In the cover story, Gates, then only 35, and Jobs, 36, spoke of the future of the personal computer. To put things in perspective, Windows 95 was still four years away, and Jobs had been kicked out of Apple and struggling with his workstation company, Next. The iPod was still 10 years away. It was, as far as I can tell, the last time the two industry icons were interviewed together, until the All Things Digital 5 conference last May 30–or some 15 years later–organized by the venerable Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal.

A copy of the session is available free as streaming video on the D5 site (http://d5.allthingsd.com) or as one whole MP4 file from the Apple iTunes store (almost 1 gigabyte). An audio file (83.3 megabytes) is more manageable. In any case, it’s well worth listening to these industry pioneers talk about the past, present and future of computing.

The video is also an interesting study in contrast, not only between Gates and Jobs today, but between how they viewed the industry, then and now.
In 1991, the issue of competition–and Microsoft’s domination of operating systems–was clearly on Jobs’ mind. When the discussion turned to pen computing and the pioneering Go Corporation, Jobs predicted–correctly as history shows–that the company would be crushed. That prediction came true when the company closed in 1994 in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Pen Services for Windows.

In 2007, however, an older Jobs talks of acceptance. “You know, we don’t have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80 percent of the PC market,” Jobs says at one point. “You know, we’re really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it, but Apple’s fundamentally a software company and there’s not a lot of us left and Microsoft’s one of them.”

Curiously, 15 years after the Fortune Magazine interview, Gates is still talking about pen computing, calling himself an “unrepentant” believer in the tablet form factor.

“I think you’ll have voice [activated commands]. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that,” Gates says of the future tablet PC.

While Jobs expects computers to evolve and become more mobile, he also talks about an explosion of “post-PC” devices such as the iPod and iPhone, where people “are inventing things constantly.”

Neither Gates nor Jobs, however, see an end to the general-purpose personal computer.

Unlike in 1991, if there were any animosity between the two, it did not show. In 2007, Gates and Jobs appeared like old friends, sharing reminiscences and the occasional jibe, but all in good humor.

“His mother likes him,” Gates quips about the PC guy in Apple’s now-famous “I’m a Mac” commercials that poke fun at Windows computers.
This was all entertaining and informative, but Mossberg, Swisher and the other participants who joined the short question-and-answer session afterwards, missed a great opportunity to ask Gates and Jobs about how they see free and open source software will affect the industry.

Mossberg may not see it yet–perhaps he has not installed a user-friendly Linux distribution such as Ubuntu–but there is a sea-change coming that will see more companies and individuals, especially in the developing world, choosing free and open source software over proprietary solutions such as those offered by Microsoft and Apple. It’s a pity nobody in the conference thought of asking Gates and Jobs about it.

As you might expect, while both men are excellent communicators, it was Jobs who struck a chord that resonated with his generation. Summing up his relationship with Gates, he quoted a 1969 tune entitled Two Of Us: “There’s that one line in that one Beatles song, ‘You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.’ And that’s clearly true here.”

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Canada duty

A few weeks ago, the research company Gartner jumped the gun on everyone and offered its 10 top predictions for the years ahead.
Blogging, Gartner said, would peak at 100 million Web journals this year then level off.

The company also predicted that Vista would be the last major version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system and that by 2010, the cost of owning a personal computer would drop by 50 percent.

The numbers tend to bear Gartner out, at least on the number of blogs. By the end of 2006, blog watcher Technorati was tracking 63.2 million Web journals. Since about 175,000 new blogs are created every day, some 5.25 million are added to this figure every month. At this rate, we ought to hit 100 million blogs by July 2007.

Gartner’s prediction that these numbers will taper off is a bit trickier, as it assumes that the number of blogs dying off will reach or exceed 175,000 a day after July.

I was surprised to read Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer explain it this way: most people who would ever start a Web log have already done so. Those who love blogging and are committed to keeping it up, while other have become bored and moved on.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Plummer told the BBC. “Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

The explanation is facile, and the suggestion that very few new Internet users would want to start a blog seems ridiculous.

As with all such predictions, only time will tell. But soothsayers work at an advantage. Few people bother to come back later to check if they were right. If their prognostication proves accurate, they can beat their own drums. If not, they can just keep quiet about it, and usually, nobody will notice.

Some predictions, however, come back to haunt the people who made them.

For example, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2004, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicted that spam or unwanted commercial e-mail would be a thing of the past in two years.

Now we all know that’s just not true, but what do the figures say? Commtouch, an e-mail security company, reports that spam accounted for 87 percent of all e-mail traffic in 2006, a 30 percent increase over 2005. In other words, spam hasn’t gone away; it’s become worse. Oops.

Here’s another example.

