Android rules phones. Apple rules tablets. And Microsoft rules desktops. Quibble about the exact numbers or satisfaction of users, but that's the basic reality today.

All three are making plays to get more dominant in someone else's kingdom. But the two desktop contenders: Apple and Microsoft may be trying to go for a unified platform too early. Do users really want to select cell G7 in Excel on their phone under Windows 8? And certainly Apple users haven't been completely happy with trends coming the other way with the iOS-ification of Lion. This may be a huge mistake to aim for unity between desktop and mobile so early. A unified platform that's compromised stinks on all platforms.

There are advantages for a unified OS to the OS vendor and programmers, but for the user it still isn't clear. That conservative stance will actually help Android in the short term; the attempts to advance are hurting rather than helping MS and Apple right now. On the other hand, if Microsoft or Apple finds that advantage / leverage it could be very bad news for Android that's "only" a mobile platform. Android will be be quickly leveraged to the back of the pack. Short term: this is a liability to aim for unity so early, but it does make me a little nervous when considering the longer term these OS battles are fought that Android is relying on no such advantage being found.

Still nothing will be "decided" with the release of the IPhone 5, windows 8, or the next Ice Cream Tablet. This is a three horse race for three kingdoms over the long haul and all I can say is that this next year will be a very interesting seventh lap rather than the finish line for anyone.

Any indications Google will just take the IP and kill the hardware business?

By making hardware, they risk driving other hardware makers to Windows Mobile or (if eventually opened) HP WebOS.

Right now, Motorolla Mobile has no significant reputation among the non-geek public. And Motorolla Mobile isn't amazingly profitable. So why wouldn't they just take the IP and shut down the questionably-profitable hardware liability? For the Android ecosystem this may even be a good thing.

You will know in the first 15 minutes.

The movie starts with a chase in Africa; that's a good taste for what most of the action feels like: fast and fleeing. The apes are chased and captured; it's energetic and sympathetic, but not unexpected (considering it's a movie about apes)

But one of the more intense moments occurs shortly after that with the lab chimp "Bright Eyes" seemingly going crazy and you don't know what's going on. Has the medicine made her crazy? Has she been mistreated? Should we feel sympathy for this out of control ape? It's not explained until (START SPOILER) Bright Eyes is killed, and you realize she was protecting her new baby.

I consider the gore minimal, but here's all of the gore I recall:
* Apes are shot, but you see very little blood (their fur hides it). Two are major plot points where you feel the significance of the shots, despite insignifiicant gore.
* A scene where an ape defends someone by biting the assailant on the ear and causes a small bit of blood.
* A scene where someone who is very sick is discovered dead on the bed with a bit of blood around him.
* Three sneezes where blood comes out (3 different times).
* A bad man is killed, but the body is not fully shown on screen (you see some very pinkish / reddish skin but no blood or direct view of the body).

Lots of chases. Lots of running. But most everything is expected from the situation. So if the 7 year old gets through the "Bright Eyes" scene, it's less likely they'll be shocked later on.

Overall I think a seven year old may be bored. Caesar has conversations in sign language. He teaches apes to share (with cookies). He longs for home in his cell. He has trouble being accepted by the other apes. There are long stretches which might have bored me as a young kid. But as an adult, I really liked the movie.

The high end iHelmet will plug into a proprietary nasal Thunderbolt port.

Need a lower end version? The iPod Zip will have open interfaces, but you don't want to know where it plugs in.

It only takes one claim on one patent to become a significant and expensive problem.

Oracle may have had some of it's ability to negotiate for an out of court settlement shot down, but I don't see why this is a win for Google. Fewer claims remain but still the same number of patents in dispute.

Beyond "it's not a loss", can a nice slashdotter enlighten me what this really means?

Well, I thought I understood it.

Norman & Nielsen say gestures lack intuition because they lack consistency, discoverability, visibility, and feedback. They say they suck for other reasons too (scalability, et al). Compared to the successes of the traditional menu interface, OS vendors should: disallow inconsistent gestures. Develop gestures that can be reliable and not prone to error. Only release gestures in the wild before perfecting them in the lab. Add a button to universally pop up applicable menus in all situations. And like the old GUI standards, impose gesture standards from OS vendor down to developer and not the other way around.

