ITS News

Yes, it’ll cost you, and yes, Apple wants your SSN in iTunes. But you’ll want one anyway Whatever plans I might have had for this week were put on hold by Apple’s full opening of iPhone’s kimono prior to the June 29 launch. I knew that Apple would hold back as much detail as it could until the last possible minute, but now that crates and crates of iPhones are sitting in the back rooms of AT&T Stores in strip malls across North America, and store staffs have been issued their riot gear and marching orders, it’d be silly to try to keep anything about iPhone under wraps. Apple has answered most of the non-feature-related iPhone questions that I’d have asked on my readers’ behalf, but several remain open. I’ll give you a taste of the answered and unanswered questions here. The details that deadlines force me to leave out of this column will be in my Enterprise Mac blog. The grand detail will be in my InfoWorld Test Center review of iPhone, which will get underway as soon as Apple supplies an evaluation unit. That brings me to my first still-unresolved question: When will iPhone review units be sent… READ MORE

All iPhone units sold in the U.S. will be locked to AT&T’s GSM/GPRS/EDGE mobile network. If you’re already an AT&T subscriber, iPhone is a painless transition. If you’re on a month-to-month contract with another operator, or you had a term contract which has now expired, you’re sitting pretty for iPhone. But if you’re already under contract with a competing operator (e.g. T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon), it might cost you as much as $300 to bail out of the one or two-year agreement that scored you a cheap price on your existing handset. If you’re in that latter category–under active contract to an AT&T competitor–but planning to buy an iPhone, how will you do it? a) Pay the one-time fee to sever your existing contract immediately (what will it cost you?) b) Buy iPhone and make payments on your existing phone service until its contract expires (give your phone to a relative, friend, keep it as a spare?) c) Try to complain, threaten or loophole your way into a courtesy cancellation (”I’m being deported”; “I have petitioned ICANN for a .sucks top level domain just for you”; “My service was always horrible, but it became absolutely intolerable on June 29th”; “Return… READ MORE

Microsoft fights the good fight for a fair, relevant IT benchmark A friend and I share a running joke. Whenever one of us comes up with a million-dollar idea, we declare that we must get business cards. That’s dated; everyone knows that today, venture capital precedes business cards, except in the case of computer hardware or system software. There, the publication of irreproducible “preliminary” benchmarks precedes all other steps toward the realization of an idea. Like a carnival game, vendor-published benchmarks have always been a “shoot ’til we win” affair. Back in the days when business cards came first and benchmarks were only trusted if they were published by objective third parties, Job No. 1 for every new CPU, compiler, or operating system vendor was to tweak its product to kick ass on synthetic — not representative of real-world conditions — benchmarks. Intel took the crown here. Every time I’d get a new Intel compiler or processor, I’d test to see how much closer it came to reducing 100,000 iterations of the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks to a single CPU cycle. Intel eventually settled on strapping humongous Level 2 caches onto its processors. Many popular canned benchmarks fit inside an… READ MORE

Jobs tells developers that for them, iPhone is purely a portable browser. Microsoft, Nokia, and RIM rejoice. At Macworld Expo in January 2007, Steve Jobs told the crowd that Apple’s upcoming mobile device, iPhone, runs OS X. I think that it’s an easy and reasonable leap from that statement to the expectation that iPhone will be open to custom applications, an expectation that I held and which I’m sure many developers shared. A Unix phone with Apple’s UI panache? Touch, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile phone in one device? I was ready to take a three month sabbatical from InfoWorld just to spelunk around inside iPhone’s APIs and its OS X core. Looks like I’ll have to continue to hone my mobile app development chops in the familiar domains of BlackBerry, Symbian/Nokia, and Windows Mobile. At the Worldwide Developer Conference on June 11 2007, Steve Jobs paved the way for the June 29 delivery of iPhone by telling a crowd of some 4,000 that where developers are concerned, iPhone is a handheld Safari browser. “You don’t even need an SDK,” Steve said before he invoked the magic phrase “AJAX and Web 2.0,” to let the press know that iPhone is open… READ MORE

