chainmailledesign.com

“We know we can have TCO, but need NetWeaver enhancements. There’s a very close link between the TCO of Business ByDesign and NetWeaver. The TCO is not so much hardware; There are too many processing steps in our hosting. We can continue to do manual steps when first upgrade Business ByDesign from 1.0 to 1.1, but it’s not predictable in way where every client got it at once and in the same way.”

We also debate whether Microsoft is open to a union with Yahoo after the parting of ways.

In this week’s EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet’s Larry Dignan and I discuss the latest news from SAP, Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, and Microhoo. At SAP’s Sapphire conference this week, company executives explained the delayed rollout of the new on-demand enterprise suite, Business ByDesign. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said that the total cost of ownership (TCO) equation on Business ByDesign and the upgrade procedures weren’t good enough:

Larry remarks on AMD’s lack of transparency about its chip fabrication plans and product roadmap, and I recap my visit to JavaOne, where I met rocker Neil Young and interviewed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz about his plans for JavaFX and cloud computing. Schwartz has a good plan, but getting developers on board will take some heavy lifting.

CNET News.com’s Tom Krazit contributed to this report.

• Medical records app: Epocrates, a maker of software for medical professionals built a native iPhone application that can access an SQL database for accessing medical information, pictures of pills, and checking for potentially harmful drug interactions.

• Super Monkey Ball: A game from Sega. A skiing game, where you hurtle down a ramp trying to get bananas, and other things. It uses the accelerometer for control, just like Tough Fighter.

• AIM: AOL made an iPhone version of the instant-messaging service. You can switch between conversations with a swipe of the finger, like if you’re scrolling through photos on the iPhone. You can also upload photos from your iPhone to serve as your buddy icon.

And with it came a few applications, developed in a couple weeks by some very high-profile names in tech. Apple demonstrated seven new applications in a variety of categories: business, communications, and games.

• Salesforce.com management application: Salesforce.com created an application that does more than you can do with its Web-based application. For instance, it can talk to Maps to plot directions to your next appointment, figure out how many more widgets you need to sell to make your quota, and more.

• Spore: Electronic Arts created a mobile version of the game.

• Touch FX: Adds Photo Booth-style effects to a photo using your finger on the iPhone touch screen. Pinch or tap to introduce fun-house mirror style effects.

See my colleague Tom Krazit’s blow-by-blow chronicling of the event as it unfolded in Cupertino on Thursday morning.

The long-awaited
iPhone software development kit, which will be released in June, was finally unveiled Thursday.

• Touch Fighter: The first official game for the iPhone, developed by Apple engineers over two weeks. You fly through space and steer by using the iPhone like a pretend control wheel, with both hands on the side.

The security firm reported that several ISP’s saw between 15 and 25 percent spikes in traffic. One ISP reported that traffic nearly doubled. Engineers at the ISPs stopped worrying when they saw the ballooning Internet usage wasn’t directed at any individual customer.

Tiger Woods’ playoff performance at the U.S. Open drew traffic big enough to look like a massive denial-of-service attack to Internet service providers.

NBC said that Monday’s playoff drew the biggest audience the Web site has ever seen, with 2 million users generating 9 million page views. The United States Golf Association and ESPN also covered the game but their numbers weren’t available.

“Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office-bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage,” Arbor Networks wrote.

According to Internet security company Arbor Networks, the playoff between Woods and Rocco Mediate “generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year.” The country’s golf fans who were at work, turned to Web video to watch the duel at Torrey Pines.

The biggest proponent of Blu-ray, Sony, now stands poised to become the standard bearer of HD video mostly because of its strategy in including Blu-ray playback capability into the PS3. It’s unclear if Microsoft now plans to make an attachable Blu-ray player for the Xbox 360.

The drive, which currently costs about $130, was intended as Microsoft’s answer to Sony’s
PlayStation 3 console, which contained an integrated Blu-ray Disc drive.

“HD DVD is one of the several ways we offer a high definition experience to consumers and we will continue to give consumers the choice to enjoy digital distribution of high definition movies and TV shows directly to their living room, along with playback of the DVD movies they already own,” Blair Westlake, a corporate vice president of Microsoft’s media and entertainment group, said in a statement.

Microsoft is just the latest top-tier tech company to abandon the failed high-definition disc format. Along with Toshiba, Intel, and NEC, Microsoft was one of the most prominent supporters of the standard. Toshiba said last week it would no longer make HD DVD players. Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy, and all the major movie studios have all now said they will exclusively support Blu-ray.

The company said it would, however, continue to offer warranty support for the peripheral.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft will end production of the external HD DVD drive for its
Xbox 360 video game console, according to a report by the Associated Press.

(Credit:
Sun)

Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos

Further out into the future, Papadopoulos expects that the technology infrastructure industry will be similar to the energy industry. In past presentations, he has called this transition the Red Shift.

Higher up in stack developers have more targets and more freedom to innovate below it, Papadopoulos said.

Papadopoulos also advocated a free market in which all interfaces and formats are based on open standards; customers own their data, relationships, and metadata; and customers can extract, synchronize or purge their data unilaterally. This echoes recent efforts to promote openness and data portability.

Papadopoulos has predicted a “neutron star collapse of data centers,” meaning at some juncture it won’t make sense for businesses to build their own data centers. Instead they will contract for computing resources from hosting providers who bring “brutal efficiency” for utilization, power, security, service levels, and idea-to-deploy time.

Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.

SAN FRANCISCO–Speaking at the Structure 08 conference here, Sun Microsystems CTO Greg Papadopoulos predicted that by the beginning of 2010 the majority of systems sold would be for Web, high performance computing and software-as-a-service applications. “We are going through this phase change in computing in a big way,” he said. He made a similar prediction last year.

