The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
If you do business in laces that use non-latin alphabets, then you have a new brand protection issue on your hands - non-latin domains went live this weekend. http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/, for instance. Try putting that in your browser - it should actually work, although I have no idea how to read any of it :)
Gemstone has been acquired again - by a big player:
SpringSource, a division of VMware, Inc, and the leader in Java application infrastructure and management, today announced that VMware has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GemStone Systems, Inc., a privately held provider of enterprise data management solutions based in Beaverton, Oregon
We'll have to wait to see what - if anything - that means for the Smalltalk business there. The focus of the acquisition seems to be Gemfire.
There are reports that Apple might get an anti-trust investigation - over their developer policy, and the new ad platform they are ready to roll out. It would probably be simpler for Apple to back off, but after Jobs rolled out his "Flash stinks" letter, that's going to be a dificult climb down - as PC World reports:
Whether Apple will truly reverse its developer agreement remains to be seen. Apple believes it has good reason for its decisions, and the company may be reluctant to back down after Jobs' public defense of its policies.
Even if the lawyers recommend backing off (and who knows if they do) - Apple will have some egg on its face. I think it would have been smarter for Jobs to say nothing, so that his options could have remained more open. Now? It's in that emotional realm that's so hard to escape from...
Engadget notes that Microsoft is echoing Apple's lines about the future of video on the net. Cast your mind back a decde and ask yourself whether things would have progressed from Apple to Microsoft that way:
Where Steve Jobs leads, Microsoft follows -- how's that for shaking up the hornet's nest? It's said in jest, of course, but we've just come across a post from the General Manager for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and the perspective expressed by him on the subject of web content delivery broadly agrees with the essay penned by Jobs yesterday on the very same subject. Echoing the Apple CEO's words, Hachamovitch describes HTML5 as "the future of the web," praising it for allowing content to be played without the need for plug-ins and with native hardware acceleration (in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X).
No, Microsoft isn't banning Flash from IE - but further down Hachamovitch did single it out as a security and reliability problem that needed attention. It's been a bad week for Adobe.
Adobe's CEO has responded (in an interview) to Steve Jobs' smackdown:
Narayen didn't offer much we haven't heard Adobe say before, but his frustration with Apple is palpable even in summary form: he called Jobs' points a "smokescreen," said Flash is an "open specification," and further said Apple's restrictions are "cumbersome" to developers and have "nothing to do with technology." What's more, he also said Jobs' claims about Flash affecting battery life are "patently false," and suggested that any Flash-related crashes on OS X have more to do with Apple's operating system than Adobe's software.
The market will figure this out - it's Apple's way, Google's way, RIM, and whatever HP does with Palm. I'd include Microsoft, but they've been fumbling the ball in this space for more years than I can count.
Looks like there won't be a climb down for Apple - Steve Jobs has released a public letter on Flash - and why he doesn't want it on Apple's mobile devices. He went through a whole set of points, building up to this last one: Jobs doesn't want cross platform tools being used to build apps:
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Maybe there was some kind of compromise possible before this, but - not so much now. Apple has - from the very top - told Adobe (and every other non-native toolset, for that matter) to "go fish". That means the lines are drawn now: there's the bright lines of Apple's app store, and the less well drawn ones for Android. Meanwhile, HP sounds like they intend to invest real money in WebOS, so there's going to be real competition in this space. Game on.
In a brief press release buried within Sony Japan's website, the company announced that they would be ending sales of the classic 3.5 inch floppy disk in the country in March of 2011. Sony introduced the size to the world in 1981, which saw its heyday in the 1990s. Sony has been one of the last major manufacturers to continue shipments of the disk type they helped develop, but had ended most worldwide sales in March of this year. The company's production of the 3.5 inch floppy ceased in 2009
I had no idea that you could still buy those things. On a slightly more serious note: "back in the day", lots of people did backups on floppies (I well remember the multi-disk flip operation). If you actually have data from that era that you need to access, it's well past time to fire up any old PC's you still have in working condition and transfer the data :)
Technorati Tags: floppy disk
While Apple is trying to kill Flash, Android is embracing it, and so are the next generation Windows phones. I'm not sure what RIM plans with the BlackBerry, but I expect they'll fall in line, too. That'll put Apple on one side, and the rest of the universe on the other. Normally, I'd say that would put Apple in the losing position, but the iPhone is popular enough that it guarantees one thing: a long battle.
Looks like there may be an end-run solution to the "no flash for you" problem that doesn't involve a client level (iPhone or iPad) solution - RipCode has a cloud based transcoder:
RipCode, Inc., the leader in transactional transcoding, announced today its newest product, the TransAct Transcoder V6 can intercept Adobe Flash-based file or live video requests and convert them to a container, video codec, and audio codec accepted by Apple Inc.’s new iPad all transparently to the end user device and without the need for any pre-transcoding or device-based client.
For that to work on the client, either back end services (like, say, hulu) would have to cooperate, or RipCode would have to build a client that did the redirection through their servers. Since the client would be fully native, it might be hard for Apple to reject it with a straight face (not that they've been stopped by that before). If sites that use flash did the work though, it would all come transparently through the browser.
I wonder whether Adobe will be talking to these guys?
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