Pervasive Code

It doesn’t take a lot of courage to predict that Amazon’s new Kindle electronic book reader will be a flop. This device looks like something that Sony or Apple circa 1994 would cook up. It’s getting a lot of press attention (such as the cover of the current Newsweek), but this is only because it’s Amazon promoting it, and because the tech press is obsessed with gadgets.

A closer examination, though, reveals that Kindle doesn’t solve the problems that caused prior e-book efforts to fail. It’s not better than a book in any way, and yet it costs more than a laptop PC and is nearly as complicated.

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The Android mobile phone software platform from Google has some journalists and developers confused due to its license terms. The terms are open source, but not as free as the GNU Public License. That decision has people wondering what Google’s up to. I have a theory about why they did this.

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In I still don’t get the fascination with Ruby on Rails, Andy Davidson writes:
Scaling does not mean “Allows you to throw money at the problem”, it means “Can deal with workload”. He goes on to recommend mod_perl instead of Rails.

I’m not interested whether he likes Rails or not. Lots of people hate Rails, and I don’t care. I’m not going to make a big deal about the fact that he’s comparing a runtime architecture (Apache + mod_perl) with a framework (Ruby on Rails).

Those are insignificant compared to his claim that scalability means “Can deal with workload”. Actually, that’s a description of capacity.
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It turns out that as The New York Times says, Google is not building a phone. They’ve built (bought, really) a phone platform called Android. It’s Java on Linux, and it’s open source, but notably it is not J2ME based. Reportedly it will run J2ME apps, but the SDK makes the Android API look more like the BlackBerry’s Java API than J2ME. It’s a full featured API that isn’t a least common denominator of all possible mobile devices.
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Technical Architecture is a Form of Investing. I’m reminded of this sort of thinking because of recent news from RubyConf 2007.
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