T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. … except for you desperately searching for that all-important part you must have to make little Joey’s gadget work properly.
Every year it’s the same old story. You remember to get the big-ticket item for your loved ones, say an iPad for Matthew or a Blu-Ray DVD player for Mary, but you forget those little things they need to work properly. So, for this holiday season let’s make sure we stock up with those tiny essentials before the day arrives.
I’ve talked with my friends and here’s our list of tech odds and ends you’re most likely to need to make this holiday season a jolly one.
I think anything you put up on the Internet, especially a social network, can be swiped and that Facebook, in particular, has always played fast and loose with its users’ rights and privacy. After all to Facebook, you’re the product. They have to turn the information you trust them with into money some how and if they can do that by licensing your photos to third parties so be it.
So, if you’d rather not see your images bought and sold by Facebook, or legally speaking Facebook licensing your images to others without your permission, I suggest it’s time to abandon Instagram and look for a replacement.
For years, MySQL has been the dominant open-source database management system (DBMS). Recently, MariaDB, the MySQL fork created by MySQL’s founder, has been making in-roads and Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most popular Web site, is shifting over from MySQL to MariaDB.
Asher Feldman, Site Architect at Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the group behind Wikipedia wrote recently, that he had” migrated one of the main production English Wikipedia slaves, db59, to MariaDB 5.5.28.” I then asked him if Wikimedia planned to move all of Wikipedia to MariaDB. He replied, “We will indeed be migrating more of our production databases to MariaDB. I’m hoping to have one of our major projects (such as the English language Wikipedia) fully migrated in production by the end of the year. I don’t have a specific timeline yet, but if the assessment continues to be positive, we may fully migrate production in the first quarter of next year.”
Why is Wikipedia making this move? Feldman wrote, “The main goal of migrating to MariaDB is not performance driven. More so, I think it’s in WMF’s and the open source communities interest to coalesce around the MariaDB Foundation as the best route to ensuring a truly open and well supported future for mysql derived database technology. Performance gains along the way are icing on the cake.”
Back in 1983 in Compute magazine, my friend Kathy Yakal wrote, that 1983 “might be the Christmas of the computer.” It would be the first holiday season when “the home computer [was] well withing the budgets of many American consumers.” So, what computing toys did you have to choose from in 1983? Brace yourself, there won’t be a smartphone or tablet to be seen.
You may be too young for this, but one of IBM’s best ad campaigns ever featured Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. And, he was touting IBM’s newest PC stars: the IBM PC and the IBM PC XT. The XT came with 4.77MHz 8088 processor, a 10 MB hard drive, 128KB RAM and a 360KB floppy drive. For this top of the line business machine, you only had to pay $5,000.
To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die and a time for Linux to discontinue support for Intel’s 27-years old, 32-bit 386 CPU in its next major release of the Linux kernel: 3.8.
Ingo Molnár, a Red Hat engineer and Linux kernel developer, asked Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder on December 11th to “consider pulling the latest x86-nuke386-for-linus git tree. For those of us who haven’t been Linux kernel enthusiasts since day one, Molnár explained, “This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit of complexity.” He continued, “Unfortunately there’s a nostalgic cost: your old original 386 DX33 system from early 1991 won’t be able to boot modern Linux kernels anymore. Sniff.”
Indeed, back in 1991, Torvalds sent out a Usenet posting saying, “I’m doing a (free) operating system. (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu [Gnu] was, and is, the free software collection of programs originated by Richard M. Stallman) for 386(486) AT clones.” From that modest beginning Linux began.
Windows may still be winning the desktop operating system war, but according to a Goldman Sachs report, Clash of the Titans, that doesn’t matter because Microsoft has been badly losing the far more important computing device war to Apple iOS and Google Android.
Why? Because, “The compute landscape has undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade with consumers responsible for the massive market realignment. While PCs were the primary Internet connected device in 2000 (139mn shipped that year), today they represent just 29% of all Internet connected devices (1.2bn devices to ship in 2012), while smartphones and tablets comprise 66% of the total. Further, although Microsoft was the leading OS provider for compute devices in 2000 at 97% share, today the consumer compute market (1.07bn devices) is led by Android at 42% share, followed by Apple at 24%, Microsoft at 20% and other vendors at 14%.“
Goldman Sachs’ analysis isn’t in a vacuum. Mary Meeker, once a superstar Wall Street analyst, and now a well-respected venture capitalist, recently presented a Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers report titled Internet Trends Year-End Update. The report found that tablets and smartphones were out-selling PCs in 2010’s 4th quarter and have since left them in the dust. By 2013’s 2nd quarter, Meeker predicts, the Apple- and Android-dominated smartphone and tablets installed base will be greater than the Windows PC installed base. Today, by Meeker’s numbers, Apple iOS and Google Android have 45% of the market to Windows’ 35% .
