To judge by pop culture (tv shows) and anecdotal evidence, lawyers have been one of the strongest markets for the BlackBerry. Given that, RIM might be getting worried by stories like this:
"You can open to review all PDF and Word files and Excel spreadsheets, and shortly Documents to Go will be available that will allow you to edit these files on the iPhone," he told The Industry Standard.
That explains why they rushed the Storm to market. Had the UI not been so clunky, I might well have stayed with Verizon - I had been using their service happily since the mid 90's. RIM has the harder job, too: they have an installed base that wants and expects the real keyboard, but they also have Apple harshing their mellow with the touchscreen. Not an enviable position.
Being on time for a court appearance is important, but this is probably still a bad idea:
Spinnie, 42, of Norwood, is accused of stealing a Chevrolet Uplander Tuesday in order to get to his 9 a.m. arraignment at the Hamilton County Justice Center.
To be clear, the stuff I have on my Toshiba Gigabeat sounds bad as well. It's not just an Apple thing. It's the low-quality-for-the-sake-of-drive-space that's the problem.
Rob is complaining about the quality of CD sound compared to mp3 (AAC, etc) files. That's kind of funny, because CDs have been criticized heavily over the years by audiophiles as a bad experience. You can get downloaded music with much higher bit rates than what CDs hold, but that's kind of beside the point: most of us aren't audiophiles.
This reminds me of the old "Beta was better than VHS" thing. What people forget about that is that VHS allowed for longer record times - watching half of a movie just wasn't that interesting, regardless of the video quality. The same thing applies here: being able to cart around an entire music collection in your pocket is a whole lot easier than carrying CDs or, gosh forbid, LPs.
The market has voted, and values the convenience much, much more highly than the quality. A large part of that is simply this: life isn't a concert hall, and most of the time, music is something in the background.
According to Gartner, Microsoft is still a player in the Smartphone space. I knew that, but it's not something that gets a lot of press. One of the phones they mention is the Samsung Omnia (again, one that doesn't get much press) - it sounds like most of the sales for it would be in Europe though. From Engadget:
Unfortunately, the phone has to get slapped with the usual word of warning that you won't be able to latch onto any 3G in North America, because Samsung (in its infinite wisdom) saw fit to forgo a triband 3G chipset. These days, we're not buying any justification for this, particularly in a phone that sits this far up into the high end. Want to sell this only to your European customer base? That's fine, Samsung, but many of those folks are going to be traveling stateside on occasion, and they're going to want fast data when they do.
That's curious, but Samsung has its work cut out for it. To get a competitive touch experience, they've reskinned Windows Mobile completely (to varying levels of success and failure - follow the links to Engadget's review for details).
It sounds like MS isn't paying much attention to the mobile space right now, but is doing ok on the inertia of their early entry. I wonder if they'll step back up.
What seemed like a simple gun possession case became an undeclared war over reality: Was Officer Ettienne a diligent cop who found a gun after chasing an ex-convict weaving through traffic on a stolen motorcycle? Or was his story a "devious" facade in keeping with the ruthless character he revealed on social network Web sites?
...
Besides the "devious" mood setting, the jurors learned that a few weeks before the trial, the officer posted this status on his Facebook page: "Vaughan is watching "Training Day" to brush up on proper police procedure."
A lot of formerly private talk is now much, much more public with things like Facebook and Twitter...
Travis doesn't think much of the new Safari (version 4):
I tried the Safari 4 beta preview for about a week now. I hate it. So, I've made the switch.
I hadn't paid much attention - I normally use Firefox on my MBP. My daughter updated Safari on the iMac though, and wow - the placement of the tabs is just stupid. By putting them on the window pane, it virtually ensures that you'll end up in an unexpected place every time you select the window.
Financially struggling Sirius XM Radio Inc. is planning to stream its subscription radio service to the iPhone and iPod Touch devices from Apple Inc. beginning this spring.
As I said in another post though, why would I use that instead of, say, Pandora? Why pay a monthly fee when I can get music that I'm much more likely to enjoy without the fee? The answer might end up being what saved AM radio: talk (sports and politics).
The problem with the subscription model for today's big newspapers is the fact that there is very little exclusive information of any real value. The New York Times syndicates much of its content to other papers, so there are alternative sources - not subscription-based with the same information. Why buy a cow when milk is free?
That isn't going to change, either. Paper based news is dead, because it's too slow. Paper based analysis is probably doomed as well in a world with Kindles, iPhones, and BlackBerries (et. al.). What does that leave? Going hyper-local could work, but I doubt it will work for print. The costs are too high, and the potential audience too small to support it.
Before I get the comments, I'm not opposed to print, nor do I have an axe to grind on this. Reading in print allows for more serendipity than browsing does (especially on small devices). That said, the audience willing to pay for that tactile pleasure is aging and shrinking.
