Emerging Technology

Software glitches may be behind sudden acceleration and braking failures in Toyota vehicles. Can software quality ever match what Toyota achieved in hardware manufacturing?

Is refusing Flash in the best interests of future iPhone 4G and iPad customers? The growing war of words between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is amusing to watch, but how helpful is it? In IT Blogwatch, bloggers take sides.
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Sometimes, there's more going on than will fit into one post. Here are a few more links that caught my eye over the past 24 hours. In IT Blogwatch, Facebook un-munges email addresses, Fraunhofer lets you sign contracts on the phone, Symbian goes free, and Jonathan Schwartz tweets his final goodbyes.

While technology blogs nitpick the iPad over missing features and inadequate specs, they're missing the point of the device, which is to create a tool that people love to use.

"From a techie point of view, one could say, oh, my gosh, it didn't have this feature, it didn't have that feature. And I think a lot of the blogosphere has gone along with that line of thinking. But I think [Apple] is after a different market entirely," said ArminasX Saiman, an Apple enthusiast and IT manager for a large multinational company.

The road to SQL started with Dr. E.F. Codd's paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", published in Communications of the ACM in June 1970.

Apple's upcoming iPad includes the iBooks apps, which combines e-book reader software with an iTunes-like service for selling books. I was somewhat surprised by iBooks. I had just assumed that Apple was going to let existing e-book distributors like Amazon.com and FictionWise install apps on the iPad and sell books that way. But I should not have been surprised. Why wouldn't Apple want to have its own e-book store?

As a Second Life enthusiast, I really want the iPad to run Second Life. There's no reason why it shouldn't. As my friend Wagner James Au points out on the blog New World Notes, the iPhone already has a couple of rich, text-only Second Life clients, and the iPad now has the horsepower and screen size to support Second Life graphics.

The iPad looks like a winner. It's an e-book reader, video player, game console, and netbook, all in one sexy package. I want it. I'll buy it the day it comes out. Millions of other people will buy one too. Apple will make billions of dollars off this thing, and revolutionize an industry or two in the process. But that's just my opinion. Here's what some other people are saying.

Is the on-screen keyboard on the iPad going to be practical? It's a full-size keyboard that you type on like a regular keyboard, but with no tactile feedback, and it's also part of the display. It looks awkward. It looks especially awkward for touch-typists who are used to typing without looking at their hands. Somewhere, Mrs. Cunningham, my 10th Grade touch-typing teacher, is sobbing gently to herself.

I was hoping for something like the Swype keyboard.

No. The problem with publishing isn't technological, it's the business model. For a couple of centuries, we've had nice business models for publishing, but the models are broken now and nothing new has emerged to take their place. The iPad is not going to be a savior of publishing, much as I love the iPad for other reasons and am eager to buy one.

Shifting the burden of security processing and administration from endpoints to scalable appliances makes sense in VDI architectures.

An ex-Microsoft employee appears to have leaked the release date for Windows 8 -- as well as Windows Server 2012 and Office 15. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers shun the iPad hype and imagine the free beta download within a year. Not to mention an Impressive backwards basketball shot...
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I use a three step process for trying out a new technology:

1. Find a way to try it out with minimal time and budget impact.
2. Discuss my experience in a large community.
3. Try it again.

The latest Chrome Web browser is faster than ever, but what really matters is its new and improved feature set.

I saw an interesting article in New Scientist this morning: "To beat spam, turn its own weapons against it". I thought I'd talk a little about it in this week's Security Levity...

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