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Lewis Cunningham is running a survey to discover which databases people are using, and in which contexts. Lewis wanted to do an open survey, meaning not only would the results be published but all of the data behind the published results would be open, as well.

It’s a noble effort. I’m not sure this blog is the best place to find a balanced demographic when it comes to open source, but presumably if he can get it published in DB2 and Oracle mailing lists, as well…?

Those of us who were not quick enough to grab the app while it was available on the App Store seem to be out of luck for now. Links to the application now pop up with an error message that reads, “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the US store.” It’s not exactly clear what happened with NetShare, how it slipped through the cracks, or why it was pulled. The app may have accidentally gotten through in the avalanche of new applications that are being added to the store, however it seems unlikely that someone at Apple would have signed off on this app, not knowing what it did. It would appear that either Apple, AT&T, or both had cleared the application, then quickly reconsidered. Apple has not yet responded to a request for a comment on the issue.

Briefly available, NetShare allowed iPhone users to take advantage of tethering their 3G and EDGE connections to their computers.

The application basically turns your iPhone into a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, giving all of your Wi-Fi-enabled devices internet, wherever you have a cell signal. There are similar solutions available for iPhone users who have jailbroken their handsets, but they are significantly more complicated than Nullriver’s offering, and since they require a hacked phone, don’t hold mainstream appeal.

(Credit: MacRumors.com)
Wireless carriers have almost always been opposed to tethering smartphones with unlimited data plans. Many telcos even state in your contract that if you tether your phone, you may be responsible for additional fees associated with the data that you use. Of course, for an additional cost, you can tether some phones, such as a Blackberry, but Apple’s iPhone doesn’t offer legitimate tethering at any cost.

(Credit: Mac-Addict) One of the most requested features for the
iPhone is the ability to tether the phone to feed 3G or EDGE network data to your computer. That feature was briefly a reality Thursday, thanks to Nullriver’s NetShare application. MacRumors reports that, priced at $9.99, the application seems to have, somehow, slipped below Apple’s radar, but was pulled down after about 20 minutes of availability in the App Store.

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It’s only when I talk with Zack Urlocker or Red Hat employees that I’m reminded that Palm is still in business. They seem to be the only ones still lugging around Palm Treos.

In Red Hat’s case, it’s because the Palm Treo works fairly well with Linux. As for Zack…? No clue, except that Zack isn’t one to spend money on disposable liabilities.

With Red Hat’s roughly 2,200 employees, plus Zack, Palm has a total addressable market of 2,201 people with its new Treo Pro.

Unfortunately, Palm has yet to find a US wireless provider to carry the Treo Pro. More unfortunately, it will run Windows, so only Zack is left as a potential customer. Zack is the “Avery Wong” of mobile phones:

(Credit: UPS, Inc. Courtesy of Agfa)

Palm has apparently started a new marketing campaign for the Treo Pro: “Early and often, Avery Urlocker. Early and often.”

Following a storm of criticism, Apple has changed its Software Update software to mark a distinction between new programs, such as its
Safari on
Windows browser, and updates to existing ones.

Last month, Apple started to include Safari 3.1 in a list of applications available from its Software Update program.

Now Apple Software Updates distinguishes between new software and updates.

(Credit:
Asa Dotzler, Mozilla) That practice got many people riled up, complaining that Apple was essentially deceiving people into installing a new program–Safari 3.1 for Windows XP–through a program meant to update already installed applications, namely iTunes and QuickTime.

Among those complaining was John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla which makes the competing
Firefox browser.

In a blog, Lilly said that Apple’s practice was “wrong” and bad for the industry “because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users.”

Now, Apple’s Software Update has two separate boxes, one labeled “New Software” and the other labeled “Updates.” Before Safari 3.1 was under the “Updates” box and there was no “New Software” heading.

The old way: including new programs like Safari in with updates of already installed programs.

(Credit:
CNET Networks) The folks at Mozilla noticed the change but don’t appear fully satisfied.

“This is a good first step. Now Apple needs to stop checking the box for “New Software” items by default. With that change, I think I’d be pretty happy to let the Apple Software Update service back on my Windows machine,” Asa Dotzler, director of Mozilla community development, wrote Thursday.

An Apple representative told Computerworld that the change was done to distinguish new software from updates but declined to say whether it was in response to criticisms or whether Apple may leave the “New Software” box unchecked, as Mozilla’s Dotzler suggested.

DENVER–If you’re a candidate for president during the 2012 primaries, you may want to watch how sharply you criticize your rivals. Your critiques may come back to haunt you on the Web.

Notready08.com features a video board of clips of former candidates criticizing Barack Obama.

(Credit:
Notready08.com)

That’s what the Republicans, at least, are hoping to demonstrate with their notready08.com site, which features clips of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and John Edwards slamming Barack Obama last year and earlier this year for being inexperienced or over his voting record in Illinois.

