On Tuesday January 5 Google announced the Nexus One smart phone. On Thursday January 7, my Nexus One arrived.
For context, I’ve historically been a BlackBerry user, but have been steadily driven away by the browser experience. My wife was a zero-day iPhone adopter, and I’ve spent a lot of time using an iPhone. I also […]
In my last post, I shared benchmark data for the web browser on the iPhone versus BlackBerry. My theory is that web browser performance is critically important for smartphone user experience. Furthermore, the BlackBerry seems to be embarrassingly inferior to the iPhone in this respect. This begs the question, how do other phones stack up.
Thanks […]
Lately I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. They seem trendy, and I like gadgets. But I’ve started questioning what I would get from one that I don’t get from my current devices. I’ve concluded that what I want isn’t a netbook, it is a phone that is actually good.
I’m the happy owner of a […]
A couple of weeks ago I attended a meeting at MIT on Cloud Computing. One of the questions from the audience was how cloud computing impacts high performance computing. The response was that in a cloud of inexpensive commodity servers, scientific applications must learn to spread applications across large numbers of parallel compute nodes. This […]
Read the rest of this entry »I switched to Wordpress. Let’s see if anyone notices.
Read the rest of this entry »A few weeks ago I had the chance to attend Edward Tufte’s lecture in Boston thanks to StreamBase. This was one of his standard lectures on information presentation, for which he has become famous. As usual, it came complete with a set of his books. This was convenient since sometime in my last 4 […]
Read the rest of this entry » I replaced my Sony Reader with a hipper new Amazon Kindle, and I’m totally disappointed. The Kindle has a few good ideas, but it is terribly executed. I’m returning it today (something Amazon is making pleasant enough) and buying another Reader.
Read on for more detail…
Catching up on email this Saturday, I got the opportunity to take a survey about my experience evaluating Bungee Connect. Evaluating bungee connect has been something that has popped onto my radar several times. They purport to be an application platform for web applications. They have their own language, their own ui toolkit, their […]
Read the rest of this entry »The opening keynote for this year’s VLDB was a great presentation by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, describing their data management challenges. I particularly appreciated it because it echoed something I’ve been saying for a few years now: Web-scale companies have problems which cannot be managed with standard RDBMS, or with any common research systems, […]
Read the rest of this entry »A few weeks ago Bruce Schneier discovered a classic economics paper, “The Market for Lemons”. The paper describes the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have. It uses the example of used cars.
In these markets, the price buyers are willing […]