Older blog entries for chbm (starting at number 163)

• I’m slightly confused about the open source symbian foundation as they seem to be closing down. And right after the EU wasted some millions on them.

• TSA wants you naked but gets upset if you get naked and they totally don’t want to see Congressman naked but they sometimes get distracted and miss 25cm steel razor blades. And the hip kids have even figured out a name for going through a TSA gate. But hey, the fun might come soon to trains all over the US so everybody can get free gropings. But not to Germany cause the germans are not fun at all.

• Was this a slow week ? Probably. Either that or I wasn’t paying attention to all the Kinetic hacks.

• Palm Pre2 went on sale and HP is already teasing us with more OS and devices roadmap. I might just have a soft spot for JS but I find a webOS tablet appealing.

• AMD join MeeGo. They were obviously sick of Intel having all the fun and probably scared their tablets would have to run Windows7.

• Microsoft made a very un-MS turn declaring they meant Kinect to be open just a couple of days after basically threatening to sue anyone that went near the thing.

• What ? Google’s cars drive themselfs on regular roads ? Audi got TTs going up mountain roads.

• Thiswasclearlynot a good week for TSA.

• Huge event this week SAPO Codebits 2010. You had to be there.

• Nokia swallowed back Symbian. Not like Symbian is still relevant.

• Naked scanners and ball groping were all the rage last week. US Govt has tens of thousands of naked pics, apparently turning away from TSA costs you 10000USD and people are starting to figure out who’s pushing for the scanners. For contrast, observe how a country actually at war, like Israel, handles airport security.

• For some reason EU wasted 22M EUR on Symbian. We know it’s a struggling OS but c’mon, why does it get public funding ?

• Hell froze over and IE9 ranks first in HTML5. This has got to be the most bizarre news this week. On the to be expected front Oracle spins off a for-pay JVM.

• As another sign of the war to come US Govt blocked ZTE and Huawei on Sprint contract.

• What does India do to heroes who try to save its democracy ? They throw them in jail. Or at least that’s what happens to people who expose their e-voting machines pathetic bugs. Meanwhile, the TSA is busy planting drugs for laughs.

• Microsoft had a record first quarter. Which looks like great news but really isn’t cause the good news come from the Windows and Office cashcows instead of entertainment and mobile.

• Impressed with Google self driving cars ? The Visilab car went to China on its own.

• The BlackBerry PlayBook involves Adobe Air.

• Adobe conceded Flash defeat and showed off a Flash-to-HTML5 conversion toll. Meanwhile, Microsoft conceded defeat on Silverlight and says HTML5 is the one true platform.

• Shocker, Motorola mobile posted profit. More Shocker, Nintendo needs to dip into the warchest after net losses this half-year. Most of the loss comes from value loss of foreign assets due to a strong Yen but dropping Wii sales doesn’t help either.

• Microsoft presses on with the patent debauchery, now trying to extort licencing from people using Linux. Apple and Motorola keep trout slapping now with Apple claiming Motorola can’t have multitouch. Guys, remember the ROKR ?

• Murdock owns Sky, 3M owns purple. Meanwhile, TSA continues to be the beacon for pervs everywhere for now you either get on the naked scanner or get your testies manfondled. I bet children get the rubber glove too.

Apple is probably working on a pro HTML authoring tool. Lets review the recent events:

• Apple keeps Flash out of iOS;
• Apple removes Flash from the Lion install, whoever wants it needs to get it from Adobe;
• iWeb is missing from the iLife11 announcement while mail templates are demonstrated from something that felt like 1 hour.

So my take on this is the Web team is hard at work on a HTML5+JS pro authoring tool to obsolete Adobe Flash. In fact, all Apple needs to declare full out war on Adobe is to throw in a decent Photoshop replacement.

And lo and behold, between writing and publishing time Adobe concedes defeat and announces a flash-to-html tool. Flash is now irrelevant.

• Apple still turns mad profits.

• HP didn’t kill Palm. In fact, WebOS 2.0 is actually happening along with Pre2. Meanwhile Samsung Tab actually came out at insane prices

• MeeGo is confirmed a 2011 thing while Symbian Foundation starts to crumble and Nokia announces there will be no more Symbian releases and everything going forward will be Qt.

• A lot of Facebook apps steal your data. Nothing new there.

• Motorola is back and it’s suing Apple back on patent crap. Not only that but they entered a 4G pact with Nokia ie., a screw Apple pact.

• At some point in the near future the N900 is getting MeeGo. Can’t tell if it’s official or not. Not that I care much at this point. Meanwhile, the ex-MeeGo guy is the new Palm/HP guy.

• Google is not only doing self driving cars but it’s also placing a 6TW wind farm in the Atlantic. Google is clearly the first megacorp of the future.

• The FSFE tells us about the BSA’s lobby in the EU against Open Source. It’s full of the usual bullcrap, and some new fun one such as preference of Open Source weakens defense of IPR against China.

• Remember the stuff about WikiLeaks killing operators in Afghanistan ? Turns out that was wrong according to the DoD.

• Remember the Lower Merion School District peeping tom principal ? The US Govt spent over half a million dollars to settle out of court and said principal from going to trial. So, in the future when someone refers to censorship to “protect the children” refer them to this case.

• The Pope says technology causes confusion between reality and fiction. That’s, of course, opposed to his bible which everyone knows is complete fiction so it doesn’t confuse anyone.

• Ballmers says they’re going to have tablets by Christmas. They also went on a patent license binge with a troll. Which was a nice ramp-up to the WP7 launch which will actually ship on time as opposed to my prediction. And don’t worry, copy’n’paste will come in the future like in the real iPhone.

• Google has cars that frikin drive themselfs. For real.

• Nokia’s head MeeGo guy quit. Word on the street is it’s about bringing WP7 onboard. Meanwhile Nokia says no MeeGo till first half of 2011 which is like the fourth or fifth delay since Maemo6. And if you want to know what Nokia is about this days, sticking a regular BL-4D inside a sealed N8 sums it up.

• Amazon is launching an Android app store. Maybe even a real live tablet which would probably be better than anything in the market now.

• More ACTA leaks, now near the end of the process and apparently the nastier stuff USA wanted didn’t make it to the final text.

• Rim stunned the world by producing a tablet people might actually want. It’s definitely not lacking in hardware, the QNX based system seems up to the mark and it comes with a development kit. It looks even better for BlackBerry users as it tethers to BBs for internet access and gives a larger view of the familiar BB messaging. Speaking of which, russians cracked BB backups.

• Google is expanding the Android Market to 20 more countries. I’ll be able to buy Android apps. Horray ? Meanwhile Microsoft is keeping true to itself and trying to squeeze more licensing money from Android makers. After settling with HTC they’re going after Motorola. Google needs to start really selling a flagship Android phone and force MS to come after them.

• 3DS is coming in March. Probably in the 300EUR mark. Decisions Decisions.

• Piracy fosters new business models. UK ISPs, for instance, are racking it in turning customer data. There’s a budding blackmail market stealing from my idea. It must really hard to be in the racketeering biz as they even have to steal from each other.

• Won’t someone think about the children ? No, really. Denmark and Sweden have a child porn blacklist 167 site long. AK Zensur of Germany analised it. Seems like only 3 (2%) actually had any type of child porn. Nobody cared to take the illegal sites down until the AK Zensur notified the hosting companies and they put them offline within the day. So, now, the Denmark/Sweden children pornography blacklist contains exactly zero child porn sites. Note to governments: if you’re using children as an excuse for censorship or for demagogic reasons, actually do something useful about child porn instead of insulting us all.