Emad Fanous

I was talking to some friends about online photos the other day, which they use, and the whole Flickr versus Zoomr story.

Most all of them use Flickr…so I found it interesting when Leeann of Hitwise published some stats which showed Flickr is 6th in market share at slightly under 6%. Photobucket is the undisputed leader of the pack at a little under 44%.

I decided to take a look at what Alexa thinks…a graph at Alexaholic tells a different tale:

Alexa shows that Photobucket was slightly higher the beginning o the year but the last few months Flickr has been holding a slight lead over it.

Just goes to show you that everyone aggregates data in different ways and gauging the traffic someone gets (or their market share) as an outsider (read: no access to logs) is a daunting task. The best you can do is understand the ways these different providers aggregate their data in order to understand shortcomings or potential inaccuracies (or even potential for someone to game the system as this is easily done with Alexa).

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Apple has launched their Macbook (note: not Macbook Pro).

This appears to be their replacement of the iBook.

MacBook At a Glance

• 1.83GHz or 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo
• 13.3-inch (diagonal) TFT glossy widescreen display
• Apple Remote with Front Row
• Up to 2GB memory⁽³⁾
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
• Slot-loading optical drive
• Up to 120GB hard drive⁽³⁾
• Built-in 54-Mbps 802.11g AirPort Extreme wireless
• Analog and digital audio in and out
• FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 ports
• iLife ’06, Mac OS X Tiger

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I think Netflix has been feeling the heat from competitors. Most new entrants have been large offline chains…some already in DVD rentals and some are in other businesses.

Blockbuster, which was an offline DVD rental company, decided to get into the business and provided value-add by offering in-store rentals combined with the online rentals…and they started offering no late fees for both channels.

Netflix was also being threatened by Walmart as a potential entrant. Walmart is known as being the world’s largest retailer that has put many smaller, offline companies out of business. Walmart built their own DVD rental subscription service and run it for a couple of years. They, too, had the added benefit of having many offline locations that someone can go into to rent or drop off. Netflix, however, ended up working with them when Walmart opted to drop their service and promote Netflix instead.

Couple that with the fact that many Cable companies are offering video on demand which offers rentals from the convenience of your armchair…no getting up to rent or return.

Well, it seems Netflix is suing Blockbuster in an attempt to shut down the competing service based on patent infringement.

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Apple is providing Boot Camp is a public beta:

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.
As elegant as it gets

Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

Virtual PC doesn’t work at all for me on the MacBook Pro. Qemu doesn’t work perfectly, and Open OSX packages everything for you so it is convenient but it doesn’t have an intuitive interface amd also doesn’t work perfectly. I don’t know if VM Ware’s OSX version is out yet and haven’t had the time to check.

more info here.

UPDATE: pictures of boot camp running on a mac and pictures of x86 linux beginning install on a mac.

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One of the big problems with the new MacBook was the packet loss on VOIP networks (802.1x).

Looks like someone figured out a solution which basically uses the firmware from a Intel Mac Mini.

If you try it, let me know how it goes…and make sure to back up your existing installation!

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I finally got my MacBook Pro about a week ago. All around, it is a nice laptop and software that runs natively on the intel processors are noticeably faster.

My list of Problems thus far includes

1. Airport connections are lost when waking or when idle for too long
2. 72+% packet loss on VOIP networks
3. runs very hot when running for a while
4. unstable software - some software has a habit of freezing or crashing
5. The Migration Assistant copied over everything from my Powerbook…including the system problems I was having, and left out directories that had additional software/data

My Solutions to the above:

1. Working on an elegant solution while I wait for Apple’s updated firmware
2. I have 2 solutions: 1) I bought a router with NAT and connected through the router, 2) Alan said he read that running “sudo /usr/sbin/tcpdump host localhost” in the background helps…I ran a test where I pinged www.google.com and could see the 70+% packet loss without the tcpdump running and, when I ran tcpdump, it went down to 0%! Turning it off increased packet loss again, then running it again (without exiting ping command) packet loss disappeared…weird, but effective. The optimal solution would be to get a firmware update from apple.
3. Nothing I can do about it
4. Stop using certain software, use the commandline more, use Fink to install software I want to use as replacements, etc
5. I started over and installed fresh copies of everything

The thing that made my MacBook unusable was the high packet loss on VOIP networks. At first, I noticed that it always seemed to work in the mornings and then degraded as the day went on. I realized, after reading the forums and talking to Alan that this was because I came to work early and, as people arrived, they’d start using their phones. Anyway, both solutions work well to resolve that issue. The other issues right now are more of annoyances than anything else.

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I came across the new Speakeasy speed test.

It sure beats the old dslreports.com speed tests that used java and crashed by browser (this is the second time I write this because it crashed it again when I went to get the link to create this post). Would you please keep Java on the server and out of my client??? The new test didn’t cause any problems and provided a nice feedback as it operated.

It’s funny…I take a look at a lot of the nice new products released these days and many of them are rehashes of old products but with substantially improved UIs. Take a look at Google Maps…Maps and Satellite Views have been around for years and were even around long enough to have been dropped years ago (Mapquest used to have satellite views but dropped them years ago)…but what a difference a good UI makes!!!

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Amazon S3 is a service that will provide you with disk space usage. It will be interesting to see how Google will respond. Will they charge or make it free (which you can get for free now, anyway)?

Amazon’s Pricing Model:

Pricing
* Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
* $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

First processing power/data and a programming/development buy-sell market, now Storage…what’s next? Hosted Applications?

More info and a good writeup here.

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I’ve mentioned FiOS before (great Internet speeds at great prices).

I just noticed that DSL Reports has a Google Maps Mashup of FiOS Availability and of its predicted availability.

As I expected, no Verizon FiOS in my SBC area (Burbank).

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It was interesting reading the posts about Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase and their press release that followed. Innobase provides the technology behind Innodb tables in the MySQL database.

Now, there is talk of them looking at other companies such as Sleepycat (the Berkeley DB people), JBoss (the J2EE App Server), and Zend (PHP).

What do you suppose is the business plan behind this?

Most instances of Zend I’ve seen utilize MySQL but Oracle and Zend collaborated on Zend Core for Oracle. I’ve seen and/or heard JBoss used with just about everything. Berkeley DB has always been a nice, quick DB file with low overhead (it’s free, I’ve never reached any limits on open handles to it, you can select data out very quickly, etc).

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