Smalltalk with James Robertson

This would be funnier if it weren't so pathetic:

"[Companies are] happy to stay with IE6 because ... a lot of the social networking sites and the sites that they deem are unnecessary for work purposes, they're not going to render and function properly within [older versions of] IE," Microsoft's Australian chief security adviser Stuart Strathdee said.

Can't say I've tried Facebook (et. al.) in IE 6 - I don't have it running anywhere. But seriously? With all of the security issues that MS has addressed since IE 6 with the 7 and 8 releases? Any IT department thinking that way needs to be outsourced...

Technorati Tags: social media, facebook

Microsoft squashed the rumor that Ballmer would appear at Apple's WWDC event - and the way they did it is more interesting than the news itself: they tweeted it:

"Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI," the tweet said. The company, however, has no plans to support Objective-C, a Microsoft representative said.

Steve Jobs gets the message out via email, and MS is doing the same sort of thing via Twitter. Somewhere, PR professionals are crying, since their jobs are the ones getting disintermediated.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, apple, pr

If this rumor is true (and mind you, it's a nothing but a single sourced rumor right now) it would sure be a visible turn around. Remember the giant projection of Bill Gates at an Apple event back in 1997? At that time, Apple was barely afloat, and Microsoft desperately needed to keep some competition around. Well, it's 13 years later, and things have certainly changed. Apple's market cap now exceeds Microsoft's, and there's this rumor:

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

If that's true, it would be a very visible turn about. Even if it's not true, you have to consider where Apple is in the most relevant space (mobile) compared to MS right now. Apple is in the lead, and MS is busy rearranging the deck chairs.

Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft, mobile

Engadget reports that Comcast is starting to rollout 105/10 service. That's interesting, but expensive - they have a mandatory $250 installation charge, followed by a $200/month bill. Meanwhile, my mid tier FIOS service is 25/25 - and it looks like Verizon also has a 50/20 service for $140/month. I'm not sure that's worth it to me yet, but if they start offering faster service, maybe it will be. At least there's some level of competition in my area.

Technorati Tags: internet, bandwidth

Looks like Adobe is adding a cool feature to Flash Player 10.1 - torrent like P2P capability in order to take load off central services:

For broadcasters and video services, Stratus has the capacity to eliminate a significant amount of bandwidth costs. Instead of serving the media from a central server, users will provide the necessary bandwidth. Adobe’s Stratus system serves as an intermediary in this process, managing the communications between Flash players much like a BitTorrent tracker does for BitTorrent transfers

That's a pretty compelling feature (for high bandwidth sites), and one that I'm sure will cause a bit of heartburn for Apple in their war against Adobe. HTML5 can be as standards compliant as it likes, but most people care about cost a whole lot more. If this works and catches on, Apple will have an issue.

Technorati Tags: flash, adobe, torrent, p2p

It's not just Adobe's evangelist calling Apple out on their anti-Flash stance now - the company has started running ads on the subject:

Ironically, the ad itself (as opposed to the image above) is Flash, so you won't actually see it if you're using an iPhone or iPad (and on Engadget's site, the iPhone gets the mobil version of the site without the ad anyway). That kind of speaks to the difficulty Adobe faces - a large part of their target audience will never see this campaign.

In any event, it does illustrate this: Adobe isn't backing off on this. There have been plenty of "Flash on Android" bits of news as well, so the "Open Platform vs. Apple" thing that happened with PC's and Macs could be repeating itself. On the other hand, I think Apple is in a much stronger position now than they were then, and the trendlines for Flash are running against Adobe. We'll see.

Update: I have to say, I like the headline at TechCrunch on this:

Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight

Technorati Tags: apple, adobe, flash, html5

The one thing you can say about the big ISPs is this: they seem to have no clue how people would like to use their services. Witness Rogers in Canada talking about their data plans for the iPad:

Rogers says the tablets are a new category of product and "it's too early to say if customers will use more or less data than they do for the iPhone," but the company remains optimistic that the 250MB/5GB plans "will be more than enough for virtually all of our customers."

Right... you take a vacation with your iPad, stream a movie or two using 3G - and bam, you've used up all your bandwidth for that month. It's willfull ignorance. They do say they don't intend to charge for overage, instead "rolling you into a new month". Which is an overage charge called something else.

Mind you, it's not the pay as you go part I think is silly - it's the "5GB is all you'll ever need" thing. Why not offer a few higher use plans?

Technorati Tags: movies, iPad

This sounds pretty extreme to me:

Germany's top criminal court ruled Wednesday that Internet users need to secure their private wireless connections by password to prevent unauthorized people from using their Web access to illegally download data.

I know that I've used open WiFi while traveling before - it's a simple way to share a connection. The penalties sound ridiculous - over $100 "if a third party takes advantage of their unprotected WLAN connection to illegally download music or other files"

So... the German equivalents of the RIAA and MPAA have managed to make life more difficult for normal people. As they usually do.

Technorati Tags: copyright

I'd call this an understatement (the context is the proposed nationwide ISP filter in Australia):

"The Western international community do seem to be condemning the net filter," he said. "However, we get translations of Chinese newspapers that point to Australia as an example of positive censorship. From our point of view, when China is pointing to you in their local state-run newspapers as a positive example on the issue of censorship in Australia, surely something's going wrong."

That should be a huge flashing neon sign labelled "you're doing it wrong"...

Technorati Tags: censorship

The upside of this new proposed Wireless standard:

At a speed of 7 gigabits per second, WiGig can easily handle the transfer of high-def video. That positions it as a replacement for wired HDMI connections or optical audio cables.

The downside - range. It sounds like it's mostly for same room transfers, not same building. Still - that would be pretty darn handy for things like Netflix, and make "out of the box" setup a ton easier.

Technorati Tags: wifi