Top Bananas | Monthly Archives: September 2015

The Complexity of Democracy

Posted on September 30, 2015 by admin Posted in Programming, Software Leave a comment

What it is: Java is one of the most popular programming languages that offers cross-platform performance.

One of the most popular programming languages is Java, which is the primary programming language for the Android operating system. One of Java’s original advantages was its cross-platform capabilities with the promise that you could write a program once and run it on multiple platforms through a portable virtual machine. While this promise of write-once, run anywhere isn’t quite perfect, it’s much better than porting programs from one language to another.

Unfortunately, Java isn’t the simplest language to learn. Even worse, Oracle inherited Java from Sun Microsystems, the original creators of Java. Oracle is currently fighting with Google for Google’s use of Java in the Android operating system, despite the fact that Java is open source.

This current battle between Oracle and Google over the use of Java highlights one of the problems of open source vs. proprietary software. On the surface, open source sounds appealing since it’s free for anyone to use and contribute to. The problem is that when you have multiple entities with their own agenda, getting people to cooperate can be difficult. The current fight between Oracle and Google over the use of Java in Android is just one problem with open source.

Oracle has even been rumored to have lost interest in Java, which means another company or organization will need to take control of Java. Theoretically, this should be possible with open source, but if Oracle keeps trying to control Java, that could cause trouble with Android and Google.

While Java may be a general purpose language, Swift is designed strictly for OS X, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS programming, so all the latest features of each operating system will be accessible by Swift through Apple’s programming framework. Since Apple controls both Swift and their operating systems, there should never be a battle between the programming language supporters and the operating system supporters.

For people who prefer open source like Android and Java, that can sometimes translate into chaos and disorganization. On the other hand, proprietary software like Swift and iOS can be optimized to work together and progress rapidly where features in one can be exploited immediately in the other. With Java and Android, changes in one may not be immediately reflected in the other since Java isn’t designed strictly for Android and Android can’t dictate changes in Java. That doesn’t mean open source is better or worse than proprietary software; just that each has their pros and cons.

For proprietary software, the pros are that a single company can define the future for their programming language to work with their operating system. The cons are that you risk getting locked into an ecosystem defined by one company.

For open source, the pros are that nobody can control the programming language or operating system. The cons are that with nobody firmly in control, progress can come in fits and starts with no definite vision or timeline.

Open source is generally best for tech-savvy users who have no fear of taking advantage of open source features. Proprietary software is generally best for user convenience as long as users accept what a single company has to offer.

Open source is best for maintaining existing technology because then you aren’t locked in to a particular vendor. Proprietary tends to be best for introducing and profiting from innovative new technology that open source eventually copies and mimics.

Look at all the major open source projects and ask which ones are truly innovative and which ones are simply offering incremental improvements. In general, open source focuses on incremental improvements while proprietary can offer innovative technology. That’s because people tend to focus on proprietary technology so they can profit from their ideas. This encourages innovation but can also encourage monopolies.

So watch the current battle between Oracle and Google over Java and Android to see one of the flaws of open source. Whatever happens, the current battle isn’t helping either Java or Android progress and provide new features for consumers, and that’s bad for everyone.

The Importance of El Capitan

Posted on September 29, 2015 by admin Posted in Business, Software Leave a comment

What it is: El Capitan is Apple’s latest version of their Macintosh operating system that will be available on September 30.

El Capitan is Apple’s latest version of OS X. What makes El Capitan useful isn’t just that it adds new features and squashes bugs (while likely adding more bugs in the process). The main importance of El Capitan is that it’s just one of many of Apple’s long line of free operating system upgrades.

Back in the old days, people had to buy an operating system. Once you had an operating system, you had to buy a new one and each new operating system version often cost $100 or more.

The first shift of change came when Linux appeared as a free, open source operating system. Initially Linux required technical skill just to install, let alone to use, but now practically anyone can install Linux with little problems. With Linux so freely available, it still struggles in attracting novices, but many technical savvy users have little problems using Linux and even novices can install and use Linux if they’re willing to try.

The next shift in the operating system market came when Apple started offering free operating system upgrades for the Macintosh. Essentially Apple makes their money selling hardware so improved versions of OS X simply helps sell hardware. If you want a new version of OS X, Apple will cheerfully let you have it for free.

The combination of free OS X and Linux operating systems helped commoditize the operating system market. Microsoft used to make tons of money selling operating systems starting with MS-DOS and then graduating to Windows. Now that other operating systems are free, even Microsoft had to resort to giving away Windows 10 for free for the first year. After that first year, can Microsoft still sell Windows 10? Maybe, but the days of making money selling operating systems is long gone.

