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Today, I came across an interesting article in the Forbes Magazine entitled “Computing 2010″. The interesting part is that this article was written ten years ago. The author, Kip Crosby, imagined what computers would look like in 2010: optical circuits instead of silicon, with a CPU running at 100 GHz, holographic mass storage offering several TB capacity, 256 GB optoelectronic RAM, biometric authentication, voice control, completely wireless and shaped like a frisbee. Whew! Looks like Kip was just a tad too optimistic. Optoelectronics hasn’t caught on and most computers are still boxy rather than frisbee-ish. In fact, todays’s PC looks pretty much like that of 2000, except that its capacity has increased roughly following Moore’s law. The only accurate prediction is about mass storage capacity, although that didn’t require optical technology.

Personally, I’ve begun the new computing year with a major upgrade, though still far away from Kip’s 2010 vision. I have replaced my 32-bit Windows OS with a 64-bit Linux OS, doubled RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB and added another external USB hard drive for backups. The Ubuntu installation turned out a little difficult, because Linux did not want to cooperate with the BIOS RAID-1 configuration, so I had to switch to SATA mode and wipe out the Windows installation. The rest was easy, however. I used to worry about not being able to make my 3G USB modem work with Linux, but our maid has solved this problem for me. She obliterated the device by putting it into the washing machine. Can’t really blame her for that. I probably shouldn’t have carried the modem in the pockets of my shorts.

Back to the topic. What are the computing trends in 2010? Just off the top of my head: cloud computing is becoming a mainstream technology (or perhaps a mainstream buzz; time will tell). Along with that, virtualisation is now widely used. Supercomputers have broken the petaflop mark and now operate in the range of large clouds (> 1 PFlop). CRT monitors are quickly becoming relics of a past epoch. Single-core CPUs are headed the same way. Functional programming languages are beginning to catch on. 64-bit hardware and software are overtaking 32-bit systems in mainstream IT. Java 7 is announced for 2010. It surely looks like an interesting year.

Generally I don’t comment on events in the business world, since this blog is about web development and software engineering. However, the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, which was officially announced yesterday, is so large-scale that it is likely to affect the engineering halls in many subtle ways. Quick facts: the deal is $ 7.4 billion worth, it was unanimously approved by Sun’s board and it will be closed this summer. Sun and Oracle published identical press statements yesterday which sing the praises of the acquisition.

I am not sure whether this is good news. While it was apparent to most observers that Sun was past its zenith, one wonders what will happen to its employees and its innovations. Granted, an acquisition by IBM would have tipped the scales even more in favour of Big Blue’s dominance in the enterprise market and that might have distorted competition. But one may doubt that Oracle will uphold Sun’s commitment to the open source community. Sun’s market was driven by innovation and open source products. Oracle’s market is clearly not.

In particular, one wonders what will happen to MySQL which was bought by Sun earlier last year and which competes with Oracle’s core products. Pessimistic observers have already called it MyToast. Will Larry Ellison allow MySQL to compete in the enterprise market? Probably not. Other items in Sun’s portfolio once considered crown jewels, such Solaris and Glassfish, might also be on the endangered list. But that is pure speculation at this moment. Whether this acquisition will turn out to be a good move for Oracle is currently debated by the industry experts. Whether it is a positive turn for open source community may be reasonably doubted. Time will show.

Pocket PCs suck! Well, they do at least suck when they don’t work as they are supposed to. …which is pretty often in my experience. To be fair, I must say that Pocket PCs are great as long as they do work. Since a Pocket PC is like a miniature computer, it offers a functional range and programmability that surpasses almost any other mobile device. Unfortunately, this leads to complexity, and complexity leads to bugs which in turn leads to malfunctioning devices. I’ve been using Pocket PCs for two years now and have developed sort of a love-hate relationship. Probably the culprit is the Windows Mobile operating system. Windows Mobile, although already in version 6, evokes bad memories of the buggy Microsoft operating systems of the nineties. Only that this isn’t the nineties. After ten or fifteen years of consumer mobile phones, we have come to expect mobile devices to work flawlessly. In fact, I am relying on my Pocket PC for many day-today tasks. I use it as a phone, alarm clock, notepad, camera, phone book, and mp3 player and more. My HP iPaq Business Navigator also has an assisted GPS, but I came to see the latter as a toy function. Due to usability issues I hardly bother to fiddle with it.

However, the question I am asking myself now is – isn’t this device just an expensive toy? Where is the robustness that should come with a “business” device . I have put in a good deal of time just to keep my pocket PC working. My HP PPC has seen the service shop twice, once because of a faulty memory chip, and another time because it didn’t boot anymore until the shop installed a firmware upgrade. In addition to that, I have spent a fair number of hours with configuration and trouble-shooting because one or another function was broken. Once I get a working configuration with all the software installed, I use Spb Backup to create a complete backup of the system. Spb Backup is a real life-saver. It backs up all configuration data, user data, applications and system data. Should the device give up its ghost or display odd behaviour (believe me, every Pocket PC will do that at some point), I can perform a factory reset and restore the backup to recreate the former status of the device easily. But even with this tool, the amount of maintenance required seems a little excessive. A gadget that carries the name “Business Navigator” should be expected to work like a business device, namely reliably. Unfortunately, I can’t say that for the HP iPaq and neither for the other Pocket PCs I’ve owned and used. As previously mentioned, I am not blaming the hardware manufacturers. The OS seems to be the crux.

Real business users would probably be better off with a smartphone that requires less messing around. A Pocket PC is more suited to -shall I put it this way- the technically inclined person.