't appear on the iPad. Thats lame but i wonder for how long will Apple resist when new competitors are entering the couchpad market with Flash enabled.

Bottom-line I already have the smaller iPod Touch which fit perfectly in my jean back pocket, i will not buy a bigger iPad but i will not refuse an iPad as a gift either.. (Note: I don't read books and when i surf the web I have 80 tabs open in my browser)  What I will buy are some Apple shares if I can get the money ;) and some Android-based devices which look more open and versatile yet promising.

Who is doing Linux Kernel Development

18.2% of Linux is written by people who aren't working for a company

7.6% is created by programmers who don't give a company affiliation

74.2% is written by someone who's getting paid to create Linux by these companies

1. Red Hat: 12.3%
2. IBM: 7.6%
3. Novell: 7.6%
4. Intel: 5.3%
5. Independent consultant: 2.5%
6. Oracle: 2.4%
7. Linux Foundation: 1.6%
8. SGI 1.6%
9. Parallels 1.3%
10. Renesas Technology: 1.3%
11. Academia: 1.2%
12. Fujitsu: 1.1%
13. MontaVista: 1.1%
14. MIPS Technologies: 1.1%
15. Analog Devices: 1.0%
16. HP: 1.0%

Desktop PC market share

According to March 2009 statistics from Hitslink,

Windows XP accounts for about 63 percent of all Internet-connected computers
Windows Vista makes up about 24 percent
Linux, mac & others accounts for the rest 13 percent

Happy 40th anniversary to Unix

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast?

1969

Unix was brought to life on a spare DEC PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs. When AT&T decided to abandon the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) operating system on its minicomputers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie cobbled together an operating system so they could continue to play a space travel game that Thompson had developed. A colleague gave the system a jokey name based on Multics -- UNICS, the Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, which morphed into UNIX or Unix.

Source: Computerworld.com

Intel Nehalem processor enables 192 GB RAM PC

Dell Inc. announced on Tuesday a new PC that, among its other impressive specs, can be upgraded to sport as much as 192GB of ultrafast DDR3 RAM.

The Precision T7500 sports 12 memory slots, each of which can take a PC10600 stick (1333 MHz) of up to 16GB.

Most new desktop PCs have two to four RAM slots that can take up to 4GB modules of DDR2 memory that runs between 400 MHz and 1066 MHz in speed.

Not a high-end gamer PC, the Precision T7500 workstation (which starts at $1,800) is aimed at video game designers, engineers and digital animators.

Lenovo, Cisco and Apple are also in the race...

Just imagine the gaming and virtualisation potential of such PCs

IBM is to eclipse the Sun

With the big buzz about 'cloud computing' of which Amazon is the pioneer, 3 big IT companies - Cisco, HP & IBM are now battling to become a leader in that data center technology market.
After Cisco willing to enter the server market, IBM has raised the stake by offering to buy Sun for $6.5B which is double what the company market cap was worth the day before the acquisition talks were reported, but less than half what the company was worth a year earlier.

What Sun has to offer: open-source Solaris operating system, the open-source database MySql, the Java platform and sun servers.

If this acquisition is materialised IBM will become the leader in java technology with its websphere application solutions.
Become a much greater stakeholder in the open-source domain with opensolaris, mysql - the worldwide famous database solution: it's the M in LAMP (Linux Apache MySql Php), and also staroffice / openoffice the office suite.
IBM will also dominate the unix market with his AIX solutions competing only with HP's HP-UX.