Other sections include a YouTube video listed as the “Temple of Obama” that shows the makings of Obama’s stage tonight at the Invesco stadium here, where he’s scheduled to accept the Democratic nomination on Thursday. Another features press conferences from Republicans–held, intentionally, right in the middle of the Democratic convention.

For his part, Obama has replied to Republican attacks with his “Fight the Smears” Web page. And you can probably expect clips to surface of John McCain’s rivals attacking him in the primaries in the not-so-distant future.

The Clinton campaign is counting on Texas to stay alive, but as David Domke describes in his account at the Crosscut Seattle, they haven’t exactly reached out to student journalists to keep the fire burning (at least not his students).

David Domke teaches journalism at the University of Washington. In order to cover the presidential race, 16 of his students created SeattlePoliticore. In David’s words: We’ve gone new media, adopting a mode of blogging that combines traditional reporting, insights from other news outlets, and first-person commentary. It’s somewhere between the voice of The Seattle Times’ David Postman and the rancor of the blogosphere: part journalism, part pundit, part political newbies. Altogether, we have presented the campaign through youthful eyes. The students have covered both the Idaho and Washington state caucuses, and they are heading to Texas later this week. They have generally been successful gaining access, but they were only able to get into a caucus in Washington through the intervention of the Seattle City Library and a Sheriff’s deputy.

The Obama campaign also stepped in to ensure the students got in at the KeyArena when the Senator spoke on February 8. Domke writes, “when some of my students arrived at KeyArena after the local police had locked the doors and weren’t allowing anyone in — including reporters from local TV and radio outlets — the students dialed up Giertz [a contact at the Obama campaign] and he personally came and vouched for them.”

Neither Domke nor the students have had the same sort of success dealing with Senator Clinton’s campaign. Jennifer Ware, one of Domke’s students, “noticed a difference between Obama and Clinton when [she] first started calling their campaigns in the week before the caucuses.” While she found dealing with Obama’s campaign to be a positive experience, her description of what happened when she called Clinton’s campaign is rather odd: When I called the Clinton campaign to ask for a contact at their Washington state campaign office, one staffer tried to tell me that Washington was where their campaign headquarters is. “Yes” she said, “Washington, it’s right next to Virginia.” According to David Domke, Ware’s experience was not an isolated incident. “The Obama campaign treated us like pros — they called us back within minutes, set up interviews, got us press passes, went out of their way to make the campaign accessible. Whereas the Clinton campaign, “didn’t return a single phone call, didn’t provide press access, and did virtually nothing to encourage our coverage.” Domke dismisses their inaction as “either arrogance or disorganization on the Clinton campaign’s part.”

Later this week Domke and his student’s will head to Texas to cover what could be the last hotly contested battle primary season. I’m curious if the student’s will have better luck making contact with Clinton’s Texas campaign or if the failure to reach out to student journalists is true in other offices as well.

For what it’s worth, the team at SeattlePoliticore were not just successful making contact at the Obama campaign. The campaigns of Paul, Huckabee, and McCain, all reached out to the students and made sure that they were able to attend their events. As Domke points out, “For those scoring at home, five presidential campaigns came to town — and four reached out to my students, treating them like what they are: journalists and citizens.”

I sent an e-mail to Hillary Clinton’s campaign asking her to comment on this story; if I receive a response, I’ll update this blog if I hear anything besides the auto-responder

After being named world champion of Crave’s nonviolent robot tournament, most robots would probably have been content to rest on their laurels, put on a little weight, and settle into a sad, drug-addled existence only to wake up 10 years later and realize that they’re out of money, and their fans have moved on. But Honda Motor’s Asimo is not like most robots.

(Credit:
Honda)

After handily taking that title, Asimo has a new role now. He’ll be conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on May 13, leading the orchestra on just one song, “Impossible Dream” from Lost in La Mancha.

Famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma will also be performing that night, though not on that particular number. Both celebrity appearances are part of a program that will benefit music programs at Detroit schools. Honda has given more than $1 million to the symphony orchestra to create The Power of Dreams Music Education Fund, which will help fund master classes, an introductory class, and private lessons for Detroit students. (More details on the program are here.)

You may remember that a few months ago, Toyota unveiled a robot that can play the violin. Let’s just hope that the two companies don’t team up, or those music-loving robots are bound to figure out that they can get rid of us pesky humans altogether.

With Intel’s focus on the new Atom-brand processors being described at the Intel Developer Forum this week, “Atom-powered” is the obvious description of the mobile Internet devices (MIDs) these chips will go into… and it seems like half the IDF stories on the Internet this week are using that phrase.

Intel's Atom processor (on the right) and its companion System Controller Hub code-named Poulsbo.

(Credit:
Intel Corp.)

