The news is out that Verizon sold 2.2M iPhones in the roughly 60 days from product launch to their quarterly report. I’ll fess up; this is well over what I was expecting, based on the reports of unimpressive first-week sales. But I also underestimated Android new-unit sales by a larger factor. Even on the very… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail
Month: April 2011
Broadening my Deepwater Horizons
I’ve gotten used to being cited in computer science and software engineering papers over the last decade, but here’s a new one. Today I read a draft in which I and the GPSD project get cited a bunch of times and it’s – er – not about open source. It’s about Marine AIS in disaster… Continue reading Broadening my Deepwater Horizons
The Smartphone Wars: Android measured at over 50% U.S. market share
Two consecutive smartphone-wars posts is unusual here, I know, but the latest marketshare news is high-explosive stuff. The Guardian in Great Britain has published data from a European market-research outfit, Kantar WorldPanel Comtech; the article is titled Nokia and RIM bleeding smartphone share while Android cleans up, and includes a very informative table of smartphone… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Android measured at over 50% U.S. market share
The Smartphone Wars: The Stages of Apple-Cultist Denial
It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic. But I will attempt a brief tour through the… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The Stages of Apple-Cultist Denial
rsnapshot: you’re doing it right!
Some years back I wrote a book titled The Art of Unix Programming. My goal in that book was to convey the Zen of Unix to today’s generations of eager young Linux and *BSD programmers. In the spirit of that book, I feel impelled to point out out a program I’ve recently learned as a… Continue reading rsnapshot: you’re doing it right!
The Smartphone Wars: NoWin deal “more takeover than deal”?
In this week’s installment of “As the Smartphone World Turns”, we hear dire rumors from Nokia and see (more) evidence that RIM is circling the drain. We finish with a fascinating dispatch from the Android front.
Analysis of scaling problems in build systems
My post SCons is full of win today triggered some interesting feedback on scaling problems in SCons. In response to anecdotal assertions that SCons is unusably slow on large projects, I argued that build systems in general must scale poorly if they are to enforce correctness. Subsequently, I received a pointer to a very well… Continue reading Analysis of scaling problems in build systems
The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now…
Ah, yes, I see it’s time for another comScore report and another round of breathless journalism on the state of the U.S. smartphone market. But, you know, these are getting almost boring now. Once again, Android rampages over its competition like Godzilla laying the radioactive smackdown on Tokyo. And once again…everyone acts surprised? Get with… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Almost boring now…
Imprimatur me!
In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, I learned a few minutes ago that I have been quoted, approvingly, in an article published with the imprimatur of the Vatican. This is from a news report that made Slashdot; I have not seen the article itself, which is apparently print-only and is likely in Italian. OK, yes, I did… Continue reading Imprimatur me!
SCons is full of win today
It’s not much of a secret that I loathe autotools and have been seeking to banish that festering pile of rancid crocks from my life. I took another step in that direction over the last four days, and have some interesting statistics to report.
Stolen jewels
Our cat, Sugar, is getting old. The final, swift decline one tends to see in aging cats is not yet upon her; she’s still the lovely creature we’ve known for nearly two decades – eyes bright, coat soft and glossy, purr ready and resonant. Our friends marvel at her apparent health at over 18 years…but… Continue reading Stolen jewels
The Four Levels of AFJ Mastery
Once, in a bygone century, in the half-forgotten place called USENET, there were masters of satire and parody who could be an example to us all in these latter days. Among the greatest of their arts was the AFJ – the April Fool’s Joke, yes, but in the hands of these masters the AFJ could… Continue reading The Four Levels of AFJ Mastery
The Smartphone Wars: Microsoft may win after all
By a curiously-timed coincidence, three lines of evidence have combined over the last week to convince me that I have been seriously underestimating Microsoft’s competitive potential in the smartphone market. One is that I actually got my hands on a Windows 7 phone; another is a report from a major market-research outfit that has been… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Microsoft may win after all