We’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now, but here’s yet more evidence that smartphones with a little ‘s’ are leaving PDAs (remember those?) in the dust. Key stats:
- During the first six months of 2006, PDA+smartphone shipments grew 57% versus first half of 2005
- Shipments totaled 42.1 million units
- 34.7 million of those units were smartphones, versus approximately 7.4 million PDAs
That’s right, 82.4% of all “mobile computer” devices sold from January through June of this year where phones, not PDAs. Not surprisingly, the article goes on to note:
The last stronghold for PDAs is North America, which is the only region where they outsold smartphones. In fact, North America accounted for 45 percent of worldwide PDA shipments during the first half of 2006. On the flip side, Japan prefers smartphones more than any other region, accounting for 33 percent of shipments for the first half of the year.
And my favorite bit as a former employee and current NOK shareholder:
Nokia owns half of the smartphone market and was responsible for 42 percent of PDA and smartphone shipments during the first part of 2006.
If I worked for Palm I’d really be praying that the Treo 680 gains some mass market traction RSN.
George Gilder provides a glimpse into the power requirements and infrastructure scalability issues involved with Google and other peta-scale Web services in “The Information Factories” published in Wired 14.10.
The array of costs and issues involved may seem insurmountable by any new business trying to ramp up and compete. But as Sun’s Andy Bechtolsheim notes when interviewed for the article, the game is over “Only if no one changes the game” (italics for emphasis).
Right on, Andy! Kobayashi Maru.
It’s very interesting to see both the good and the bad uses of Internet technology in reporting, reviewing, remixing, and even fighting modern wars. Sobering in many ways.
Recent contract work has presented me with an offer for permanent employment that I can’t refuse.
I have accepted a position as a Product Manager for Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc. (DRSI). While the company is headquartered in Brentwood, Tennessee, I’ll be able to work the majority of the time remotely, much better in line with family commitments than my previous full time position.
DRSI is doing very interesting things. Watch for more from me and the team via our site, and of course I’ll continue blogging my own personal take on all things techie via BillDay.com.
A contract I’ve been working on the last few months requires careful time keeping and reporting. I’ve tried several tools, including both Web-based and local apps, and read through various suggestions from Om’s Web Worker Daily and elsewhere.
After lots of searching, I’ve settled on the simplest solution: A script described in a July Lifehacker post entitled “Quick-log your work day“. I’ve made a few simplifications for what I need from Cowboy_K’s QuickLogger Plus et voila, time tracking to automagically rotated log files. I normally write my own bash scripts and run them in Cygwin, but this little Visual Basic script does just what I need so why mess with a rewrite?
You might be asking “Why did you go the non-Web app route?”. Answer: I need to be able to log activities whether I have a net connection or not. For example, while working on a plane. Quick Logger Plus meets my needs, no muss no fuss, and its simple output is imminently parseable should I need to massage it into another format, post it online, or do some other kind of post-processing down the road.
Recommended.
Interesting news: “Nokia unveils Bluetooth rival“.
OK, maybe “Bluetooth’s little brother” would be more accurate than “rival”. Or should that be “Bluetooth and WiFi’s love child”? Or maybe “Bluetooth’s Mini-Me”?
Whatever it is, you can read David Berlind’s early analysis in his ZDNet blog here. Hopefully Nokia Research will be posting details soon.
In the time honored tradition of The MIT Guide to Lockpicking, engadget has published a two part series on bump keys and locks that are vulnerable to them.
Read part 1 here and part 2 here.
As with all security related matters, the best security comes from security-in-depth. It’d be a great idea to replace any affected locks with non-bumpables such as those mentioned in the article, but it’s also a great idea to have other security measures in place (external security cameras, fencing, an alarm system, a big mean attack dog, etc.). The more critical the thing to be protected, the more layers of security one should use.
Now go forth and lose sleep over all of your tumbler locks.
Toshiba’s laptops aren’t immune to Sony battery problems, either.
Apparently Sony-supplied Toshiba batteries aren’t blowing up, but certain lots can suddenly lose power causing the laptop to shut off if it’s not plugged into AC. One of my Toshiba Satellites is from a model line that has some affected units, but thankfully for me, according to Toshiba’s instructions for determining whether a given battery is affected, mine is safe.
Whew, close one!
Here’s a brilliant definition and discussion of “What is a Hacker?”.
I bet quite a few of us tinkerers identify with this. Indeed, any good engineer is by definition finding better ways to “bend the rules” to make things cheaper, faster, better. So fear not, fellow geeks, wear the “hacker” moniker with pride.
Now back to breaking things…
Baseline Magazine provides an interesting glimpse into what makes Google tick in “How Google Works“.
The teasers on some of the technical stuff (BigFiles, Google File System, and BigTable) are good, but so are some of the “fly your own airplane” stuff. Example: Google uses software smarts to crunch on emailed weekly contributor updates rather than requiring more heavy handy methods that, frankly, many employees in many enterprises simply ignore.
Worth a read.
BillDay.com 