Look back to the days of compilers. In the 80’s, Borland International made a ton of money selling Turbo Pascal and later Turbo C. Microsoft countered with QuickC and QuickBasic along with their professional compiler versions of C and BASIC. A host of other companies sold compilers too such as Symantec. Then something happened.

Free compilers started to appear and they were initially poor and slow, but they kept improving. Much like Linux kept getting better and easier to use, so did free compilers like GCC get better and faster. Apple nearly killed the Macintosh when they shifted from 68000 processors to PowerPC processors, and forget about offering compilers so people could make PowerPC programs. Another company called Metrowerks saved Apple by release a compiler called Code Warrior.

When Apple made the shift from PowerPC processors to Intel processors, they were ready with their Xcode compiler. Initially Apple sold their compiler for $4.99, but then they made it free. The idea is that instead of making money from developers, you give developers the tools to make programs for your operating system. That in turn helps sell the Macintosh and sales of the Macintosh fund development of OS X and Xcode.

So by giving away Xcode and OS X, Apple makes it easy for people to use and develop for the Macintosh. Ultimately OS X and Xcode are nothing but free ways to get more people to buy a Macintosh.

With free compilers and free operating systems, the compiler and operating system markets have effectively been gutted. No startup would get any money if they tried to sell a new operating system or a compiler. Yet selling compilers and operating systems is still how Microsoft makes money. Free compilers and operating systems completely challenge Microsoft’s business model, which is why they’re shifting to services like Office 365 as fast as possible.

When comparing computers, you can either pay for future upgrades with Windows or get free upgrades with Linux or OS X. Which looks like a better option?

The operating system market, like the compiler market, is gone for good. Free operating system upgrades won’t hurt Apple one bit and will actually help sell more products. However free operating system upgrades will hurt Microsoft. El Capitan isn’t just helping sell more Macintosh computers; it’s also helping kill the operating system upgrade market as well.

iPhone Sales Hit 13 Million in One Weekend

Posted on September 28, 2015 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: The iPhone 6s is the latest iPhone model that recently broke previous sales records.

Every year, critics claim the iPhone won’t sell because it lacks features that Android phones have had for years. Yet every year Apple manages to sell a record-breaking number of iPhones in the first weekend. Ignoring technical specifications that mean nothing if they don’t translate into improved user experience, the iPhone continues to sell each new model because it does offer major features that users want and like.

The two most prominent examples are 3D Touch and Live Photos. 3D Touch detects soft vs. hard presses on the screen so you can view commands without wading through multiple menus. This alone makes the iPhone 6s easier to use, which is a feature that Android phones will have a hard time matching. Wait another year or two for a 3D Touch-like feature to come to Android, and even then it will be useless until more apps take advantage of this new form of user interaction.

Live Photos is another example of an interesting feature that’s not necessary, but still interesting and makes ordinary pictures come alive. Although Live Photos does take up more space, it is a unique feature that Android should be able to mimic fairly soon. In the meantime, you won’t hear Android supporters claiming the iPhone offers features that you can’t find on Android.

While Apple is busy selling 13 million iPhones in one weekend, Blackberry managed to sell 800,000 devices in the second quarter. That’s actually down from the 1.4 million they sold in the previous quarter, which tells you how far Blackberry phones have dropped in popularity. Will Blackberry ever regain their once dominant lead? You might as well ask if Kodak will ever overtake digital photography with film cameras or if Borders Books will ever overtake Amazon by opening more retail stores.

The reason why people buy Apple products is because they trust the products to work as advertised and to make features easy to use. That’s what critics fail to understand when they attack Apple. Most critics look at all the features Apple products lack while ignoring the idea that features are useless if they’re not easy for most people to use.

One major example of this is the file system found in desktop operating systems like Windows, OS X and Linux. Most novices have trouble understanding the concept of folder hierarchies and files. They easily lose files and forget where they put them. Using a file management program like Windows Explorer or OS X’s Finder won’t help these people because they don’t understand how files and folders work in the first place.

That’s why iOS keeps files linked to the app that created them so all you need to do is find the app and search through the files that particular app created. Critics who dismiss iOS because it doesn’t have a file system should also criticize a Lamborghini because it lacks a crank in the front to start the engine.

People don’t keep buying Apple products and breaking sales records every year because they want a cheap product that’s hard to use and poorly supported. Apple will continue selling a record breaking number of iPhones every year as long as they keep developing products that people want with features that people can understand. Other companies can continue selling products that people don’t want (Blackberry) with features that don’t translate into greater user satisfaction.

Apple shows how to make money selling products that people want. Blackberry and other companies show how to make money selling products meant to deceive the customer (think of bloatware on PCs), products that are poorly supported (think of the lack of Android updates on most smartphones and tablets), and products that aren’t as easy to use with few features that people want (think Windows RT).