There will be a grid of a half dozen very large cloud infrastructure providers and a hundred or so regional providers, Papadopoulos said. It will also look more like the banking world, he continued, with customers willing to trust the service providers with their private data as they do banks with their money. It’s a question of when, not if, this scenario will occur.

Papadopoulos acknowledged that the nirvana of every customer or user in charge of their own data that lives in the cloud has challenges. Today, users cede control of their data to service providers like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. It’s not as easy for users to manage and move their data as it should be, which means users are generally stuck with the user experience and monetization schemes of the host sites. “It’s proprietary systems all over again,” Papadopoulos said. Over the last several years Sun has differentiated itself proprietary vendors, focusing on free open-source software and open standards.

Papadopoulos also laid out a map (see below) of the current universe of cloud computing in terms of increasing virtualization and consolidation across various categories: processor, operating system, language, and application services. Over time, the categories will fill out more especially as more languages and applications services or platforms rise up. Papadopoulos pointed to two Sun projects, Dark Star and Project Caroline. Dark Star is about software infrastructure designed to simplify the creation massively scalable online games, virtual worlds and social networking applications. Project Caroline is a hosting platform for developing and delivering Internet-based services. It’s not clear why the Sun research projects are positioned at the far right on the chart, and players such as Google, Joyent, and Rackable are missing.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Click here for more from GigaOM on Structure 08.

Do you buy CDs, LPs, MP3s, iTunes, or 8 track cartridges?

I purchase about 80% of my music on LP. For a few years in the early 1990s it was almost impossible to find new vinyl, but now it’s reasonably common, especially for indie rock, electronic music, and hip hop. (Classical? Not so much. Jazz? Only re-releases.) In fact, vinyl availability sometimes convinces me to buy a record I otherwise might have skipped–Of Montreal’sGladiator Nightstick Collection and Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky come to mind. (The Wilco was particularly nice because it came with a full CD, so I could more easily rip it to my computer to transfer to my
iPod and
Zune players.) About 1 in 20 brand new LPs have defects–most recently, Radiohead’s In Rainbows was marred by a bunch of crud in the grooves on side 2. When that happens, I’ll exchange it for a CD, reasoning that there might be some persistent manufacturing or storage problem. (A record store worker recently told me that every shipment they received of the $200 Sigur Ros box set contained warped records. They had to take a lot of returns.)

How do you discover new music? Radio, friends, online, record stores?

Almost exclusively through friends and by going to shows, with about 10% through local radio station KEXP. Often, I’ll hear about the same band or album several times from multiple friends who don’t know one another, read a great live review in a local weekly, then hear a song on KEXP–that happened to me with Battles last year, and it turned out to be a good indicator that I’d like them.

Or do you get your tunes from a P2P like Morpheus or Blubster?

Only for tracks that I can’t find easily, like unauthorized live recordings. Instead of suing me, why not sell them to me?

Is sound quality a factor, would you pay more for higher quality downloads or subscriptions?

Yes, I’d pay more than $0, which is what I pay for downloads today.

Do you regularly buy used CDs or LPs? And rarely buy new CDs or LPs?

I regularly buy new and used LPs and occasionally buy new CDs. I never buy used CDs. For used LPs, the seller might have gotten rid of it as they replaced it on CD. For used CDs, the seller almost always got rid of it because (a.) it sucked (which means I’ll seldom take a risk on a used CD) or (b.) it had a scratch or other mar that made it physically unplayable. Either way, I’m often too lazy to go back to the store to exchange it within the allotted time period, which means I’m stuck with a CD I don’t want.

What about DRM, do you care?

I won’t buy DRM-protected files because I want to play music I own on any device or player I own. CDs don’t have DRM, analog sources don’t have DRM, why should I pay the same price for less portability?

If so, do you buy them from Amazon or other online retailer, brick and mortar chain store, or local “record” shop?

Local record shops have the best selection of vinyl, so I usually buy from Sonic Boom in Seattle, and go out of my way to visit Amoeba whenever I’m in the Bay Area and Other Music in New York. If I really want a new release, I’ll check the band’s or label’s Web site to see if they sell the LP. I also buy LPs at shows whenever they’re sold–I’ll buy an LP from a band whose set I liked in a heartbeat, but hardly ever a CD. I have not bought anything from iTunes because of DRM, although I’ve gotten plenty of free downloads as promotions. I’ve bought a handful of songs from the Zune Marketplace and other Windows Media-based stores for testing purposes.

Do you subscribe to a subscription service, if so, which one? Rhapsody, Yahoo, Napster, etc?

No, but I might if it offered lossless downloads with no DRM.

What have I left out?

I’m most curious about where, when, and how people actually listen to music. Do you sit down and listen to an LP or CD start to finish? When you use an MP3 player, do you shuffle or listen to specific songs or albums? Do you listen with headphones, or connect your MP3 player to a home or
car stereo? Personally, I listen to at least a few album sides per week with no distractions, but play a lot of background music through my iPod and Zune connected to various clock radio-stereo devices in my house.

Do you buy CDs, burn ‘em, and them sell them?

Luckily, I’ve always been able to find work, so I’ve never needed to do this.

What percentage of your physical music collection did you get for free (ripped CDs, gifts, etc)?

Less than 10%. I have about 40 ripped CDs and a number of LPs and CDs I’ve received as gifts over the years. I also have a number of digital files that have been given to me on flash drives.

Over on the Audiophiliac blog, Steve Guttenberg is polling readers about how they get their music. Here are my answers to his questions.

Wilco's last album was available in double vinyl, with a full CD included in the package for easier ripping.

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