Back to online news - how is that going to be paid for? I really have no idea. The ad model has problems, and I don't think those problems are going away. I suspect that what we'll end up seeing is a completely new set of models that harness what the net does well - probably with a lot of paid content. They'll span the range from hyper-niche to topics of broad interest, but that's about as far as I can see at the moment :)
I received a question from a customer today - he wanted to use the features of the VW transcript in ObjectStudio 8. The ObjectStudio transcript is a read-only thing, and he wanted something more engaging. Rather than try to build up the OST tool, I figured "why not use the VW tool?"
So I asked a few questions, did some debugging, and came up with a handful of overrides that accomplished my goal. The first one: have a VW transcript open detached when you ask for a transcript from the launcher menu. To do that, I made these two changes in class GlobalDictionary:
activateProgramWindow
"if we use the VW Transcript, no need for this"
""
openProgramWindow
" Can't actually open program window, but the following is equivalent"
"use the VW Transcript instead"
Core.TextCollectorView open: Core.Transcript label: (#systemTranscript > 'System Transcript').
I commented out the rest of the code in that latter method. Then I needed to track down the implementations of #out - it turns out that all ObjectStudio objects use #out to dump themselves to the OST Transcript. So I overrode these three messages - first, in Object:
out
"Use VW Transcript instead"
Core.Transcript show: self; cr.
""
And finally, in CharacterArray:
out
"Use VW Transcript instead"
Core.Transcript show: self; cr.
""
And that's it. Engineering tells me that there are some primitive uses of Transcript that this misses, but it covers nearly all cases - and it gives you a Transcript with some more functionality. To print to it yourself, just use standard ObjectStudio protocol (i.e., #out) - or look at class TextCollector for the VW level API to the object. Enjoy!
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem.
That's the problem that various bits of media have been trying to avoid thinking about for years now. It goes beyond media though; the entertainment industry (with music going first) is also being hit by this. The only reason paid software is hanging on longer is that unlike music and movies, software usually needs a support presence behind it to answer questions, and you can build a charging model around that need.
You want to know what's going to happen with music, you should look at what Jonathan Coulton has been up to. With reporting, look at Michael Totten and Michael Yon. That's the future, and it doesn't involve huge organizations standing between you and the end product.
While the entertainment industries push for harsher copyright laws, public opinion steers in the opposite direction. Two recent studies from Canada and Spain found that half of the Internet users use p2p networks to download music, software and films. Less than 5% of the respondents believe that people who download copyrighted content are engaging in criminal behavior.
This week we spoke to fellow Cincomer Dirk Verleysen, who's been working on the Modeling and Mapping tools in ObjectStudio. These tools had been allowed to stagnate in older versions of the product, and is now being brought up to date. In the podcast, we find out from Dirk what kind of progress has been made on the project, and what the roadmap going forward looks like. To hear it now, click here.
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Sometimes I really wonder about IT management. Recently in comp.lang.smalltalk, a thread arose about migrating an application from Smalltalk to .NET. Forget the specific languages involved though; my answer on this is the same without regard to what the source and destination are: it's almost always a bad idea. Unless your language/tool vendor is going out of business, or pushing the product into EOL, such migrations just don't make sense. I've written about this extensively, so rather than recapitulate, I'll reference the older posts:
Every time I've seen this kind of thing come up, it's a variation on this:
Line level management that created the original application has left the organization/group
New management has arrived, and they are unfamiliar with the technology in use
New management has experience with (insert tool/language here), and believes that it's the answer to every question
New management insists that the application needs to be "modernized" (meaning, written in the favored technology he/she understands).
Just ask yourself: especially in a time of uncertain budgets, is a huge rewrite really the best use of your limited resources? What will your group not be doing for the business while they waste time on that?
This sounds interesting, but I have no idea what utility it has at present:
Spy is written in RPython, and can be translated with the PyPy toolchain as C executable, as Java native backend, and as .Net native backend. Spy is the collaborative effort of the Squeak-PyPy Sprint in Bern last autumn. Spy has been realized by the PyPy Team and the SCG Group in only one week.
Last week, Alan Knight, our Smalltalk engineering manager, gave a presentation to the Ottawa (Canada) Smalltalk User's group. He talked about the product roadmap - where we are, where we're headed. To watch, click on the image below:
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we make ObjectStudio 8 use the VisualWorks Transcript, so that text can be copied / pasted to and from it. To watch, click on the image below:
If you're interested in following Cincom Smalltalk information on Twitter - and not whatever else I happen to post on this blog - then follow Cincom Smalltalk. I've set it up to gather just the Smalltalk oriented posts that I make.
