Home / 2009 / October (Page 2)

Wi-Fi Direct a bomb?

General

usb_memory_bomb2

There’s a fair amount of buzz going round at the moment about Wi-Fi Direct, the latest thing from the WiFi Alliance people. It appears for all intents and purposes to be a version of the 802.11 Ad-hoc mode, designed to allow for connections between individual devices without the use of an AP or router, which led to bnet.com claiming it was a “sales bomb” that would somehow destroy Bluetooth, kill the majority of AP sales, kill all the companies who make connector cables and create a large security problem to solve as we all switch over to using WiFi Direct to hook up our various gadgets. And they’re not alone in suggesting this is a bluetooth killer.

Baloney. Utter rot. Nothing of the kind is going to happen, and it’s pretty obvious why.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

Reddit Math Puzzle

GeneralMathematics

RedditMathPuzzle110909

So it’s not nonlinear math, but this made for a fun five minutes over Sunday morning coffee. There’s a number of ways of solving it, I went for the geometric one myself but the same answer comes out in the end for all of them, hopefully 🙂 And it’s nice to think you could still pass the Leaving Cert if you had to sit it again tomorrow, so hooray for Reddit.

Enjoy over coffee today! (My scribbled answer after the break…)… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

What platform to write mobile apps for?

e71GeneralMobile

A question came up on the boards.ie programming forum a week or so ago about whether to write apps for the iPhone or the Android platform. With Suura, we’ve been looking at what platforms to write clients for (and which to write for first), and it occurs to me that the data on what’s actually going on and what the hype is pushing are monumentally disparate. Believe the hype and the competition is all between Android and WebOS.

Thing is, all that noise is ignoring a few details. First off, both are tiny. In the telecoms market, even the iPhone is a niche player. Take mobile internet usage – yes, it’s growing, and at a rate noone expected, but look at how much of the overall total is made up of phone browsing compared to laptop browsing in these statistics released by Boingo in June this year:

b4

Yes, it’s rising and I’d be surprised if it tailed off tomorrow, but it’s still only a small part of a niche market – don’t forget that the telecoms market is seeing 50% global market penetration at the moment and is looking to improve on that.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 8 Comments