Intel, however, seems to want even more hyperbole– it expects people to believe that Atom will recharge the whole company. CEO Paul Otellini reportedly said “This is as important to Intel as the launch of the Pentium in the mid-1990s”– but that’s ridiculous.

The original Pentium processor and its descendants were responsible for nearly all of Intel’s revenue. Atom will be merely a blip on Intel’s financial reports.

The problem with Atom, especially these early models, is that the niche they occupy is a no-man’s land between truly mobile devices like cellphones and MP3 players, and truly powerful devices such as laptop computers.

Atom consumes ten times as much power as cellphone processors and one-tenth the power of laptop processors. This power consumption makes for a device that has to be larger than a cellphone, and has to be smaller than a laptop because it can’t provide comparable functionality. And there simply aren’t enough applications that fit naturally into devices in that size range.

Look, I have as much experience with MIDs as anyone. I used an Apple Newton for seven years (as I’ve written about here several times). The Newton had roughly the same form factor and somewhat lower power consumption than today’s MIDs. For a while I had a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem that gave me wireless Internet access.

But the simple fact is that the Newton wasn’t useful enough to make me carry it around all the time. I loved mine because I had one critical application for which it was perfect. It was my electronic reporter’s notebook, and no small-screen device could ever substitute for it. But most people don’t need one of those.

And most people don’t need a 5″ to 7″ display for basic Web browsing… at least, not enough to actually carry one around. And if you can carry something too large for a pocket, you can carry a small notebook PC that can handle a traditional notebook CPU.

Even after the Atom family evolves to the point that it can fit into cellphones– which is the only way it’s going to achieve significant sales volumes– profits from these chips will never be very high. Intel’s never going to achieve a monopoly in cellphone processors, and the competition from ARM-based cellphone chips will keep the value of a CPU core under a few bucks.

What Intel doesn’t want people to think about very much right now is that in a cellphone, the CPU core is about the least-valuable part of the system. Even in a MID with an Atom processor, the CPU is just a tiny part of the whole package. Look at that picture up there– the Atom processor is small compared with its companion system controller. In a cellphone, there’s even more circuitry required for the radios.

And that’s why Intel’s never going to be an Atom-powered company, and I’m sure Otellini knows that in spite of everything he’s been saying. But when your stock price has been trending downward for seven years in spite of the fact that you’re running the world’s largest semiconductor company with a stranglehold on the world’s largest semiconductor market, I suppose you have to try to drum up as much excitement as possible for every new product that comes along.

Studyrails is a relatively new tool for students who want to get their class schedule and study time synced up. It’s mainly a calendaring tool, but thrown in is a mobile reminder service, and a forceful lock-out system that will keep you from slacking off on your computer when you’re supposed to be studying.

The core calendar product is one of the more interesting efforts I’ve seen. After you’ve plugged in your class schedule, you have the option to schedule in study time. You guesstimate how much time you’ll need for each discipline or project and then block out those hours on your calendar. It’s a simple drag and drop affair. What’s neat here is that it’ll automatically divide up your time into little chunks based on how much time you’ve acknowledged you need to spend per task and when it’s due. It’s not an exact science, but it’s a good start for people who don’t know where to begin when they’ve got a lot of projects stacked up at once.

When it actually comes time to study, you can link up the application to send you reminders on your phone or e-mail in-box. It’ll also give you a physical lock-out from using certain applications or Web sites during those times. This list is made by you (or your parent), so unless YouTube is a part of the study plan you’ll get a little block on the page that chides you to get back to work.

The service runs $10 a month and has a two week free trial. On a side note, founder of Studyrails, Joshua Loewenstein, and I have no relation.

See also:
Motivation management with GradeFix

Related: Quizlet: Flash cards made easy

Studyrails is mostly a calendaring tool, but added is project management and time management tools for slackers.

(Credit:
Studiolo Systems Inc.)

(Credit:
PediSedate)

Sometimes we hear about gadgets that are made for good but could definitely be used for evil. Take the PediSedate, a combo gaming device and sedation machine.

It’s essentially a Game Boy system modified to distract kids ages 3 to 9 with Tetris or something while they’re pumped full of nitrous oxide to knock them unconscious for dental surgery. Sounds evil, even though it’s intended to make things easier on the kid.

But that’s not all it does. The colorful headset includes systems to monitor the patient, such as a pulse-oximeter to slightly adjust the flow of gas in real time, meaning it’s safer for the kid than just raw gas.

Boston-area anesthesiologist Dr. Geoffrey Hart, the company’s founder, received grants totaling $1.8 million from the NIH and the Albert Einstein Society to make his vision into a product. New England product design company Design Continuum delivered prototypes.

No word whether a DSi version might be in the works to update the idea, but we wouldn’t doubt it. The PediSedate is not exactly brand new, but we’ve apparently been anesthetized, so we’re wondering if any of our readers have ever come across one.

(Via OhGizmo)