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Chrome 4, Apple's new tablet and more...
 One
of the most important advantages that Firefox had over Chrome has been largely
nullified. Chrome 4 has extensions now. As of now, Firefox still has the lead
in the sheer number and variety of extensions that are available (I couldn't
find Chrome equivalents to two that I use—Screengrab and Word Count Plus).
That being said, now that Chrome supports extensions, it's likely just a matter
of time before it catches up. Chrome 4 also supports bookmark sync through Google
Docs. You have to have a Google account for this to work. Other than that the
browser seems faster than before (it was already faster than the rest).
Apple's announced a tablet PC called the iPad. The device is lighter than a
netbook (680 grams versus 1 kg plus), has a screen large enough to comfortably
read books or browse the Web and an optional dock that comes with a physical
keyboard. The claimed battery life of 10 hours playing video is impressive if
true. Moreover, the tablet supports existing iPhone/iPod Touch apps. On the
downside, the product’s name, lack of multitasking, no webcam all add up
to it looking like a glorified e-book reader. This looks like a work in progress.
Oracle's purchase of Sun which had been held up by the European Union for a
while has finally gone through. Now it remains to be seen if Oracle can succeed
in the hardware business. As of now it appears that the software giant will
be looking to sell hardware and software bundles that are tightly integrated.
That's an interesting idea but it is not how companies buy servers and storage.
Oracle's done this before with its Raw Iron database server appliances about
a decade back and that didn't float. Meanwhile, Oracle's promised to continue
supporting Sun's Open Source software—Java, OpenOffice and MySQL. There's
talk of a cloud based version of OpenOffice which should prove interesting.
Time was when in-memory databases were restricted to Stock
Exchanges that had to process a humongous number of transactions per second.
Conventional commercial databases are usually loaded from the disk into memory
in bits and pieces as required. Now, Sybase is the latest of the mainstream
enterprise database vendors to offer the in-memory option for its flagship Adaptive
Server Enterprise (ASE) product. Disk I/O is becoming a bottleneck as the number
of transactions processed grows from several hundred thousand per second to
over a million.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com
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