Blog Archives
Smile for the cell phone camera you created, Steve
By Andy Patrizio | July 30, 2009The Silicon Valley is a long way from the flashbulbs and high speed chases of the west side of Los Angeles, where paparazzi chase after celebs at more than 100 mph on city streets. I used to live in that madness. You saw some real sights driving up Robertson Blvd., a.k.a. Paparazzi Row, where celebs went to be photographed. It was all so deliberate despite protestations to the contrary.
They may act like they didn't want their picture taken, but trust me, if it was taken, they wanted it to happen. This is a town where people call the paps to say where they will be ahead of time. All the chic restaurants on Robertson have two entrances: attention whore and non-attention whore.
Up here, we don't have that nonsense. Most Valley CEOs are kinda boring, although Yahoo boss Carol "F-bomb" Bartz has been providing considerable entertainment lately. Despite those goofy Intel commercials about their "rock stars," we don't really have any.
Well, except for one. And unlike the celebrity who protests having their picture taken while walking out the front door of The Ivy where the paps are waiting, Apple boss Steve Jobs really does hate intrusions into his life and probably isn't a happy camper over this. (click for a larger version)
Yes, TMZ strikes again. The site that was all over the death of Michael Jackson, leaving other press flat footed, caught the first photo of the Valley's last rock star since his liver transplant surgery and subsequent return to work. The irony of it is that the picture was taken with an iPhone camera, which would explain the lousy quality.
Just prior to the release of the 3GS, which has a new camera, a developer told me that the 3G camera phone quality would improve as well because of improved software. I have noticed no difference, and this picture seems to validate that. Granted, the photo was taken through the windshield of a car, which distorts the view. Still, while the iPhone is a great phone, the camera quality is seriously lacking.
Given it was taken in the Apple campus parking lot, with an iPhone and through the windshield tells me it wasn't a pap job. They would never be so sloppy. It was likely someone visiting Apple who sold the picture to TMZ (the name means "thirty mile zone," a portion of LA where all the celebs are clustered). Whoever it was, you better not let your identity leak out.
It's not lost on anyone that Jobs is now about as skinny as an iPod Touch turned sideways. Some have noted on various boards that following an organ transplant, patients are often shot up with steroids, and they gain weight, they don't lose even more. Now we know why he wasn't at WWDC. The audience would have had a collective heart attack if they saw him like this. The fact he's even skinnier tells me one thing: the last year has to have been absolute hell for him.
On the other hand, that's not a bodyguard or a personal trainer walking with Jobs, that's Apple design chief Jonathan Ive, who looks like the picture of health. Good thing. While Jobs gets the worship and fretting over his health, Ive's departure would be far more detrimental for Apple than Jobs's would be.
Of AT&T, /b/tards and Net Neutrality
By Andy Patrizio | July 27, 2009AT&T, one of the largest Internet service providers (ISPs) in the country, put a temporary block on its Internet customers over the weekend to an underground Web site due to a denial-of-service attack. The block is gone but the fuss kicked up among bloggers remains.
Over the weekend, Christopher "moot" Poole, the owner of the site 4chan.org, noticed that AT&T users were blocked from accessing a portion of his site. Specifically, AT&T blocked the server on img.4chan.org, the dedicated server for the site's Random board, also known as /b/. The Random board alone gets around one-third of all of 4chan's traffic, so it has its own server.
But even though AT&T said it blocked the server because it detected a denial-of-service attack, the board's rabid user base smelled censorship at work.
Poole, a fan of Japanese anime, started 4chan about six years ago, copying a similar Japanese anime board called 2chan. Since its founding in 2003, 4chan quickly gained popularity, with its various message boards enabling people to post and trade pictures and chat anonymously: unlike other message boards, 4chan requires no login account.
The iPhone My Location feature: missed it by that much
By Andy Patrizio | July 16, 2009As the owner of an iPhone, my colleagues like to forward new announcements for the phone my way, either because I might be interested in it, or to check it out. In the case of Google's new My Location feature, it was both. Too bad AT&T failed me again, albeit in an amusing way.
My Location is a feature found in the iPhone's Safari browser. Select that option with a tap of the finger and it determines your location and narrows searches to where you are. So if you do a search for a Starbucks, it would find the ones around you (not like I didn't already know every one within 5 miles of my house).
So while working at home the other day I fired up the phone, selected "update" from the My Location line right below the search box and it came up with "Berkeley, CA." Which was great, except that I live in Belmont, 40 or so miles to the southwest.
Even better was at work. Our office is right on the edge of San Francisco proper and just next door to Candlestick Park (Dave Needle is always correcting me, saying I need to be factually accurate in its name, especially when I'm giving directions. He's right, of course, but I utterly loathe corporate arena naming and won't use it for an older building/stadium. For something new like AT&T Park, I usually come up with something unprintable here).
That puts us at the corners of three cities, really; San Francisco, Daly City and Brisbane. Renewing my location on the phone resulted in all three cities being selected at one point or another. Updating it is a bit of Russian Roulette. I'm never sure which of the three cities it will pick.
So the Starbucks search finds me stores 15 miles away, smack in the middle of downtown, or Daly City stores a few miles west but on the other side of the mountains, and of course, none in Brisbane (despite my efforts. I recommended a Brisbane location to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz when I met him two years ago at the iPod Touch launch.).
One thing I can confirm is the rumors that iPhone OS 3.0 is a major power pig. Reports have been popping up on Apple and enthusiast sites that the phone can't hold a charge to save its life. The iPhone 3GS has a slightly smaller battery, around 15 percent smaller than the prior generations, but further tests found older 3G phones also had the problem.
