Information Manager Journal

Virtual battle

At last, the fundamental technology battle of our time is at hand. Will you want a virtual version of your Web stuff on your desktop or your handheld device -- the way Google will serve it up -- or will you want a virtual version of your desktop or handheld device on the Web -- the way Microsoft will serve it up?

I'm betting on Microsoft's approach, but only because Google's privacy assurances aren't very convincing, and the Web is subject to reliability problems, as anyone who's ever tried to watch a Netflix movie online can confirm. But millions of others will opt for Google, because of the continuing headaches of deploying and patching desktops like Windows.

Finally, which side will Apple take?

Opening up software testing with video

The details of software testing inside big companies tend to be locked away in some vault. Novell is doing something different at its Better Desktop Web site. They've posted lots of videos of people using Mozilla Firefox, Evolution, Open Office, Banshee, F-Spot and other applications. The videos are organized by task -- that is, you can watch the way various people try to perform the same task, viewing their on-screen actions, their comments and their facial expressions all at the same time.

I applaud Novell for opening up the process of software testing in this fashion.

Gary Cornell says SOA is CORBA done right

Gary Cornell of Apress says service-oriented architecture (SOA) is CORBA done right. If you are old enough to remember CORBA, or even if you aren't, you'll probably find the rest of his comments interesting too, in this conversation I recorded for Opening Move at IT Converssations.

Feedster link claim

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Search: Will all roads lead to Rome?

Matt Hindman: "Because of link/traffic patterns, we may be facing a situation in which all search engines are returning the same results." Time ran out before I could ask this question of Matt: What do you think of the Amazon A9 search engine idea, that “people like you found search engine results like these to be useful”? Won't that create a new, more personalized search alternative? UPDATE: Five seconds after I wrote this, Stewart Baker suggested in a later session that law enforcement could use something very much like A9 to get better results while better protecting privacy.

Avoid Gateway

John Walkenbach comes down hard on the way Gateway forced him to buy a second copy of Windows XP to easily restore his PC after a power outage crashed his PC. Microsoft should not allow its OEMs to treat their customers so shabbily. Meanwhile, avoid Gateway.

Pocket PC not ready for prime time

One thought leads to another this afternoon. I downloaded Larry Lessig's new book, Free Culture, as a PDF file. Then I downloaded Adobe Reader for the Pocket PC. Then I opened the 352-page PDF on the Pocket PC. First, I was warned that the file wasn't properly tagged for viewing on the Pocket PC, and I had to tell it to do its best. Then, it ran short of memory (I was listening to an IT Conversations audio interview at the same time on this device) and the Pocket PC asked me to let it steal some storage memory to use as program memory. (Why couldn't it do this dynamically?) Finally, it just stopped loading the PDF. At least the audio file kept playing until it finished. (Then, promptly, I got a "crash" with random graphic garbage overwriting a pop-up menu). This is the software that will power millions of 1GB cell phones in the next few years? UPDATE: I tried to read Lessig's book on my Palm Tungsten C. It doesn't try nearly as hard to display the text using pretty fonts, but it did load the document successfully, unlike the Pocket PC.

Ease of use vs. 1GB gizmos

Charles Cooper: "You don't log onto your television or boot up your phone. Is it entirely unreasonable to believe that people should be able to use technology tools with similar ease?" Unfortunately, it's far more reasonable to expect that a 1GB TV or phone will be a device you do have to log onto. Not that I think this is progress!

Next: Cell phones with 1GB storage

Jim Louderback: "If I were Microsoft, Telmex would scare the pants off of me." All the cell phone really needs to become the core of a replacement PC is a 1GB drive. It's probably a matter of months, rather than years.

$1 a gigabyte

Time marches on. I still remember when we thought $1 a megabyte was really something. Now it's $1 a gigabyte. That's a conventional hard disk for a PC. I bought a 128MB SD card at Fry's today for $50; a 256MB Compact Flash card costs $55. But the declining cost of storage still the most amazing story of 2003-2004, as I said shortly after CES 2003. It assures that we'll see more complexity under the surface of every device and gadget, not less. The challenge is to boil the complexity down into a user experience that's ever more powerful yet graceful. My first week's experience with the Pocket PC 2002 Edition is like a step back into a klunkier world, but then you iPod and Palm users out there are way ahead of me.

Java to get generics before Visual Studio

Generics -- defined here as classes and methods that work uniformly on values of different types -- and described here as "parameterized types" -- ignite programmer passions. At last fall's Microsoft Professional Developer Conference, when I asked one .Net corporate developer why he had chosen .Net over Java, he vehemently replied it was because Java had atrocious support for generics. But I wonder just where this feature is in the two respective product pipelines. This story states that due to the delay of Visual Studio 2005 (a.k.a. Whidbey), Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.5, will be shipped with generics first.