Software

Skype is now available for the iPhone. Sound quality for iPhone to iPhone connections on WiFi networks is excellent, and if you leave the Skype app running (in the foreground) you can turn the phone off and still get calls. However, if Skype is not the main app, you cannot receive calls, so there are still some limitations on the usefulness of it on the iPhone.

A new study of smartphone Web browsing shows the iPhone positively crushing the competition. The Apple iPhone accounts for 33% of all the Web browsing being done by smartphones. The nearest competitor is a Nokia phone, the N70, with a measly 7.1%. After that, it goes downhill even more rapidly, with most of the other phones in the top ten barely breaking 3%. The iPhone has a good, fast Web browser, a large readable screen, and a touch interface; the combination is unbeatable at this time.

Verizon gets a pat on the back for cracking down on spam. The company has announced that it will finally close Port 25 on its mail servers. Port 25 allows email be sent without any authentication, making it easy for spammers to use "zombie" PCs infected with spambot software to send spam email.

A Vietnamese researcher has cracked face recognition technology that has been built into some laptops. Built in or add-on cameras are designed to do facial recognition with the aim of making the laptop more secure. But the researcher found the software could be easily duped by displaying a picture of the owner, and a brute force attack (by showing the software many face images in succession) also worked.

If you are in the mood for a chuckle, take a look at the screen shot here, where someone discovered that Googling Google gives you a search results page warning you that every single Google service may damage your computer. Note: By the time I wrote this, Google had apparently fixed the problem.

TGDaily reports that Microsoft's share of the Web browser market has fallen below 70% for the first time. The open source Firefox browser from the Mozilla organization now has over 20%, with other browsers like Safari and the iPhone Web browser picking up the rest. In a testament to the popularity of the iPhone, it's share of the Web browser market has tripled (but it is still very small).

ComputerWorld reports that Microsoft's share of the operating system marketplace continues to shrink, and has now fallen below 90% for the first time in more than a decade. The recent 2% drop in marketshare was made up primarily by Apple, and a much smaller gain in Linux-based computers. Microsoft's share of Web browsers has also been shrinking steadily, with FireFox, the free open source browser, taking most of the users away from Internet Explorer.

This note from ComputerWorldUK suggests that the problems for Vista run deep. With so many applications having compatability problems with Vista, companies are sticking with older machines, buying used machines that will run XP, and are evaluating alternatives like Linux and OpenOffice. There are some really good Linux variants available; one I've played with is Ubuntu, which is impressive.

In the continuing saga of voting machines that simply don't work, here is perhaps the most alarming story to date. In a Washington, D.C. voting precinct during the primaries, a "static discharge" magically created an extra 1,500 votes on the memory cartridge that stores the vote tally. The only slightly good news is that someone did notice that the manual tally of voters at the precinct was only 326, but what if it had not been caught?

New research suggests that email, to hardly anyone's surprise, is a huge time waster. A UK scientist studying how we use email found that stopping to check your email imposes a big time loss on us as we switch back and forth mentally between tasks. For those who have their email set to check automatically on frequent intervals, the overhead of task switching can eat up an entire workday out of a five day work week.

"Cloud computing" has replaced "Web 2.0" and "social networking" as the latest buzz phrase. IT folks love buzz phrases, and the IT landscape is littered with them. Whatever happened to "client-server," "relational databases," "artificial intelligence," and "fifth generation?" All of those buzz phrases were based on solid and useful technical advances that were grossly oversold as the answer to everyone's problems.

Cloud computing has replaced Web 2.0 as a popular IT buzzphrase. Nobody ever really knew what Web 2.0 was, but it sounded important, and a lot of small companies got lots of cash to "really important" Web 2.0 applications and services that were going to change the world, make a lot of money, and cure cancer. None of them made much money, and most of them made no money.

Fuel prices may be a proximate cause of airline financial problems, but insanely inefficient reservation systems and insulting fee structures are structural problems that less expensive fuel won't fix. I just spent over an hour and a half trying to make a simple change to an existing flight reservation. A full hour was spent on hold, with periodic updates from the reservation agent, who said the change was being "processed." The call was finally disconnected by a recorded message telling me to hang up and try again. Huh?

iPhone users are starting to get bills from AT&T (which is really SBC), and the bills are apparently stupefyingly detailed. This article describes 52 page, double-sided bills that include detail on billing items that cost $0.00. Apparently one of the problems is that even if you have an "unlimited" data plan (for using the Web and email features of the iPhone, AT&T provides billing line items for every time you access the 'net, even if there is no charge for such access.

At least part of the reason that health care costs so much is due to arcane software and poor information systems design. I had to have a routine blood test this morning, and went to the hospital to do it so I could take care of it early in the day.

If the airlines are losing money, they have no one to blame but themselves. The systems they use to process their customers are so arcane and inefficient it is a wonder that they work at all. On Friday, I was in New England, which was having a typical bad weather day. I had a noon flight out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and discovered via email at 9 AM that Delta had rebooked me on a flight out of Boston instead, also leaving at noon.

Most businesses, if they had the opportunity to attract several million new customers with almost no effort, would do so willingly. Not Microsoft. In an almost incomprehensible move, Microsoft wants Mac users who want to buy a copy of Windows to pay $100 more than other Windows users. All new Macs can now easily run Windows alongside the Mac operating system, and many Mac owners are looking forward to being able to run a Windows application occasionally.

Peter Gutmann, a well known software security expert from Australia, has posted a long piece on the some of the problems he sees with Vista. Gutmann's piece is not the typical anti-Microsoft rant; he has done extensive research and consulted with many other reputable experts. His focus on on Vista's new "features" that are designed to prevent unauthorized use of copyrighted content like videos and music.

This short article talks about the Google/Microsoft war, and suggests that Google may be winning. The theory is that Microsoft is way behind Google in being able to deliver Web-enabled applications. The author points to Google's still fledgling word processing and spreadsheet applications that run via the Web.

I now have the ability to access Google Maps from my Treo cellphone/PDA. I ran across a reference on the 'net about someone doing this, and in a couple of minutes I found the software; it is free. You also have to have Java installed on your PDA, and it turns out that IBM has a free Java distribution for Treos (IBM has really embraced the Free and Open Software movement).