With developers unable to grab iPhones and Leopard still under wraps, what of note will come out of WWDC? Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is coming up next week, and Steve Jobs will keynote with the enthusiasm one expects from a billionaire geek who’s addressing the crowd responsible for his non-iPod wealth. Signups for the conference were high early on, thanks to the anticipated delivery of Leopard (which was subsequently delayed until October) and maybe a shot at grabbing an iPhone (which won’t be available to conference-goers but will ship at the end of June). Does this leave Steve with nothing to brag about. Portents indicate otherwise. Apple timed the introduction of new Apple TV features (larger hard drive, Internet-direct YouTube viewing) as well as the delivery of new MacBook Pro models to make a splash in the press before WWDC. That seems odd given that both would have made nifty keynote surprises that would have helped salve attendees’ disappointment over Leopard and give the media a big basket of news to report from the show’s opening day. Putting on my strategic thinking cap, it seems to me that these “lesser” product introductions were intended to clear keynote time and… READ MORE

Quad core is not the magic key to a quantum jump in virtual server density, but that key exists Despite the bait dangled by Intel and AMD — twice as much server in the same space every two years — that rule of thumb won’t work for capacity planning. We can’t really count on cores per socket doubling on alternating years, even though I believe it’s likely. Now that I’ve dumped cold water from my half-empty glass on the double-up strategies of Intel and AMD, I have a surprise for you: I have a full glass in my other hand and an optimistic gleam in my eye. I’ll reveal all, but first I have to set it up. The numbers are rough, but I’ll do my best to make them realistic. For illustration’s sake, let’s say we run an e-commerce site that sells office supplies. We customize on-line catalogs so that companies can let employees order supplies from a limited catalog chosen by management, so ours is a highly dynamic site with substantial computing demands. Today, our standard rack server is a 1U, two-socket machine with two cores per socket. We squeeze 40 servers into a full-height rack. For isolation… READ MORE

Microsoft axed its Fall Professional Developers Conference (PDC), and it’s got the blogosphere all a-twitter with speculation about the reasons. If they accepted the reasons that Microsoft gave–developers already have access to what they’d get at PDC–there wouldn’t be any controversy. Microsoft is right: Developers don’t need PDC ‘07, and there’s a fair argument to be made that developers don’t need PDCs, period. One major reason to attend PDCs past was to nab the CD packs containing preview releases of Microsoft’s developer tools, OSes and Windows Server System components like SQL Server and Exchange Server. Those previews are no longer hot property. Everyone with broadband access can download pre-release Microsoft products and trialware of its shipping software. Where PDC as a learning, networking and hobnobbing experience is concerned, Microsoft’s Communities bring it all together, and you can birds-of-a-feather without making yourself presentable. You needn’t be sheepish about bailing out of a lame session five minutes in, and nobody cares what’s in your other browser window. Micrsoft still throws one show worth attending. Deep knowledge of OS fundamentals, server performance scaling and system administration, which every Windows developer should have and which is harder to acquire on-line, is the domain… READ MORE

While pundits strive to influence stock price, IT stays focused on strategic objectives - that’s not easy In computing, the space between major technology advances could be measured in years, and observers saw the variety of solutions as more of a melting pot. In microprocessors, each architecture was regarded for its respective strengths, and the informed recognized that strong systems for a variety of applications could be built around Motorola 68K, Intel x86, AMD’s K-series, MIPS, POWER, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, and PA-RISC. When Motorola’s fascinating 88K made its too-brief appearance, it wasn’t lambasted for its uniqueness. Instead, Unix lent this… READ MORE

Time to market is a poor measure of innovation At the AMD CTO Summit held last week in Monterey, Calif., AMD put a few members of the press under nondisclosure and gave us an unusually detailed look at unpublished products and plans. Much of it is to be kept under wraps, but we were given leave to carry a few facts home to our constituents, including a couple of facts related to the state of AMD’s manufacturing process engineering. In assessing these facts, three ancient axioms come to mind: Nice guys finish last, slow and steady wins the race, and… READ MORE

Be among the few who are savvy enough to put this revolutionary cross-platform UI to use After more than two decades of searching, I’ve finally come up with my million-dollar idea. It’s the ultimate in user interface technology. It is genuinely resolution and device-independent, fitting everything from cell phones to plasma panels. It adapts effortlessly to internationalization and Unicode, and a rookie who’s never used my UI can learn to write code for it in less than a day. The Internet is already thoroughly seeded with client software for my UI, and brand new client hardware is available from several… READ MORE