eInk vs LCD

 Posted on February 4, 2010  |  Erik

In the wake of the iPad announcement, there’s been much discussion regarding the relative merits of eInk vs LCD screens for reading, and googling around finds many discussions, but very little in the way of actual scientific studies. I did manage to find a study that compared the relative eyestrain between LCD and Plasma devices, where the conclusion shows that plasma results in less eyestrain. There are other studies concerning the old fashioned CRT video displays, but I have yet to find any papers that review the relative merits of LCD vs. [Read More]

iPad round 5 - The killer app

 Posted on February 3, 2010  |  Erik

I’ve been mulling over the idea of the killer app for the iPad in the same way that we look at killer apps for computers. I think that I can summarize the PC (Windows, Mac or Linux) has three classes of killer apps: Business General public Gaming For the business world, the killer app is pretty much Microsoft Office for a number of reasons. It became sufficiently ubiquitous that you can exchange files with just about everyone and replaced a whole slew of less efficient means of managing documents. [Read More]

iPad round 4 - Multitasking etc.

 Posted on February 2, 2010  |  Erik

Well, it’s been a fun few days in the aftermath of the iPad announcement, and many fruitful and interesting discussions on the web and with friends and colleagues. And of course many pointless and idiotic discussions as well. But out of these two main points jump out of the fray at every turn: multitasking and Flash support. On the Flash side of the house I can only say that the situation is complicated when I look at Apple’s target market of the non-technical user. [Read More]

iPad side note - a business use case

 Posted on February 2, 2010  |  Erik

Is the iPad not the perfect portable thin client? Check out the Wyse PocketCloud app and imagine this running on something with the screen size and fluidity of the iPad. So when you need the heavy lifting of a “real PC” you connect to your virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), with or without an external keyboard, depending on where you happen to be, but while you’re on the road, you have all of your essential applications like mail and calendar that of course are running IMAP/CalDAV or Exchange ActiveSync so everything is synced back to the server for when you use desktop clients. [Read More]

iPad round 2 - AT&T vs Verizon

 Posted on January 29, 2010  |  Erik

Sigh. This is a discussion point that keeps coming back when following any of the American media sources. Why didn’t Apple come out with a Verizon version? Why doesn’t Apple partner with Verizon? and the many variations on this particular theme. Stop it. Apple is a global company. Apple makes most of its money by selling hardware. The global cellular telephony standard is GSM. Verizon is big in the context of the United States, but is small when measured against the rest of the world. [Read More]

iPad Round 1 - The questions

 Posted on January 28, 2010  |  Erik

So the cat is out of the bag and it’s called an iPad. So to replace the sound and fury based on sheer speculation, we have 60 days of speculation based on a set of specs, a demo and the very brief hands-on by a small collection of journalists to look forward to. The media punditry is depressingly predictable with Paul Thurrot et al convinced that it’s abject failure because it’s not a PC, the Open Source crowd claiming that closed environments will ultimately fail, the Apple faithful claiming it’s the greatest thing since [insert coolest thing ever]. [Read More]

Software Update Fiddling

 Posted on November 13, 2009  |  Erik

I’ve been traveling a bit recently and have been reading about the latest 10.6.2 and Safari 4.0.4 Updates, but being away from my OS X Server with the Update Server I haven’t been able to apply the updates. Back at home this evening with a (tiny) bit of downtime I thought I’d take the opportunity to update the MacBook Pro. So I fire up Software Update and it claims that there are no updates available. [Read More]

ZFS Deduplication

 Posted on November 2, 2009  |  Erik

Wow. OpenSolaris PSARC and from Jeff Bonwick’s blog today. So this really puts into question the value of the Data Domain purchase by EMC. Since most of the Data Domain use cases are as a VTL or NFS backup appliance, I think that once the equivalent Fishworks version hits the street they become direct competition, and the ZFS based solutions are more useful since they can also be used for primary storage. [Read More]

ZFS & Leopard - not quite yet

 Posted on October 27, 2009  |  Erik

Well it looks like the Apple implementation of ZFS will not be included in the upcoming Snow Leopard release. I admit to being somewhat disappointed that it didn’t make the cut, but as I’ve been following the beta development, it’s really not ready for prime-time wide scale implementation. They’re still working hard on it internally, and I fully expect to see it out in the real world, but not before 10. [Read More]