So now suspicion now rests on the 3.0 OS as the culprit, since people with the older hardware are having the same problem. I've run the battery down to almost half its full charge with about one full hour of 3G use. That's just not acceptable.
Right now Apple has OS 3.1 in the works and is in the second beta, so fingers crossed that the problem is fixed. Despite the flaws, and now a growing crack in the plastic shell of my phone right at the base, where the USB connector attaches to the phone, I'm still not interested in anyone else's hardware. And that's coming from a PC user who builds his own computers and wouldn't use a Mac if Steve Jobs personally dropped one off at my house, since I'd just end up having to put Parallels on it to run all my Windows software.
However, I am plenty ticked at AT&T's poor network, inability to support the phone's full set of features and the $30 data bill when I know I'm not using anywhere near enough per month. I'm really ready to jailbreak this phone and switch providers.
As Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett noted, "Apple has so thoroughly stolen the customer relationship -- who would argue that Apple iPhone customers' first affinity is to the device rather than to the network -- that the network is not only irrelevant, it is rather a source of derision?"
Amen.
Sun's Q4 outlook: cloudy and fading
By Andy Patrizio | July 14, 2009It's a good thing Sun got a $7.4 billion commitment from Oracle in writing a few months ago, because if it had to negotiate off of this quarter's earnings, Oracle would be paying a lot less.
The last of the Unix giants pre-announced fiscal fourth quarter results ended June 30 and they are not pretty. Sun said it expects revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 to be in the range of $2.580 to $2.680 billion, as compared with $3.780 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. That's almost a 40 percent drop year-over-year. Ouch. Wall Street had been expecting revenue of around $3.03 billion.
Sun anticipates a GAAP net loss per share for the quarter in the range of $(0.24) to $(0.34). On a non-GAAP basis, which is what everyone uses on Wall Street, Sun expects net loss per share in the range of $(0.06) to $(0.16).
Non-GAAP net loss per share excludes amortization of acquisition-related intangibles, stock-based compensation, restructuring and related impairment of long-lived assets, settlement income, net gain or loss on equity investments and the tax effect of these non-GAAP adjustments.
Sun hasn't said why the quarter was so bad, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out. The economy, Sun's expensive hardware and a loss of confidence in the firm all have to have weighed on sales. No doubt its sales reps are pre-occupied, too, either worrying about their job, trying to find a new one before the axe falls, or likely both.
Oracle still says it has Sun's back, at least publicly. It issued a statement saying it still expects the Sun acquisition to be accretive by at least 15 cents a share on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after the purchase is complete, and that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle's non-GAAP operating profit in that year and $2 billion in the second year.
Sun shareholders will vote to approve the merger on Thursday, July 16.
Paul Maritz is no fan of x86
By Andy Patrizio | July 06, 2009Call it a hunch, but I'm guessing VMware chief Paul Maritz did not spend the Fourth of July at a barbecue with Intel folks. Video has just emerged of Maritz going to town bashing the x86 architecture while speaking at the Tiecon Conference, which took place in May.
The video runs 10 minutes but doesn't seem complete. In it, he details the long development process of the x86 architecture, dating back to the 8080 chip, and complains about how as the processor has developed, none of the old gateways were removed, making the x86 a power pig.
His main point was that Intel's x86 architecture is just not fit for mobile devices. "It's a power hog, it loves electricity, all those [unused] gates are basically consuming power," he said. He added that over the years, Intel has added instructions that no one uses and aren't used, but were never removed.
"It's all junk silicon," he added.
Intel's response was "Paul Maritz is not privy to all of Intel's product plans."
The odd thing was that Maritz was discussing mobile devices and the plusses and minuses of ARM vs. x86. His firm does virtualization software for massive server systems. Talk about getting far a-field. What next, Larry Ellison criticizing Blizzard for leaving LAN play out of StarCraft II?
(He may not care but I'm mighty annoyed at Blizzard for that.)
Got cores? HP has up to 12 for your desktop
By Andy Patrizio | July 01, 2009HP today announced it will offer a high-end workstation with one or two of AMD's new six-core Opteron processors, codenamed "Istanbul," for its HP xw9400 tower PC workstations.
Just recently AMD updated the series to run the quad-core Shanghai processor, and it's socket-compatible with Istanbul, so if you own one of these beasts and are good with a screwdriver, it's just a processor and BIOS upgrade.
The move from four to six core processors means a 34 percent improvement in performance per watt, according to HP, and a pretty good boost in overall performance with some of the newer equipment. Like previous generations, this new version supports up to 32GB of memory.
The Istanbul-based xw9400 features HyperTransport 3.0 technology to increase interconnect rates from 2 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) to a maximum 4.8 GT/s. The HP xw9400 can be configured with the ATI FirePro V7750 3-D workstation graphics accelerator instead of the nVidia Quadro card, which came in previous generations.
The HP xw9400 Workstation is registered as an Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Gold product, the highest rating available. The power supply is rated 80 PLUS, which is considerably more efficient than a standard power supply in terms of overall energy usage and the amount of waste heat.
Clearly not designed for running Office productivity apps, this kind of workstation is used in high-end applications like engineering, 3D digital content creation, oil and gas, and other science-related projects.
It might even be able to run Crysis.*
The HP xw9400 Workstation starts at a U.S. list price of $1,899 (although it scales up very fast as you add components) and is available now.
(* A running joke among gamers. The game Crysis is so system resource-intense that many rigs weren't able to play it. A long-running gag on Internet forums when discussing hardware is "But can it play Crysis?" People say that about everything from the iPhone to a supercomputer.)