It’s not hard to understand Apple’s success unless you think success should only go towards companies that don’t care about their customers.

The Slow Death of Blackberry

Posted on September 27, 2015 by admin Posted in Business Leave a comment

What it is: Blackberry once dominated the smartphone market. Then Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and it’s been all downhill since then.

At one time, almost everyone in the corporate world used a Blackberry. Companies issued Blackberry phones and people used them so often that they were labeled Crackberries. At this point, Blackberry (then called Research in Motion) kept offering incremental improvements on their phones. That all changed when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007.

Blackberry dismissed the threat of the iPhone and assumed that they would retain their massive market share since the idea that people would dump their Blackberries for an iPhone seemed ludicrous. Yet that’s exactly what happened.

The iPhone proved such a massive improvement over the traditional smartphone that comparing an iPhone to a blackberry was like comparing an F-35 stealth fighter to the Wright Brother’s Kitty Hawk plane. Once people saw how much more versatile the iPhone could be compared to the physical keyboard and tiny screen of the Blackberry, they switched en masse to the iPhone and abandoned Blackberry and others in the process.

The lesson is clear. Incremental improvements are never the answer. To succeed in business, you need to assume that someone else will come along and wipe out your entire advantage overnight. Before that happens, you have the chance to disrupt your own business and replace it with another one, but most companies don’t want to think that way. They prefer to coast on inertia and keep milking success for as long as possible until it’s too late, and that’s exactly what Blackberry has done.

Finally after seeing their once dominant market share plummet to the single digits, Blackberry has announced they plan on releasing a modified Android phone. Of course, this ignores the fact that most Android manufacturers are losing money selling phones (with the exception of Samsung and Huawei). Can Blackberry succeed selling Android phones? Even if they do, they’ll never dominate the market again because their sole advantage is security, which isn’t a large enough advantage to convince people to switch from any Android phone to a Blackberry Android phone. That means in the best case scenario, Blackberry will simply stay a small phone manufacturer.

What Blackberry really needs to do is decide where the future is going and then build devices that define that future. Instead of building another me-too device like an Android phone or a tablet that flopped (the Blackberry Playbook), Blackberry and every other company needs to think ahead and build tomorrow’s product today. Apple did that with the iPhone and then the iPad. Everyone else fails to see the future until it’s too late.

The list of companies that fail to see the future is huge (Montgomery Wards, Borders Books, Nokia, Blackberry, and even Microsoft). Knowing that incremental improvements is never the answer, companies should focus on redefining the future like Apple did with the iPhone or Palm Computing did with personal digital assistants (PDAs). Inventing the future is the surest path to success, yet it’s also the hardest because it involves thinking and planning, which most companies prefer not to do in favor of granting their executives bonuses in return for doing nothing but more of the same.

That’s a sure-fire formula for failure. Yet it’s the choice most companies choose every time and then wonder why they become irrelevant in a few years.

Good Enough Technology

Posted on September 26, 2015 by admin Posted in Hardware Leave a comment

What it is: Technology rapidly improves until it’s just as powerful as dedicated devices from the past.

Anyone remember the early days when mainframe and minicomputer users dismissed PCs as “toys”? Back then, mainframe and minicomputer users claimed that PCs were so much weaker than mainframe and minicomputers that they were practically useless – and they were right up until the point that PCs rapidly improved while mainframe and minicomputers did not.

Even today mainframe and minicomputers are still more powerful than a typical PC, but all that power means nothing when the PC can do what most people need in the comfort of their home or office without being tied down to a special room housing a mainframe or minicomputer. Given a choice between top of the line power that’s stuck in one location all the time, or near top of the line power that you can move and place in your home, office, or anywhere you can take a laptop, it’s clear that the PC will never be as powerful as mainframe and minicomputers, but it will always be more versatile.

Now that PCs are as powerful as yesterday’s mainframe and minicomputers, they’re far more useful in most cases than mainframe and minicomputers. Only a handful of people need a mainframe or minicomputer. For the rest of the world, a PC is more than adequate despite never having the same power as today’s mainframe and minicomputers. The difference in processing power is not much of an advantage over portability and versatility that a PC offers.

That’s exactly the same situation cameras currently face. In the old days, digital cameras captured poorer images than film. That’s why Kodak clung to film for so long because they made money processing film and selling it. Eventually digital cameras not only equaled film in quality, but surpassed it. It was inevitable, but Kodak failed to see the obvious and suffered as a result.

Today, professional photographers still cling to dedicated cameras that will always be better than smartphone cameras. Yet smartphone cameras keep improving to the point where they’re better than the dedicated professional cameras of the past. That means professional photographers now have a choice. Lug around a suitcase full of equipment that needs to be set up each time to capture a shot, or use a smartphone camera such as the latest iPhone 6s to capture images quickly and easily while carrying it around in their pocket.