I've been trying to answer the question I pose in the title for a long while now with "Smalltalk Daily", the weekly podcast "Industry Misinterpretations", and the periodic videos that come out. As it happens, you can subscribe to all three in iTunes (or in any other podcatching software) - they're all listed in the iTunes store (search for Smalltalk in the podcast section) - but I'll list the basic urls below, which work with iTunes and any other software that tracks podcasts:
Especially with Smalltalk Daily, I try to point out how to solve everyday development problems using our products. I'm always open to suggestions for new topics, for any of these services. Just drop me an email!
We don't have reporters, editors or producers - everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page. That'll be a training challenge for everyone, but we're all up for the challenge and totally ready to pick up all these skills.
I expect that this transition will be something of a shock for some of the more pampered people in the news business :)
I think Steven Johnson gets the direction the news is going right: we think we're losing important stuff, but - in fact - we're gaining a lot:
In fact, I think in the long run, we're going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life --out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid's school winning a big game.
Consider the technology niche I deal with: Smalltalk. Back in the 90's, there was a monthly print journal, "The Smalltalk Report". When it folded, there was much lamentation, but stop and compare what we had back "in the glory days" to what we have now.
Then: One monthly journal with a handful of articles
Now: A plethora of blogs and websites that produce regular content, including podcasts and videos
That's happening across the board, in every field you can think of. The future won't be one of paltry content and no good reporting; it will be one of more content than you can imagine, covering a multitude of niches in ways that we can barely imagine.
While I think Shirky and Johnson are right, there's still a lot of wrong out there. Witness David Carr of the NY Times, fantasizing about some way to force people to pay for newsgathering:
No more free content. The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free --the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the "original sin" -- has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn't cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.
So what does he propose to do about a local blogger who shows up to cover a city hall meeting? Take him out behind the building and work him over? Force a paywall in front of all of his "news" posts?
The world of news gathering and reporting is shifting, and there's no way to hold back the tide. The old business models simply don't work. Pretending otherwise isn't a solution.
Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at how to integrate an HTTP API into an existing application. The example uses the blog posting tool I use and Twitter. To watch, click on the image below:
As long as Twitter maintains a following I feel every business should join it and converse with their customers - just as I said a year ago. Still, it's always important for everyone to see the big picture. That's why predicting a market top is something I thoroughly enjoy doing. In part, it's what I am paid to do - think about what's next. This disicipline keeps me and others like Robert Scoble like from getting stale.
Perhaps. It's also what makes the two of you look like hummingbirds...
Looks like there's something of a "Is Fit Dead" conversation going on. I've always had my doubts about expecting end users to work with HTML/Wikis, and that seems to be one of the sticking points...
Update: In case you aren't sure what FIT is, go here.
I ran into some interesting problems with my BottomFeeder build script and the latest VW build today - as it happens, I had an interaction problem between the new build and the latest version of a package in the public repository. Why did I run into that? Well, here's the line of the script that I ran into trouble with:
What that does is find the named package and load the latest version. The problem is, the latest version happens to be a branch I don't want - what I really want is the last "stable" version. Perusing class Store.DBRecord, it doesn't look like there's an API to load a specific version. However, that's not really much of a problem, because we can craft a line of code that suits our needs:
((Store.Package allVersionsWithName: 'TimeSoZone') detect: [:each | each version = '8'])
That almost solved my problem. It turns out that the script wasn't loading the latest version of a package I wanted - ImageConfig. Why? Well, there's an old (2003) version that was published with a previous rev of Store, and it has a primary key that makes it look newer than the actual latest version. Yes, I'd call that a bug :) Still, I needed to deal with it, and I just used the same line of code again:
((Store.Package allVersionsWithName: 'ImageConfig') detect: [:each | each version = '7.10'])
And that solved my problem. I'll do a screencast on this in the morning :)
International Business Machines Corp. is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. in a combination that would bolster IBM's heft on the Internet, in data storage and in government and telecommunications areas, according to people familiar with the matter.
The good news for people interested in Sun is that IBM would jettison all of the "we'll make it up in volume" bozos at Sun (like their CEO), and actually use their services business to start bringing in revenue from Sun's various open source properties.
I have to say, it's amusing that the purchase price would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $6.5B (hat tip Troy - he has a subscription the WSJ, so he has access to that little tidbit). Recall that Sun blew $1B on MySQL not so long ago; I wonder how much more the company would have been worth had they not done that, and instead just made outrageous salary offers to the lead MySQL developers?
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we look at how to load a specific version of a package/bundle from Store within a script. To watch, click on the image below:
Here's something you don't want to say in a public Twitter channel, after a job interview:
Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.
Heck, I have searches set up for finding Twitter (and wider) references to Smalltalk, VisualWorks, ObjectStudio, Cincom (and a number of other terms as well). I think anyone applying for a job should assume that the company you are applying to will be doing the same...
