dkeskar

Reflections in the iPad

Apple announced a new tablet as predicted, and as expected, everyone has been talking about it ever since. Pundits, programmers, strategists, sophists, and my kids have been weighing in. Social courtesy requires of me to share my thoughts. 

Apple will undoubtedly deliver on the promised magic. And it will be great, and awesome. People will line up, jostling each other, to buy it. Strangers will bond in singing its praises, and friends will come to blow over differed opinions. Otherwise perfect families, complete with an iMac, a MacBook, two iPhones and three iPods have suddenly realized that they have an unmet need and are itching to fulfill it. 

iPhone developers, new and old, will go overboard in porting and writing new apps that will make the iPad positively shine. Newspapers suffering from shifting patterns of news consumption are hoping that the tablet will create a new channel for keeping their readers and rejuvenating their brand. Book publishers fighting Google's book scanning agenda and Amazon's book-selling tactics are happy to have another dog (or lion) in the fight. 

Apple is now a $50B-dollar-a-year company. Apple's hardware design and integration skills are already a huge cut above everyone else in the world. They have now developed their own in-house chip that is causing some beard-tugging from the small band of CPU designers capable of reading between the lines. This ability to recombine technology DNA with a laser-like product focus is unparalleled and, in Apple's case, highly repeatable. From NeXT technologies repurposed to be the Mac OS X, and KHTML engine jump-starting the industry-leading WebKit browser framework to the morphing of the Mac OS X into the iPhone OS, very few organiz ations can deliver improvements on multiple fronts so fast and so radically. Apple does it again and again. 

Apple software teams deliver seamless experiences in their marque applications combining firmware/OS/toolkit expertise and user interface insights. Apple has finally recognized and embraced third party developers providing them with SDKs and tools as well as a way to get paid through App Store purchases.

Apple, in short, is inexorable, controlling its supply chain, extending its reach and creating its own destiny through a new device-driven ecosystem, rooted in end-to-end capabilities and special partnerships. A veritable Magic Kingdom, where there is an App for what you want, everything just works and happy vendors wear uniforms with name-tags.

A Work of Art Perpetually Auctions Itself

via cgi.ebay.com

A Work of Art, literally and metaphorically, that perpetually attempts to sell itself on eBay. The Artist explores the "perpetual state of uncertainty and the instability of ownership" through the medium of Acrylic, custom electronics, programming, internet connection and online auction. Current minimum bid $2500.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Capricorn Transitions

MMX 2010

No, I am not talking about some gadget. Its just the next 12 months, as marked by the Reformed Gregorian Calendar system, by which we synchronize much of planetary society.

Fans of BBC and Columbia Pictures who wait until all credits have rolled by, might remember copyright notices in Roman numerals. And, yes, I am really showing my age when I say I loved the Sherlock Holmes series by Granada Television, which I remember watching back in MCMLXXXVIII.

Yes, despite the mathematical dead-enders and cultural degenerates that the pseudo-logical Romans turned out to be, there is a certain charm in this system of numeral representation which makes addition and multiplication mysterious, and provides a few programming exercises for n00bs.

For the CPU-savvy, MMX was the Multi Media aXeleration instruction set that Intel introduced with the Pentium. Some people I know have fond memories of writing MMX optimizing compilers and speeding up video codecs. Coincidentally, the letters MMX (plus the word Pentium) sparked a long curve of stock growth and splits for those other four letters, viz. INTC, leading to more fun times, which many more people I know might remember even more fondly. But hey, its been X years since INTC peaked.

Continuing in CPU-speak, the New Year is like the leading edge of the synchronizing clock pulse, at which various processing entities do stuff. Memories get refreshed, and values get latched. As it is for DRAMs and Registers, so it is for people and news organizations. So, have fun making those resolutions and reviewing the year as it went by. More on that later.

Happy MMX-ing ya'll.