Tech Status Quo

Another company is preparing to sell Intel-based computers that can run Apple’s Mac OS X. But unlike Psystar, a Florida clone maker that’s been sued by Apple, Open Tech won’t pre-install the operating system on its machines. Open Tech’s Home (equipped with an Intel dual-core Pentium processor, 3GB of memory, an nVidia GeForce 8600 CT video card and a 500GB hard drive) and XT (which includes an Intel Core 2 quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 8800 video card and a 640GB drive) machines will sell for $620 and $1,200, respectively. Open Tech is prepared to do battle with Apple if it comes after Open Tech. ‘We definitely would defend this,’ said [Open Tech spokesman] Tom. ‘The only possible case that Apple can make, the only one that has any chance, would be based on the end-user licensing agreement.

Tag this at Technorati: apple, psystar

What a question. Is there actually a chance that women, rather than men, code to “help” the next person that works on the same project? According to the Wall Street Journal that chance does exist, and women continually create better commented programs than men.

According to Emma McGrattan, senior VP of Ingres over in Silicon Valley,

Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, “they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. “They try to obfuscate things in the code,” and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later. McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.

Ughh.. what? Men obfuscate code on purpose to look cryptic? Not only does that make zero sense, it is incredibly prejudiced. Nobody in their right mind creates cryptic code - which, conveniently, is usually impossible to decrypt in a year by the same person. Rather than making this a gender debate, Ms. McGrattan should have just presented what she believes the ideal coding semantics are to inculcate bad programmers.

Tag this at Technorati: bad programming, comments, prejudice

Asynchronous Ruby and XML.  You heard it folks, Asynchronous Ruby.  Guess who is pushing it?  Yeap, Microsoft.  It will be completely integrated into the Silverlight package that Microsoft is failing miserably to spread across the internet.  Frankly, why would they succeed in getting programmers to use Silverlight - Microsoft still uses Flash.

Can ARAX overcome the overwhelming appeal of AJAX?  I doubt it, mostly after reading the following:

Indeed, Galbraith said, “As long as Windows/Office dominates Microsoft’s balance sheet, these cross-platform Microsoft plays always feel a bit like the story of the boy who upon encountering a rattlesnake picks it up after it promises not to hurt him, upon which the snake promptly bites. After the boy protests, the snake says: ‘You knew what I was when you picked me up.’ No matter what capabilities Silverlight may have, I think most of us in the community simply wouldn’t dream of embracing architectures dependent on Microsoft’s goodwill to support other OS vendors.”

Dion Almaer, the other co-founder of Ajaxian.com, said, “It is interesting to note that you have been able to use JRuby to run Ruby in the browser for quite some time … IronRuby is great. Getting more languages into the browser is great.”

In the world of hard drives, Seagate reigns king;  the newest edition to their repertoire is a 2 terabyte hard drive with a July 2008 launch date.  A 2 terabyte drive would store roughly 500,000 songs or 1300 full length DVDs, plenty of space for 99% of the population.

Seagate is also venturing into the SSD market, solid state drives that have instant boot and access time because they are flash memory rather than spinning disks.  From the CEO of Seagate Bill Watkins,

“SSDs are not price-competitive yet,” Watkins said. The storage market is driven by cost per gigabyte, and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won’t be in laptops in the next few years, Watkins said. Low-power consumption capabilities and high speeds make SSDs useful for laptops, but the cost per gigabyte won’t come down at least for the next few years, Watkins said.

“If the cost per gigabyte comes down to 10 cents, maybe,” Seagate will focus on SSD storage for consumers, Watkins said.

As of the writing of this article, SSD cost per gigabyte is approximately $3.58 compared to $0.37 for standard hard drives.  As the technology for making flash memory imporves and the degradation factor of flash memory decreases, SSD memory will become the standard and Seagate will domiante the market once again.

Projected date of SSD cost per gigabyte to hit $0.10: July 1st, 2010.

Tag this at Technorati: 2 terabyte, flash memory, seagate, solid state, SSD, terbyate, western digital

Joe Anderson is running a critique on Google - not the search aspect, gmail, or Reader - and the failure of many of its applications.  He discusses the dismal ‘Google Answers’ and even less popular ‘Google Video’, but missed what I believe are the most “use-less” Google applications.  When I use the term “use-less”, I do not mean that the applications are poorly designed or implemented, they just are not as useful as the competition.

1. Google Product Search - The description of this application is, “Search for stuff to buy.”  Great, a second search engine that crawls the same websites as Google itself.  I am yet to find a use for this.
2. Google Finance - Come on, we already have Fidelity, E*Trade, CNN Money, and a myriad of other financial repositories;  stay out of this are Google.
3. Google Health - No matter what anyone tells you, putting medical records online is an awful idea.  For that matter, medical records should not even be on your computer where they are easily accessible by anyone with computer knowledge.

What Google application is the most “use-less” to you?  Which is the most “use-ful”?

Tag this at Technorati: applications, Google, google answers, google finance, google health, google reader