In 1995, Oracle Corp. head honcho Larry Ellison predicted the death of the PC and the rise of cheap Network Computers that would draw applications and data from the Internet. Today, 12 years later, people are finally delivering some software as services over the Internet–but they’re doing so onto PCs, not Ellison’s stripped-down, disk-less machines. In fact, Ellison’s Network Computer company tanked.

But probably one of the least successful prognosticators was Bob Metcalf, the inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and one-time columnist of InfoWorld. In 1995, he predicted the Internet would collapse catastrophically in 1996 as too many people tried to connect to it. In an act of public contrition when his prediction didn’t come true, Metcalf put his column and some water into a blender and literally ate his own words.

Four years later, Metcalf was still at it. In his InfoWorld column, he predicted Linux would soon be killed off by Windows 2000. His reasons: “The Open Source Movement’s ideology is Utopian balderdash. And Linux is 30-year-old technology.” He must have known something Microsoft didn’t. In 2003, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer fired off a memo to employees clearly identifying Linux and open source as a growing threat to the company.
Back when Metcalf predicted its decline, Linux was primarily seen as a server operating system. These days, more and more people, especially in developing countries, see it as a viable alternative to expensive, proprietary operating systems on desktop PCs and notebooks.

Predicting the future is a tricky business. Maybe that’s why Metcalf stopped writing his column–and became a venture capitalist.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Low-volume PCB Assembly

Now, more than half a year after switching to Linux at home and Mac OS X at the office, I’ve yet to encounter a single virus on either platform, despite running both without any kind of software protection.

The old Windows user in me wonders: Am I being reckless?

The numbers say the odds are in my favor, at least for now. There are far fewer Linux viruses and those that exist have caused very little real damage.

In a November 2005 interview with Computerworld Hong Kong, security expert Mikko Hyppönen says there are over 140,000 viruses for Windows and only 30 for Linux. None exist for Mac OS X, he says.

Is this a matter of superior software design or simply a matter of market reality?

The conventional wisdom–a view I accepted for many years–is that there are more Windows viruses simply because there are more users on that platform. People who write viruses want the biggest bang for their buck, so they target the most popular operating system. And viruses written for Windows, like any other programs, will not run on Mac OS X or Linux.

The follow-on argument to this dominant-platform theory is that if Mac OS X or Linux became as popular as Windows, you’d see more viruses written for them as well.

But months spent using both operating systems have convinced me that this isn’t necessarily so.

Because Mac OS X and Linux are both based on Unix, they work on a system of permissions that allow only the administrator–also called the root–to change things on a system. In practical terms, that means you must enter the administrator’s password every time you want to install software–and that includes accidentally installing a virus or worm you downloaded from the Internet.

In contrast, Windows users have been accustomed to running as the administrator by default for years and expect to be able to download and install software on any personal computer they use. I know. I used to be one of them.

Unfortunately, this setup makes it devastatingly easy for careless users to unwittingly install viruses or spyware on their computers.

Windows Vista is supposed to address this problem with its own system of permissions and by encouraging people not to log in as administrators. Only time will tell, however, if end-users– especially those at home or in small offices–will heed this advice or simply keep doing what they’ve been doing since Windows 3.1.

Related to this concept of permissions, both Mac OS X and Linux keep their system files separate from applications and user data and require administrator privileges to change them. On the Mac, in fact, the system files are hidden by default, making it difficult for ordinary users to mess up the operating system.
On a Windows PC, the operating system, the applications and the user data aren’t kept apart and even non-administrators can add system files that could do serious damage.

In an article for The Register, Scott Granneman argues that even if Linux were to become the dominant desktop platform and if Mac OS X continued to grow, these operating systems would never experience all the problems with e-mail borne viruses in the Microsoft world.

“Virus writers use social engineering to convince people to do stupid things, like open attachments that carry viruses and worms,” he writes. “Poorly designed software makes it easier for social engineering to take place… Together, the two factors can turn a single virus incident into a widespread disaster.”

In Windows, it’s easy to run an executable program, Granneman says, noting how simple it is for users to click on an e-mail attachment to run a virus or worm disguised as a steamy screensaver. In contrast, a Linux user would have to save the attachment, give it executable permissions, and then run it. Every extra step is added protection.

Of course, just because an e-mail-attached virus won’t run on a Linux or Mac system doesn’t mean you can’t pass it on and infect other Windows users. But that problem is probably better handled on the level of mail servers, anyway.

For now, I’m convinced that I won’t need any anti-virus software on my iBook or my Linux PC, despite what McAfee or other vendors of such products say. This doesn’t mean I can afford to be careless or reckless because there is no perfectly safe operating system. Prudence dictates that I make sure I download and install software only from trusted sources, be careful about typing in my password and take other sensible precautions. After all, security is a process, not a product.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asias first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Author: Chin Wong
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Humorous photo captions