2 Robots

I am a digital pack rat. I used to keep piles and piles of floppy disks all over my room. Cabinets were full of them. This included software I had bought (or “borrowed”), school work, creative writing, and source code I had written. Later, I moved it all over to CDs, and then to DVDs. [...]

The guys over at LMAX spent a lot of time looking at multithreaded software performance. Since computer performance will scale out with more processing cores rather than higher speeds for the foreseeable future, this seems like a good investment. What they found is that the traditional methods of multi-threaded communication — namely, blocking queues — [...]

So, it looks like I called that one wrong. Or did I?At first glance, it appears that android is a serious contender against the iPhone and IOS. It’s even arguable about which on is more popular at this point — do you measure by total units sold, or sales in the most recent quarter? What [...]

A colleague recently asked me who I thought would win the mobile phone wars: Apple or Google. He suggested that Android is a better horse to bet on because Google has virtually unlimited resources to spend until Android dominates the mobile phone market. From reading around the Internet, this seems to be a common misconception.

The expectation of an emerging dominant platform for smart phones comes from general experience with the PC industry, where there has been virtually a single platform for decades. However, the cell phone business is very different from the PC business: while market forces pushed the latter towards platform consolidation, there are several factors keeping mobile platforms distinct. Factor in Google’s self-stated motivation for entering this market in the first place and it becomes clear that the current fragmentation of smart phone platforms isn’t going to go away any time soon.

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Once Oracle completes their Sun puchase, who wants to bet that the first thing they do is shut down MySQL? http://www.sdtimes.com/ORACLE_TO_BUY_SUN_PENDING_APPROVAL/About_ORACLE_and_SUN/33425

This is the company that is going to transform commercial space travel. What do I like about them? You can download the user manual for the Falcon 9 heavy lift rocket.