Eleanor Rear, my great aunt and family matriarch, passed away early this Sunday morning at the age of 88. My aunt lived her entire life in the same house in Arnold, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar steel town just outside of Pittsburgh. I have fond memories of spending my summers there when I was a kid, but I really got to know and appreciate my aunt much later in life as an adult.

My aunt was from the generation that knew the Great Depression. She would tell us stories of how her father was a bartender, and thus one of the few families on the block taking home a paycheck. They would often feed the other children in the neighbor, and to this day, the children of these children would still thank my aunt for what her family did for them when times were tough.

Eleanor Rear was also a devout Catholic, attending church often more than once a week. But more than a devout Catholic, she was the embodiment of what Christianity is supposed to be about. She was honest, tolerant, kind, forgiving and generous to the extreme — all traits that too many “people of faith” today seem to be completely lacking.

She never married. She had met a young man in her youth that she liked, but he was Lutheran and the church would not allow it. She passed away unmarried due to her devotion to her church. She kept track of that young man, and he remained single to this day.

What I most admire her for is that she gave to others her entire life, at her own expense. I remember visiting her several years ago before her sister Augusta passed away. It brought me to tears to see Eleanor, at over 80 years old, providing nursing care for her older sister in that same house. It was at that moment when I came to fully grasp the gravity of the sacrifice she had made for us and the rest of the family. Her life was all about giving to others, and I realized much too late that I would never be able to repay her for that.

In spite of my own agnostic beliefs, I am confident Eleanor is in a better place. She is the purest of saints and an example from another generation of how to lead a good life. I will greatly miss her. I have attempted to honor her by naming my daughter after her, but the void souls such as hers leave in this world are hard to comprehend and too often impossible to fill.

Last weeks big news was the release of Firefox 3.0. But a quieter event happened the Tuesday prior — Opera 9.5 was released. I’m a regular user of Firefox, although Firebug is starting to piss me off. I haven’t used Opera since they experimented with an ad-based model serveral years ago. It was always fast, but felt clunky.

Opera 9.5 is a huge improvement and I was very impressed. The look-and-feel is different from prior versions and was not so wierd as to be uncomfortable. Rendering speed was very fast and JavaScript also is very fast, which was my main interest. They also incorporated a JavaScript development tool similiar to Firebug that is called Dragonfly. Beyond being a clever play on words, Dragonfly provides an integrated, supported tool to handle what I was using Firebug for.

So I suggest taking a look at it. I’ll probably end up using Firefox 3 more often, as I’m a creature of habit, but the folks at Opera Software have done a great job and it is always nice to have another standards-compliant browser to test with.

After reading the news coming out of Apple’s WWDC about the new iPhone 3G, the first thought through me head was that Blackberry is dead.

The new iPhone is nothing revolutionary, technology-wise. It takes the prior model, adds a faster CPU, a new OS rev., a GPS receiver and connectivity through 3G telephone networks. This is a very expected and evolutionary step for the iPhone. What makes the iPhone 3G revolutionary is the price — $199 for the base model. This is stunningly cheap for a smartphone and will take the iPhone from most-coveted status to most-used status.

So how do we get to “Blackberry is dead?” The price. A current generation Blackberry is running around $400, without cellular provider discounts for contracts. This gets you a rather ugly device with pathetic capabilities for twice the price of an iPhone. And although the Blackberry Bold looks like it is going to be pretty cool, if it costs more than $300 list, it is dead-on-arrival.

Apple is playing to win in the mindshare race for the next computing frontier. About their only possible competition will be Google’s Android platform, but they’ll have a two year headstart on Google and will have effectively captured the majority of the development community. iPhones at $199 will be selling as fast as they can make them, and this new user base, combined with Apple courting the developer community, will mean an enormous software market for the iPhone.

All this will be great for consumers, but it means the death of the legacy players who owned this niche before. Windows Mobile/CE has always sucked in a big way. Microsoft will keep some market share by throwing away money at it, but they don’t hold a prayer of keeping up with Apple. Palm has been on life support for a decade and is just awaiting the coroner. Blackberry has enjoyed a one-horse race for years, and the iPhone is going to crush them. They will not be able to attract the developers or carry the same marketing buzz that Apple will create with the iPhone. They’ll sell some Bolds to their existing customer base, but they’re on the same path as Palm.

This leaves only Google as a possible contender, and their offering is too far out to slow down the iPhone. Apple is going to own the smartphone market with the new iPhone, and a lot of legacy players are going to perish in their wake.