I submit the following for your humble perusal:
Category: General
I’ve been dealing with some personal stuff, which is keeping me from posting about OpenAFS and the difficulty I’ve had finding working documentation that covers setting it up with Kerberos5 (not Krb4), and works on CentOS. More on both soon.
Today is, of course, the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11th. It’s very surreal to me to think of my life 10 years ago, today. The world seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and I had already accepted a job working for a university in the UAE. It’s weird how much has changed since that day, and how much really hasn’t.
I was looking through my photo archives, for pictures I’ve taken in NYC to post today, and it hit me – I’ve not been to New York since December of 1999. I’ve never seen the New York City skyline, in person, without the twin towers. It’s high time I go back, but there’s nothing I can post from the archives.
MAKE Projects: So many good ideas, so little time.
Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, in an open letter to the company:
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.
I would honestly be unsurprised if 24 months from now there are three major smartphone vendors left: Apple at the middle to high end, Android everywhere, and Microsoft screwing about trying to figure out who they are in the mobile space. Apple will likely stay where they are with their focus on unparalleled user experience and unheard of profit margins; Android appears to be the de facto response to the iPhone, and it costs carriers very little in terms of short-term cash; and Microsoft, who can afford to pour billions of dollars down the drain getting back into the market with Windows Phone 7
Symbian, MeeGo, WebOS and a dozen other software platforms? I don’t see a long term future for them. They cost a lot to develop internally, they cost a lot to maintain, and they cost a lot to market. Android is a zero-cost solution, and I suspect we’ll see Android phones available in the feature phone segment in AT&T and Verizon stores soon. There is still some time for the carriers to suck profits out of the specialness of a “smartphone” – but I suspect in 24 months all phones will be smart. To some degree or another.