A few weeks go, I reported a conversation with a Chinese-American investor who confirmed my suspicion that the next game-changer for the smartphone market is going to come out of mainland China. He wouldn’t name the company, but I think they’ve just unstealthed. ICube matches the hints he was dropping exactly.
The Smartphone Wars: The world turned upside down
It’s always a good day when you get to wield the Righteous Cluebat of Reality straight into the teeth of dogmatists and downshouters – and no, I’m not talking about being Andrew Breitbart, though I do like to think I’m at least as capable of upending smug certitudes as he is. Today’s cluebatting concerns two… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: The world turned upside down
A first game of Twilight Imperium
Twilight Imperium is advertised as “an epic boardgame of galactic conquest, politics, and trade”. The advertising doesn’t lie – the games in progress I’ve occasionally tripped over at SF conventions were sprawling affairs with huge fleets of starship models swirling about on a tile map representing the explored galaxy of a far future. Designed for… Continue reading A first game of Twilight Imperium
The Smartphone Wars: No bump, no glory
The April 2011 figures from comScore are out, and I’ve added them to my time-series plots. There are no surprises here, which is very bad news for anybody not an Android fan.
Configuration files and switches considered harmful
Someone on the gpsd-users list asked: I was just wondering why gpsd doesn’t have a configuration file in /etc/gpsd.conf, like most other Unix/Linux software? Because configuration files are evil, and not to be countenanced unless they become an absolutely necessary evil. Which in gpsd’s case is not yet, and I sincerely hope not ever.
The Smartphone Wars: HTC rejoins the good guys
Market pressure works. In response to an outcry from customers, HTC has just annnounced that it will return to its policy of shipping handsets with unlocked bootloaders. This makes me personally happy because I’ve been a fan of HTC handsets since the G-1; I would have had to stop buying and recommending them if they’d… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: HTC rejoins the good guys
The Moral Landscape: a critical review
Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape continues a pattern I’ve noted in the last two books of his I’ve read, Letter To A Christian Nation and The End Of Faith (my review here). Harris is a very capable thinker and a fearless, lucid, forceful writer; at his best, he’s the most accessible of the group he… Continue reading The Moral Landscape: a critical review
Maybe science is my religion, after all
In a recent comment thread, I wrote that I am revolted by the corruption and politicization of science. After I wrote that, I experienced a moment of introspective surprise during which I realized that my feelings about people who commit scientific fraud for personal or political ends are in tone and intensity very much like… Continue reading Maybe science is my religion, after all
The Smartphone Wars: More fun with statistics
Today, a prediction about the timing of Android victory. But – more importantly – a discussion of the uses and perils of statistical extrapolation.
The Smartphone Wars: Tracking userbase growth
I’ve put together a tool to visualize the smartphone market-share data comScore makes available in its monthly press releases. Readers can download both the tool and the raw data in order to check my work. And the first new visualization is quite interesting:
The Smartphone Wars: Still It Rises
I’ve been meaning to put together a running plot of U.S. smartphone marketshare for some time. The monthly press release from the market research firm comScore contain enough information to do it, but you have to stitch a number of them together as they only report the covered month and the third previous month. Stitching… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Still It Rises
The Uses of Cliche
I’ve done a lot of writing for the game Battle For Wesnoth. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned, and now teach others, is this: genre cliches are your friend. Too much originality can badly disrupt the gameplay experience. This is so at variance with our expectations about ‘good’ art that I think it… Continue reading The Uses of Cliche
The Smartphone Wars: With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?
Android just got a boost it didn’t need. RIM, already staggering after a 5% market-share drop over the last quarter and the Playbook debacle, has just…well, “shot itself through the foot” fails to convey quite the right sort of intensity. In fact it has executed a hitherto-unprecedented form of marketing suicide which can only be… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: With Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?
Scenes from Penguicon
It’s Saturday night at Penguicon. A few hours ago I blatantly pulled social rank on someone, and I am not ashamed. This is how it happened.
The Smartphone Wars: multicarrier breakout fail
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
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.