A Mechanic's Dream !!! F430.

iPhone on target for end of June launch ;-)

BOSTON (Reuters) - The iPhone, Apple Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) first mobile handset, is on schedule to hit the U.S. market at the end of June, a senior executive with AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T - news) said on Wednesday.


AT&T's wireless unit has an exclusive U.S. deal to sell the highly anticipated new handset.

"Our expectations are good. Our testing has been good," said AT&T Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson. "The iPhone is on target to launch in June."

The iPhone has become one of the most highly awaited product debuts since Apple Chief Executive
Steve Jobs demonstrated a prototype of the device in January.

There had been speculation by some blogs and reports that the iPhone could be delayed due to technical issues.

Stephenson said more than 1 million customers have said that they would like to buy one of the phones when they're available for purchase.

He made the comments while in Boston to speak at a Boston College Chief Executives' Club luncheon.

Stephenson said he was not sure how many iPhones will be available at launch.

"We're sorting through that right now," he said. "We got a million people waiting to buy it so we're hoping we get a million."

I am one of the million ;-))

Microsoft, Samsung sign broad patent pact

NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said on Thursday they have agreed to a broad technology patent pact to develop future products.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but the companies said they will both receive monetary payments compensating them for the patent usage.

The companies said the deal would help speed up development of new products including digital media players, televisions and computer-related devices.

Microsoft will never give up :-)

Moore’s Law, still proofed correct.

Gordon Moore one of the founders of Intel, made an empirical observation in the 60’s stating that the number of transistors in a ship will double every 18 to 24 months.

In the last years, a lot of rumors were floating around that Moore’s law is hitting a wall because current technologies are reaching the limit of what we can put on a silicon ship. But in the last few months , announcements came from Intel and IBM that saved Moore’s law. Intel came up with the new multiple core technology, where combining new materials allowed it to be able to build gates and switches insulated at 45nm while reducing transistor leakage and thus minimizing power consumption. But still this does not solve the performance problem, for that Intel introduced with the Core concept a way to use multiple processors on a ship to increase the performance. They even have a prototype of an 80 core layered in tiles consuming only 62 Watts. As a comparison, in 1996 to achieve Tera-Flop performance Intel used 10000 Pentium Pro (ASCI Red Supercomputer) that consumed 500 KWatt of Electricity!!!

By successfully shrinking the silicon gate dielectric to as little as 1.2nm thick –(five atomic layers!!), they solved the density problem in the past and with this new breakthrgouh, they would replace silicon dioxide with a thicker hafnium-based high-k material in the gate dielectric, reducing leakage by more than 10 times allowing to put more transistors, thus more processors on the same surface.

This is a leap that will take performance to level we’ve never see in PC’s before, assuming that MS Vista will leave some of that to the applications :-).

These processors use tera-scale computing in which chips can perform trillions of calculations per second and move terabytes of data. These processors can reconfigure themselves to perform tasks that were only possible using specialized ICs.

IBM on the other side is not idling and it announced a new memory technology that reduce memory cycle time to 2 ns which is 10 time faster than the existing RAM. By embedding these memories inside the processor, IBM will achieve a comparable level of performance to Intel’s architecture. Now imagine combining these two technologies together!!!

So Moore’s law still have good days laying ahead.

Apple iPhone. It is here.

The long awaited iPhone from Apple is here. It was announced today by Steve Jobs here at SF macWorld. After iTunes, Apple makes a step forward into consumers electronics with this cellular phone and iTV is next. Ahh Apple, what a company, I love it. My years working at Apple were a blast, the culture, the people and the charismatic leader...

So the question now, is how Aplle is going to compete with thousand pounds Gorilla like Motorola, Samsung or Nokia. I am excited to see how the Apple marketing machine and the Apple R&D gurus will take on the competition.

Check http://www.apple.com/iphone/
for the revolutionary multi-touch display, and the revolutionary phone UI, the Apple designers came up with.It is an all screen phone, no keyboard or navigation button, best usage of the real state with some magic touch from Apple.

SAO and ESB

All CIO and IT architects always imply that to implement SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in the entreprise, all what they need is an ESB (Entreprise Service Bus) and make IT developers build a set of reusable services and transformations to allow the data flow form a service to the other. I always found that approach simplistic and could lead to a disaster. This is an article that exactly explains very well my thoughts.

Easy and simplified answers are de rigueur at the moment – and "ESB" is exactly the kind of answer you might get when asking about an SOA. Don’t get me wrong – an ESB is a very valuable and useful component in an SOA set-up. If, however, you think that you are perfectly prepared for setting up an SOA simply because you now have at last got the selection process for your ESB over and done with – then you had better think again.

There is another view – although an ESB does not equal a SOA, it is however at its very heart. While this answer may be incrementally better, it doesn’t quite capture the essence of what an SOA really is: an SOA’s main task is to chop up the IT world into small tidbits. These tidbits are designed in line with the individual wishes of the specialist departments, correspond to industry standards and can be combined to form new processes and applications. They have to communicate with each other, exchange information, transform it and then forward it securely. There is also the need to link these tidbits with larger ones, bringing us to the topics of orchestration and composition. And this is where an ESB can actually be of help.

The question is, however, how do you decide on which tidbits? Who tells IT what the business requires and who tells the business what is feasible for IT? And who tells you whether the various tidbits are yet to be deployed, as originally planned? It’s now no longer a case of using middleware: it’s a question of how we deal with the actual development process of services, which leads us then to SOA management and governance. It is impossible to develop services that are worth being wired via an ESB, unless accompanied by processes that go beyond the borders of individual departments. The heart of an SOA is, therefore, more to be found on an organisational level – reinforced by the principles and best practices involved in SOA governance. Once these processes have been understood, then an ESB really does make sense for an SOA, just as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) does for the Internet.
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HP #1 PC seller in the world.

Less than 2 years after the Compaq acquisition, the strategy of the ousted CEO Carly Fiorina seems to be working, making the HP board look stupid for firing her over her merge decision and making her look like a real visionary. Another example of public company giving in to the Wall Street perssure on short term results.

HP today passed Dell to become #1 PC seller in the world.

Hewlett-Packard has passed Dell to become the world's largest PC seller, according to new figures from iSuppli Corp.
HP shipped 9.9 million PCs globally in the third quarter of the year, up 16.7% from 8.4 million sold during the same period the year before, according to a report from iSuppli, an industry research organization. HP's latest numbers not only exceeded the 9.5% expansion of the overall PC market, but also surpassed the 3.4% and 10.4% global increases for HP's two closest rivals, Dell and Lenovo, iSuppli reported.

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