Microsoft – Sol Young

Mac OS X Operating System Market Share Bumping 10 percent (9.93%)

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Sol Young

Since December I thought it was pretty clear OS X would own 10 percent of the operating system market share by the end of January. So yesterday, in Chinatown browsing my iPhone and trying jellyfish tendrils for the first time, I opened marketshare.hitslink.com and discovered OS X was within 0.07% of the mark.

Much like the tendrals, this was slightly dissappointing since I’d wanted to see double digits. The other interesting numbers…

Mac up 9.63% to 9.93%
iPhone almost half a percent, up 0.44% to 0.48%
Linux down 0.85% to 0.83%, probably since there wasn’t much Linux activity over the holidays.
Windows down 88.68% to 88.26% (though Windows 7 betas are picking up)

Posted in Apple, iPhone, Mac, Microsoft, OS X, Prediction

NIB – Microsoft MS-DOS 5 Upgrade

Posted on November 19, 2008 by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Mike, our IT coordinator dropped this on my desk this morning. It’s still shrinkwrapped. 1991. We have a USB 3.5″ drive, but unfortunately we don’t have an earlier version to get this installed. Would Boot Camp support it?

Amongst the highlights:

“Online Help from the shell or command-line interface…” – Online help has come a long way.
“Undelete utility helps you recover critical files…” – Control+Z and “Undo” were born.
“Unformat utility…” – What?
“MS-DOS QBasic replaces GW-BASIC…” – Many a coder’s first language.
“… freeing up at least 45K more conventional memory…”
“Is network ready” – Remember “net use“?
“Although we test with a wide variety of system manufacturers, it is your responsibility to confirm with your personal computer manufacturer that this product correctly supports your computer and peripheral devices.” – So, ummm, is it REST or SOAP?

Click through on the images to Flickr – the pics are high enough resolution to read the full the text.

Posted in History, Microsoft

How to virtualize Windows on an Ubuntu host for an optimized dev / qa environment

Posted on May 11, 2008 by Sol Young with 3 Comments

Ubu-Xu-dows

After converting my MacBook Pro in to a Windows developer dream, I wanted to have the same experience on a more portable, commodity hardware unit. Virtualizing Windows within Windows with VMware Server is something I’m familiar with. It’s something many Windows developers may prefer (and I recommend if you’re not comfy with linux as your host OS).

Quick background: Virtualizing a development/qa environment allows one to have an easily cleaned control environment. When a machine gets dirty (too many installs, tests, builds, or other garbage collects), you can simply delete the virtual instance and copy a fresh installation back over. This saves a ton of time. In dev, this allows a safe, clean, environment to test builds in. In a QA environment, this allows a very fast way to return to a known state.

My goal in a virtualized dev/qa environment is to run a host which consumes an absolute minimum amount of resources. I run virtualization software that allows more than one running VM at a time, such as VMware Workstation (PC), VMware Fusion (Mac), or VMware Server (PC or Linux). If you’re running Windows as your host OS, I recommend Windows 2000 Advanced Server because it is tunable to consume less resources than any other flavor of Windows (including Windows 2000 Professional).

Given that Linux runs on wrist-watch sized systems, it’s a safe assumption that one will get better performance from virtual machines than on a virtualized Windows environment. I chose Ubuntu since it’s super simple to install, is fairly reliable, offers similar features to Windows, and is still a smaller footprint my Win2kAS machines.

I started with version 8.04 desktop (hardy). The installation was a piece of cake, but there are no tuning options in the basic .iso. I installed VMware Server, but just while running the OS I could tell I would run in to performance issues later. The desktop flavor of Ubuntu isn’t light enough to pass all the processing power through to the VMs.

Instructions

Posted in Education, Microsoft, OS X, QA, Software Development, Ubuntu, VMware, Windows, Xubuntu

Yahoo! – components that matter to me after no search

Posted on February 8, 2008February 8, 2008 by Sol Young with 3 Comments

YGM The news of the week (month/year?) is the $44.6 billion offer from Microsoft to acquire Yahoo!. Robert Scoble blogs the intelligence of Google’s email and Dave Winer drops thoughts on Yahoo’s options based on TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington’s analysis. Mike Arrington’s latest news is a bit disheartening. Either sell to Microsoft or sell their search to Google.

Yahoo! has a lot more than search to offer – it shouldn’t be their primary business. As Scoble and Winer both pointed out, the wars are being fought on platforms – Especially the mobile platform. Yahoo!’s Go service synchronizes calendars, contacts, etc, from phone or PC and runs on Windows, OS X, BlackBerry, Symbian (Nokia), and Windows Mobile. Heck, it runs on almost every phone out there and OS X has Yahoo Sync built in. It’s been over a year since I’ve synchronized my phone by wire and I’m able to keep three phones and two laptops in sync.

Dave Winer shares insight from past technology wars while asking which platform will be adopted as the standard for synchronization of contacts, social networking, etc. I argue it could be Yahoo!. They’re embracing OpenID and offering Pipes. The Go service has plugins which tie in to MySpace and other social networking sites. They’ve got an identity system, a delivery method, and a decent reach in to the mobile market.

Finally, Yahoo’s two destinations – Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! Finance. These two are both number 1 in their class. Numero Uno. Why? They have content. Google offers search – when you’re looking for content. Yahoo!’s Music and Finance (and other sites) have that content.

These are the Yahoo! products that matter to me and the reason I’m a Yahoo! shareholder. If the sale goes through I’ll happily cash out with a profit and start looking elsewhere for services that satisfy consumer need.

Posted in BlackBerry, iPhone, Microsoft, Software Development, Wearing, Web Services, Yahoo