Author Archives: Neil McAllister

ARM vs. Intel for the mobile device market

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ARM processorMy latest feature article for InfoWorld is a look at how competition is heating up in the chip market for mobile devices. With sales of traditional PCs and servers slowing and customers increasingly turning to smartphones and other devices to access the Internet, Intel is off in search of new markets. But to win share, Intel will have to compete with an unlikely contender — one far removed from Intel’s Silicon Valley stomping grounds.

ARM Holdings of Cambridge, UK has been manufacturing power-efficient chips for the embedded systems and digital device markets since the mid-1980s. Intel hopes to win away ARM’s customers with its newest, low-voltage Atom CPUs. But to do that, it will have to contend with a company whose business model is substantially different from the Intel Way. Click on over to read how the contest is shaping up, and be sure to leave your comments.

Oracle OpenWorld

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San Francisco’s largest annual technology event descends on Moscone Center yet again. Last year it took over a couple of the nearby hotels, too. It will be interesting to see how much Java/Sun Microsystems content is featured at this year’s show.

Online office suite comparison

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The idea that someday we’ll be doing all our computing in a Web browser is gaining traction, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to do all your daily office tasks online? I did, too, so I set out to see whether I could replace Microsoft Office with any of the current generation of Web-based office suites. I looked at Google Docs, Zoho, and thanks to an invitation to Microsoft’s Technical Preview program, the forthcoming Office 2010 Web Apps. The results are up at InfoWorld, but I should warn you: They weren’t all positive. Click the link to read about the good and the bad, and see if you want to try for yourself.

Review: “A New Kind of Science”

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The ancient Chinese game of Go has fairly simple rules. In general, it is much easier to teach someone the rules of Go than those of poker, for example, or of chess. Nonetheless, popular wisdom says that in all the 2,500 years that Go has been in existence, no two games have ever been identical. It’s impossible to know whether this is actually true, but it’s statistically plausible; thus, the game of Go demonstrates that it’s possible for very complex systems to arise from a very simple set of rules.

Makes sense, right? At least, when I say it that way it seems pretty obvious. You probably had some inkling in your mind of the idea that “complex behavior can arise from simple sets of rules” even before I mentioned it to you — didn’t you?

Well, strangely enough, Stephen Wolfram — although a mathematical prodigy who published his first scientific paper at 15, went on to school at Eton, Oxford, and Caltech, and invented the mathematical computation software Mathematica, among other things — did not. » More... » →

First look at Office 2010

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As a writer, I spend most of my life in Microsoft Office. Love it or hate it, Office has become the gold standard for business productivity software. So when the good folks at InfoWorld gave me the opportunity to take the upcoming version for a test drive, I jumped at the chance. My first impressions are largely favorable. Microsoft keeps making steady improvements here and there, and the suite is more polished and consistent than ever. On the downside, each new release seems to tie Office ever closer to back-office products like SharePoint and Exchange, which means customers will be locked in to Microsoft software more than ever. Click on over to InfoWorld for the rest of my thoughts.

Review: “Beat the Reaper”

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First-timer Josh Bazell’s novel Beat the Reaper is an unusual medical crime thriller — which is to say its protagonist, Dr. Peter Brown, is not just a doctor. He’s also a notorious criminal.

The novel opens with Brown, an overworked, sleep-deprived intern at “Manhattan’s worst hospital,” being mugged by a lone gunman. The mugger starts having second thoughts right away. Probably he should have known better than to try to rob someone with a bad attitude and a thorough knowledge of human anatomy. What he couldn’t possibly have known, however, is that Dr. Peter Brown is actually Pietro “Bearclaw” Brnwa, former mob assassin, recently having completed medical school while enrolled in the federal witness protection program. As it turns out, what this mugger really needs isn’t money. He needs to go to the emergency room — he just doesn’t know it yet. » More... » →

JavaOne 2009

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This year’s annual JavaOne conference will be taking place at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, June 2-5. It will be particularly interesting to see what direction Java will take now that Oracle figures so prominently in its future.

What’s next for netbooks?

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I have a new article up at InfoWorld this week, and this one is a little bit of a departure from my usual beats of software development and open source. This time, I’m talking about the ever-popular netbooks, and what directions these mini-laptops might take in the near future.

My conclusions? For starters, they might not even look like mini-laptops for much longer.

Hardware vendors are naturally concerned that these low-margin devices could cut into the sales of their higher-end products, so they’re looking for ways to spin them as secondary systems and “companion devices.” Look for new chips under the hood, new form factors, and even new pricing models that could send the cost of netbooks down to nothing. Click over to InfoWorld to see what I mean, and be sure to leave feedback in the comments and forums.

Tough challenges ahead for desktop Linux

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Tux, the Linux PenguinMy latest feature for InfoWorld is sure to raise some folks’ hackles, but that’s OK by me. For years now, pundits have been predicting that Linux would take the desktop by storm, becoming a true rival to Windows. I suspect that won’t happen anytime soon. The inertia working against it is too strong. In this article, I examine some of the reasons why enterprise customers have been slow to adopt Linux for their desktop workstations — and why they probably always will be.

Do you disagree? By all means, dive into the discussion by posting comments or striking up a conversation on InfoWorld’s new forums.