I think they've nailed it that the discoverability is poor, but I don't find inconsistency a problem (except as a duplicate of the discoverability argument). I prefer that the app developers are taking the lead in making new gestures to fit their interfaces, once discovered (and yes, that is a problem) they "stick" much better in my fingers than the menu interface. The ability to experiment and fit the gesture to the interface is a good thing. Some gestures stink, and those developments & products will disappear. Remember the gesture (shown at WWDC) to rotate a photo on the iPad originally? It practically took two hands to do. That's something that was worked on in the lab and imposed from on high, and it stunk. The current gesture Apple adopted was (I think) copied from third party software. Since there isn't a fully vetted and evolved interface like GUI menus to impose on developers, falling back on menus or imposing consistency at this point is counter-productive.

Though I may not have expressed it well, I agree discovery is a problem, yet I find there are major wins for gestures in my usage despite the inconsistent, unreliable, poorly visible, and questionable feedback attributed to gestures. Telling OS vendors and developers to follow menu interface traditions and virtues may not be the best thing in the evolving gestural "wild west rules" right now.

I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. But there's a big advantage to pioneering a new physical interface: you don't need the language part of your brain. My 1 year old twin nephews can interact with their iPads with only the most basic of demonstrations of how a new app works. They can't read or write but they can follow demos of fingers creating action pretty well.

Is bringing along the old interface of mice & menus helping or hurting? I particularly like the new "swipe up" gesture to scroll down of a touchscreen rather than the traditional "elevator window" model of scroll bars where clicking up scrolls up.

They are absolutely to be commended for chastising developers that there is no easy way to discover actions if they are not intuitive; I'd rather they come up with ways to address this than just fall back on menus though. For example, Apple included an interactive tutorial for using the custom gestures built-in to Pages, Numbers and Keynote because they aren't discoverable at all. Some I've forgotten because I don't use them (and I'd have to re-watch the tutorials again to re-program my brain). But the ones I have picked up on are absolutely ingrained and effortless now. Unfortunately, built-in tutorials are the exception rather than the rule, and even when they are included they more trouble to refer to than a drop down menu. But there are ways to improve without eliminating gestures.

I wouldn't want to use the gesture interface when I'm programming during the day, but when I'm swiping through my early morning junk mail, RSS feeds, and to-do items, my brain feels far more engaged on my iPad than my desktop. It's almost like the touch gestures are autonomic and leave my (limited) higher brain functions alone to read though the fog (at least until my caffeine kicks in.)

I agree that people need to improve gesture interfaces which are in their infancy, but I don't think it's justified to throw the baby out with the bath water just because of long traditions.

This is a text book example on how the GPL is not a "trap" for big companies. The terms changed. A company disagreed with the changes. And they opted out of future usage.

Is it the right thing to do with lawyers? Yes. No fighting or disguised usage; they quit SAMBA "cold turkey" and all lawyers are happy.

Is it right thing to do with SAMBA developers? Yep. They didn't fork the codebase and create a competitive SAMBA GPLv2 effort.

Is it the right thing with Apple developers? Probably. Some older features are missing, so relying on pre-Active directory features will be troubling. For those who really need SAMBA itself (rather than just the features), Apple's GPLv2 forks are public and the GPLv3 work could be taken up by interested companies, researchers, or hobbyists.

Is this the right thing with users? That's what we don't know. Will the new system be secure enough? Will it be integrated well enough? Will end users be oblivious to its replacement? If yes, that's the final word on whether this was the right move at this time for this company. If no, then that shows SAMBA is non-trivial code, that can't be easily replaced.

IMHO, that's exactly how disagreements with GPL licensed code should be resolved.

While completely justified, the developer sounds like a very angry bird.

It takes time and effort to slingshot those pigs out of the store.

I really, really wanted a Windows tablet five years ago, but the prices were way too high. Whatever your feelings about Apple, their ability to crank tablet prices down to a reasonable range has been a big boon for everyone wanting to buy the form factor. They may lead right now, but when suppliers catch up and can get parts to all manufacturers (in a year or two), we'll all be better off that this is no longer considered a luxurious exclusive of the high end like the Windows slates used to be.

But how do they do it? Jobs may be the PR showman, but Tim Cook is the Compaq-alumnus who is the real price magician.

Remember back in 2005 when Apple made a huge exclusive deal for 5 years of Flash RAM with Samsung? That was more than a year before they even introduced the iPhone, but Tim Cook locked up supplier deals people thought were insane at the time. Apple only makes Macs and iPods, what the heck are they going to use all that flash RAM for?

Apple now has a lot of cash on hand to get the best prices and to make exclusive deals like that, which they said they just did for three more critical parts in their last earnings report (and people are speculating over what those three parts are).

But finally, when suppliers aren't able to deliver on time, in quantity, and at a good price, they haven't been shy about pitting suppliers against each other.

