Huge issue: biggest chunk of apps moving in mobile markets are games. These games either need as much performance as possible (that can only be achieved with native code) or are forced to use hacks here and there that end up making them depend heavily on browser differences.

Not that this matters much here, I bet BB10 will have some form of support for native apps, and this HTML5 deal is just a way to make it easier on some to develop simple apps.

Side note: in theory you can write HTML5 apps for iOS and Android. All you need is to make a very small "shell" app with a browser view controller and redirect it to your internal HTML code.

Like the Weekly World News, once in a while, they do get lucky and print a real story.

In its own tax filings, Apple reported these tax rate figures paid in the last three years: “approximately 24.2%, 24.4% and 31.8% for 2011, 2010 and 2009, respectively.”

You can only do this if you are a registered developer (I know because I am one.)

You can only install your friend's app if he adds you to he too is a developer certificate.

Actually, you can install his stuff (if he is a developer that added your device under his provisioning profile) even if you are not a developer, but you cant install your own stuff without you being a developer yourself.

Heck, even if you are a developer you must add your own devices to your profile, and there is a limit to how many devices you can add (arguably it's high enough to have all your friends devices registered.)

You can't just download software written by strangers and add it to your device, though.

Oh, if you are a corporation with a much more expensive (although not prohibitive) corporate program, you don't have a device limit (either that or its a frigging large limit) and you can even remotely push software and updates, but this is not in the realm of the common guy and still subject to Apple's blessing.

No you can’t, not without hammering down the OS with a jailbreak. That's like saying banks allow anyone to withdraw as much money as they want with a bit of dynamite placing on the vault.

As a developer I can actually install any app (I compile and sign myself) but even that will be limited to the certificate lifetime.

Article is talking WinRT, which is the equivalent of iOS.

iOS IS restrictive, and Microsoft is aiming exactly for that. Actually... not exactly. From what I read, Microsoft will allow third party browsers, with third party HTML and JavaScript engines (something Apple does not allow.) The issue is in restricting some APIs required for JIT, and that will give third party browsers a heavy performance penalty.

So as much as I tend to be on Apple's side, this is nowhere near as restrictive as Apple's stance.

I pick the same way on all third party run-time environments. Flash, Silverlight, Java, heck the browsers get a bit of slack because:

1) They get updated very often
2) I would be a Luddite if I don't have at lest one installed.

I don't need third party run-times. Java is not on my system anymore. Nor is Flash. Thanks to the wonders of standardization (sarcasm), every time a website requires flash I launch it on my phone to get a standard HTML version that does not.

This article was brought to you by your friendly neighbor Oracle!

You are reading it wrong. :P

Funny story: "recently" I got a PC game at Target (Deus Ex, wanted the OnLive free bonus.) I was not able to install it because I was not even able to open my CD Drive. I opened up my PC to find that all metallic pieces had sort of rusted into place since I had not ever used the drive since the last Windows install, which happened several years back (don't recall date but I recall it was several months before Win7 SP 1 came out.)

They allow "media playback", it's only DVD and Blu-ray physical media that they wont be doing the playback out of the box. Why? Because these formats are not free or open. There is a licensing cost involved, and it’s paid on a per-sold-copy basis. By not including the functionality in the box, they do two things:

1) They don't force those that don't care for it to pay the extra cost
2) They, accidentally, encourage the growth of more open and free media formats.

Script kiddies screwed up the meaning, taking open source hacks from repository and going out to destroy every computer and deface every page they can, all in while calling themselves also "hackers."

For every "old school" hacker, there are about 20 script kiddies. Since they outnumber the legitimate hackers, and they call themselves so... well... it IS a democracy. They took it. It's theirs. Hacker is now synonymous with idiotic kid that does illegal computing activities.

If this was the reason why brick and mortar stores are dying, Amazon would had been bankrupt by now due to their censorship of "adult material". Not to mention Apple.

No, brick and mortar is dying because we are too lazy to drive to buy stuff, we can just pay to download or have the mailman bring us our orders.

Mind you: not saying I agree with this at all, just noting that it's not at all the reason they are dying.

We all know these religious zealots hate pornography! This must mean the reason they are doing this is instead to terrorize US citizens!!! How? From now on the TSA will request all pornography in your laptop or smartphone be carefully analyzed, frame by frame, before you board your flight!!! They may simply force you to trash your smartphones, laptops and tablets just like they do with your coke!

Conspiracy Theory B:
This was hoaxed by the TSA themselves so they have legal reasons to confiscate cool looking laptops, new top of the line smart phones, and expensive tablets!

I got to say, it sounds extremely odd that there were no more eyes. Google is a company that has a price tag on how much every signle web search executed by a user cost them, in energy and equipment degradation. They have specially manufactured cpus that can run hot so they can conserve as much heat as they can. ... but in all those years, even in the initial test run... no one noticed the cars where filling their hard-drives WAY too fast?

This takes me back about 7 years ago in a contract involving 3 parties. Client, contractor and a sub-contractor. In a meeting, the usually incompetent IT manager employed by the client to run their data center, asks our sub-contractor "why is the database growing at a rate of 1GB per day?" The sub-contractor was clueless and we shocked. Sure, we perhaps should had noticed.... (BTW, reason for the growth: zero normalization. I kid you not, these guys had absolutely no normalized tables at all, and nearly every field indexed.)

My point is: unexpected bursts in data storage are too easy to notice, because the first time hard drives fill up and windows (or whatever OS they use) shouts for air... well... some one will notice.

But these are not morons... these are Google engineers... the ones that have quantified the cost of a search to the atomic level. I'm sure more than just an unnamed "rogue engineer" was very aware of this.