The iPhone’s camera will never equal the quality of dedicated cameras since dedicated cameras have more room for lenses to capture higher quality images. However, the iPhone’s camera can capture images superior to yesterday’s dedicated professional cameras, so the tradeoff is carrying around a suitcase full of equipment to capture marginally better images or carrying around an iPhone to capture images superior to yesterday’s dedicated cameras but never as good as today’s dedicated cameras.

The technology behind the iPhone’s cameras keeps rapidly improving to the point where even a National Geographic professional photographer prefers to use the iPhone instead of lugging around a suitcase full of equipment. With so much extra equipment, photographers not only have to carry it around, but take time to set it up. By then, their perfect image could be gone.

With the iPhone, a fleeting image can be captured immediately and simply. That advantage alone makes up for the lack of equal quality between the iPhone and a dedicated professional camera. The iPhone makes it easy and fast to capture images, and that advantage is something that dedicated cameras can never match. The quality difference is no longer so great to make lugging around extra equipment worth the cost any more.

Just as there are still mainframe and minicomputers, there will always be a need for dedicated professional cameras. There just won’t be much of a need for them just as there’s little need for mainframe and minicomputers. Smartphone cameras like the iPhone are good enough with plenty of advantages of their own to make the choice between an iPhone or a dedicated camera easier with each passing day.

Anyone still think PCs are toys that can be easily dismissed? Those same people still think smartphones and tablets are toys compared to PCs, and they’ll be wrong just as badly as mainframe and minicomputer users were wrong about PCs. When technology becomes good enough with advantages of its own, the old technology can’t help but get surpassed over time.

To read how a National Geographic professional photographer used an iPhone 6s camera to capture professional quality images, click here.

A PC in Your Pocket

Posted on September 25, 2015 by admin Posted in Hardware, Software, User Interface Leave a comment

What it is: The A9X processor is Apple’s ARM-based processor that runs iOS on the iPhone and iPad.

Anyone remember the old days before mobile phones became popular? That’s when most people used a Windows PC for practically everything from browsing the Internet to sending e-mail, even to chatting with people in real-time though services like ICQ or AIM. The introduction of smartphones hardly changed anything because most so-called smartphones were hard to use and limited such as Blackberry or Windows Mobile phones.

Then Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 and changed the smartphone market. Instead of just carrying around a phone, the iPhone let you carry around a computer in your pocket capable of browsing the Internet, sending e-mail, and playing games. From that moment on, fewer people needed to rely on a Windows PC any more when they could rely on a smartphone such as the iPhone or an Android phone.

When Apple introduced the iPad in 2010, they further killed any reliance on the PC. With mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, people no longer had to rely on a PC for everything. Is it no wonder that PC sales have been steadily declining over the past few years?

The idea of an iPhone being more like a computer in your pocket than just another phone with a touch screen interface is the future. Now Apple’s latest A9X processor has the performance nearly equal to traditional desktop processors. Apple’s Phil Schiller said, “It is faster than 80 percent of the portable PCs that shipped in the last 12 months. In graphics tasks it’s faster than 90 percent of them.”

As mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad get more powerful, they’ll eventually become more powerful than today’s PC. The ultimate goal is to use a mobile device for everything. Even Microsoft is exploring this idea with Windows 10. Microsoft’s idea is that you’ll use a mobile device on the road, then plug it into a docking station to use it as a traditional PC. Ideally you’ll be able to do everything you need with one device that can be mobile or stationary like a desktop.

Of course the only way Microsoft’s vision can come true is if processors running mobile devices can get as powerful as today’s desktop PC processors. That’s already happening so it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be able to use one device for both mobile and desktop computing.

There will likely always be a need for dedicated desktop PCs just the same way that PCs never completely killed the need for supercomputers. Even today, no PC has the power of today’s super computer but PCs offer individual access to computing power. Now mobile devices offer that same access but anywhere you go. PCs will always exist just like mainframe and minicomputers still exist. They just won’t be the center of attention or the main driving technology behind the computer industry any more than the latest IBM mainframe computer shapes and influences today’s computing industry.

The future is mobile. As Apple’s ARM-based processors get more powerful and Microsoft works to make Windows 10 run on all types of devices, the world is moving towards a PC you can keep in your pocket. Combine mobile computing with cloud storage and you’ll always have access to your files no matter where you might be.

Expect PC sales to continue dropping as people prefer mobile computing instead. With both the iPhone and iPad defining the smartphone and tablet markets, it’s clear where the future lies. If you want to stay current with technology, the easiest choice today is to use an iPhone and iPad.