Apple's Survival Plan

The comments in this post is purely biased. :)

Part 1. Apple's original plot.

To me, at least until I read this news, Apple stands no chance in the fight of mobile device with Android. Steve Jobs criticized Google entering mobile phone market was a strong sign of risk that Apple is facing or will be facing.

Apple is indeed good at creating maybe the best product of a kind in the world. The original plot was to have a very good product and sequels of it to dominate the market. Competitors may be able to create similar products after a few years of chase. But the S/W app store richness and MP3 purchase channel will keep Apple the winner for as long as it does not make a fatal mistake.

Apple's ecosystem would become an ever since mobile empire if the plot goes on as planned.

Part 2. Google's disruptive plot.

No threaten can be seen in this plot until Google joins the game. The best thing Google does is creative disruptions, creating me too products were never the strength of it. Google's targets are like this: creating an open platform, free Internet access, free (to Internet users) search engine creates healthy ad revenue from transforming mobile phone users to smart phone users.

The tricky part is no existing mobile phone manufacturers have enough power to disrupt this game, they are simply fighting each other and will not accept any creative ideas from each other. If Nokia creates its app store, Samsung, LG, and Sony will all have their own ones. In the end, this competition is still zero summed.

Even Nokia is willing to offer its Symbian OS for free, it is unlikely others will adapt it from their deepest heart because when it comes to a new feature rich upgrade, Nokia will definitely be the first to enjoy it. Google isn't so, fortunately.

- Google creates an App store that all mobile phone manufacturers are able to have their share.

- Google maintains an open OS for every one without license fees.

- Google evolves the platform/desktop/GUI and so on to make every manufacturers happy and be able to catch up Apple's UI design without investing much resource.

The plot became that Google/Android powered mobile devices blooms and overwhelms Apple's ecosystem in the end, it may take several years before the fight ends.

Part 3. Apple's plan to survive through this.

Apple knows what risks Android is putting onto its empire and is smart enough to not simply been stubborn (as it did with Mac computers at IBM PC era) again.

This time it is opening a job to port iPhone OS to new platforms. The description is not explicit enough to know all the details and the interesting part is everyone can have their speculations. My theory is Apple has not figure everything out yet because of the following logical contradictions:

- Apple knows it has to let manufacturers join its camp to survive.

- Apple has always been enjoying and will not give up its healthy margin. But Google's Nexus One is breaking neck of smart phone prices. Apple will have to let go its iPhone margin and stop making money on its iPhone. Letting other manufacturers to sell ultra low cost iPhone clones.

- Apple will no be able to license its iPhone OS at sky high price, otherwise it becomes harder to make every manufacturer to join Apple's empire.

- Its past culture was never licensing stuff to external vendors. And it will suffer from this re-habitation. And this is exactly why it is looking for a manager externally for this. But I think it still will be harder than Apple's expectation.

- Apple has been a skeptical customer to its vendors and the culture will not be able to transform easily to co-work with other vendors.

- To spread its OS to enough devices is the key to win this fight between ants and an elephant. However, the quality will become hard to control.

- Current iPhone OS is tailored to and optimized on specific H/W, it is hard to maintain its elegance while been adapted to various H/W platforms.

Part N. The rest mobile alliances.

Please note that I am skipping all other alliances because I simply do not believe any one of them will be able to have a major share in this game. Period.

Targetted Cancer Therapy Medicine - PLX4032

Just read a report about PLX4032.

I was against any gene based medications. However, watching people to have their second chance of life is really encouraging. It is so encouraging that most of us forgets the side effects we may face in the future and the backfire from the nature.

I have a few unanswered questions:

1. If one day a medicine was invented to revert aging and subsequently keeping people alive forever, what would the consequence be?
2. As all other technologies human developed in the history, powerful technology *will* be misused at some point in time. For example, due to the justified development for medication, the maturing gene based technologies can be used to create super solders, superman (and if superman becomes a super stucker..). How do we prevent that?
3. The evolution involves adapting to ever changing climate, environment, threats, and so on. With gene medications, will it become that human become un-adaptive in the end?

The attractiveness of PLX4032 is infinite to those who needs it. History suggests it is impossible to stop it in a capitalism market. So maybe we should try to define the boundary of gene based technologies?!

Can't Set Default Printer on Vista Home Edition

When trying to print stuff from Chrome browser, it keeps saying no printer found. Because the printer is there and can be printed in other S/W, I can't escape from the problem I found previously which is unable to set a default printer.

After some research, I found an article that fixes my problem perfectly. I can now print stuff perfectly...

Kite Runner

I finished reading this book "Kite Runner" a few weeks ago and like it a lot. Though it is not as subtle as my last read book, it is still good to read as an adult. It contains sexual descriptions and *maybe* biased against Taliban authority.

But I like the descriptions of Amir who is kinda coward. He is a mirror of some part of us. In the end, he resolved/faced his weakness with his blood, which is the encouraging part of the story. With stupidness/bravery, he eventually transformed to someone else internally.

I bought it for a long time ago and yes: I buy books but not reading them. I'm glad I finished reading it.

A Tiny Web Server for R&D or Local File Share

http://www.jibble.org/miniwebserver/

Very tiny, it really is. Taking advantages of Java's existing libraries, its size is: 4095 bytes. Yes, it is BYTES. Not Kilobytes. I am wondering whether it is possible to implement a smaller one without using assembly.

- On Windows, if filename extension is associated properly, you can double-click it in Explorer and get it up and running.

- On Linux, you need to use java -jar SimpleWebServer.jar.

The root dir is the directory you started it with. All interfaces are listened. Port 80 is used.

As a supplement, on Debian derivatives (including Ubuntu), you need to add sudo to make it possible to bind to TCP port 80. Otherwise you will suffer from permission problems.

Cflow

Just learned that cflow is a C-language cross-referencing tool that can be used to generate the call graph. However, it is not ideal in terms of its adaptation by most modern editors.

Another way to do it is to modify gcc to generate the info needed. Someone has done this before but his source code page is gone and it seems the programmer is no more active on the Internet since 2002.

The Goal: Generate cross-referencing information in the format of cscope such that most modern open source C source code editors can use it. Whilst gcc can be modified to generate the most accurate information, it is nevertheless hard to be a complete one if you want real-time update of any modification and its lack of handling partial finished files (gcc stops parsing once any unacceptable syntax error is found).

It seems like there is no perfect tools for this, yet.

Make some money with Google Chrome

Chrome is asking everyone to find security bugs for them, if you can find a significant one, you can make money from it.

Garett Rogers said that zero-day exploits can be sold at a better price in black market, but I think it is not a good idea because someone else may turn this bug to Chrome team and this black market mechanism will lose its advantage.

Hopefully this interesting model will get us a better browser than ever.