DVORAK’S INSIDE TRACK

Inside

he Sun Also Rises Dept.:

With Oracle buying out Sun Microsystems, another Silicon Valley icon bites the dust. If the economy ever recovers, all the valuable real estate owned by companies such as Sun will eventually pay for the deal.

The fact is that nobody really knows why Oracle bought Sun. It’s possible that it was a defensive measure since IBM wanted the company so badly. Some say it was so that Oracle could get control of Java. But why? I assume it has something to do with hidden assets. And it’s also possible that Oracle would like to sell a turnkey database server built on Sun hardware. There would be nothing like it on the market. And despite what people say about the various flavors of Unix, Solaris is one of the genuine workhorses in the industry. I was recently told about some Solaris-based server that was taken offline for a replacement. It had been running for something like eight years solid with never a reboot. This sort of reliable uptime is actually rare nowadays with both Linux and Windows servers.

Death Has a Partner Dept.: According to at least one researcher, ultra wideband (UWB) transmission will be completely dead as a consumer/business technology by 2013. While it looked good on a PowerPoint presentation, it never managed to get past the critics and the FCC. The closest it got to me was a wireless USB product that I heard about but never actually owned. The technology remains in the military and is used for ground-penetrating radar. Emerging Wi-Fi variants will replace it in the home and office.

Der Kindle Ist Der Bomb Dept.: The newest Kindle from Amazon is getting a lot of attention lately, and now everyone is coming out of the woodwork either to condemn the device as a looming threat to the publishing industry or to praise it as its savior. I have mixed feelings about it, but I’ve talked to a lot of heavy readers who love the thing. I’ll reserve judgment until I actually use the device for a while. Meanwhile, Hearst and Dow Jones are considering a larger-format version of an e-reader for their newspapers. Let me assure you that while reading a trade paperback on the Kindle might be viable, perusing a newspaper on a reader like this is not. Newspapers are meant to be read and discarded. With an e-reader you are essentially carrying around a boat anchor to read the newspaper. Dumb idea of the decade.

In related news, there is a strong rumor that Barnes & Noble intends to compete with the Kindle with a device of its own. In the future the e-book people will be able

nsideTrack

to browse at a Barnes & Noble store, and, once they’ve found the book they want, push a nearby button to have it delivered to their reader on the spot. The bill would come later, or you could pay at the counter. Lots of cool gimmicks are possible. You’d be able to get excerpts downloaded or catalogs, or whatever they are promoting.

Odd Bedfellows Dept.: One of the screwiest trends in the industry seems to be emerging as the Android OS, used in the Google phone, begins to crop up in netbooks. So now people are beginning to see an interesting symbiosis between the netbook and the smartphone. People can tether the smartphone to a netbook and use its extended capabilities to augment the phone itself. Both thus become part of the same unified platform. I can see moments when I need a full-size keyboard to punch a lot of data into the phone or load a PowerPoint show or extract photos and other data from the phone for further distribution. For years I’ve imagined a small computer that acted as a phone and could be tethered to a real computer. I can see this catching on.

If this is any sort of trend, then Apple has to be faster to the punch with its netbook initiative, which it denies exists. The initiative may or may not exist, but it does seem as if Apple is going to revisit the notepad or tablet computer, according to many inside sources. Newton II! I knew it!

Buzzword Dept.: Microsoft doesn’t dream up cute buzz phrases too often, and I’m not sure it originated this one, but while discussing the possibility of a new iPhone killer, the term “lust-worthy” was used. This means something people would lust after no matter what the product was or actually did. The joke, here, of course, is that the likelihood of Microsoft actually making a phone that’s lust-worthy compared with the iPhone is close to nil. Microsoft usually can get to buzzworthy, but seldom farther. That said, we can expect some money to be flying in the phone sector, since Microsoft wants to redouble its efforts with Windows Mobile with a refresh of some sort. It’s probably too little too late, and the Android OS still looks to be the winner in the non-iPhone game.

While on the Subject of Microsoft

Dept.: I see no reason why people should not download and try the first release candidate for Windows 7, RC1. It will run on your machine for a year, at which time you can decide to buy the release final version or kill it and load Ubuntu.

WANT MORE DVORAK? John writes a weekly column for our Web site, too. Log on to go.pcmag.com/dvorak. You can also e-mail him at john_dvorak@pcmag.com.