Even with the cheapest supplies, might Apple be selling the iPad at a loss? At least for the 1st generation iPad, it's unlikely. Though Apple doesn't break out many numbers they show that iPad revenue over Christmas was almost equal to Mac revenue. Considering the larger sales of the iPad, more sold at a loss would be more loss, and that doesn't seem to have happened with their record profits over Christmas. Second, Phil Schiller last year said after the introduction but before it went on sale that Apple still had some pricing flexibility (meaning they could cut deals with big companies or bring the price down to the public, if no one bought it). Those two things together really suggest that this isn't a loss leader for Apple like the XBox was for Microsoft back in 2005. This may all change with iPad 2, but it doesn't really look like they added any expensive features to the (minor?) upgrade this time around.

With as many of the iPad parts coming from Samsung (including the A4 & A5 system-on-a-chip) you'd expect Samsung would be in the best position to make a real competitor. Apple's price advantage (though painful to competitors, right now) is short term. It's good that the market is getting competitive with low power, touch input, tablet supplies. And it will be even better for users when tablets in 2012 will be significantly better and maybe even cheaper from a variety of sources.

Just be patient, Samsung and the iPad competitors will be back soon with better products.

Two days earlier and it would have been June 6, or 6/6. Rolling out IPv6 on 6/6 would have been biblically ordained to take over the heavens and the earth. Now it's just... another day, another test.

Jobs left Apple in May 1985. System 7 was released on May 13, 1991. Unless someone wrote down his ideas and preserved them on the infamous "colored note cards" he had zero influence over System 7.

System 7 was 32-bit clean and multitasking on full-time. But it wasn't popular because formerly "high end" 2MB Macs with 20MB hard drives were now the minimum requirements and seemed slow compared to System 6.

Steve Job's only influence so soon after his return on Mac OS 7.7 was to rename to Mac OS 8 and kill clone support. It was a nice evolution of classic Mac OS 7 so people liked it, but rename it Mac OS 8 and viola, no more contractual obligation to the clone makers. A dick move indeed, but irrelevant to the quality of the software itself.

Perhaps you mean the buggy, unstable, defunct System 8 code named Copland which Apple started in March 1994? It was the failed overhaul of System 7 software with a nanokernel, preemptive multitasking, new Finder, and so on. Apple bought NeXT (and brought Steve Jobs back) precisely because they couldn't get it perfected and stable. If anything that sort of supports Steve's philosophy "Real artists ship".

Whether Jobs has evolved into vision-driven designer or whether he's still a bullying brat is irrelevant. These three software releases aren't really examples of anything he had significant influence over.

Linux has been a great win for what people use it for. Developing it to fit the needs of non-developers is a crap shoot; developers aren't casual users. Here are some things I've thought were missing.

Quicken isn't proper double entry book keeping, but it's ease of use wins non-accountants over. It's hard to get that balance right though; even Intuit had to buy Mint when it's attempt to jump start it's Mac version failed to deliver. Other Linux tools have felt like a thin veneer over double entry hell to me. Trust such tools with my financial life? No.

An automated software updater? Cute names probably works against keeping ignorant users up to date. "I know it's been years, but I won't trade in my Karmic Koala for a Natty Narwhal!" Software updates are critical for stability and security, but the Linux update tools I've seen either don't cover enough or they are way too difficult for a casual user to operate. Demanding re-installation basically means sending them back to Windows.

How about training software instead of documentation? Despite the web's illusion otherwise, Mac and Windows users are not very advanced. It's one thing to offer a simple unified interface, but software to train the ignorant bosses of the world how to send email, backup, and print? Of the few such Linux attempts I've seen, some fail by mixing interfaces. But all have failed by going to the command line at some point. Even though they say "just type this, you don't have to understand it", the user's whole experience rides on them NOT making a typo. Way too fragile.

Linux is unparalleled in meeting the needs of it's developers, but without people making apps for their ignorant bosses, middle school kids, and reluctant grandparents, it's audience with (perhaps rightfully) stay self-serving.

I see it similar to the Etude music player on the iPhone. It's a MIDI player that highlights the notes on the sheet music and on a simulation of a piano keyboard as the music is being played.

The Cat in the Hat eBook has several modes, one of which highlights the text as a voice reads the words. Another of which lets the kid touch something in the drawing, says the word and highlights it in the text (if it's in the passage on that page).

Neither replaces an audio performance (like an iTunes song or an audio book), and neither of which replace the physical static medium (like a piece of sheet music or a book), but both make a nice interactive presentation to help the viewer's brain make the connection of these very different sensations.

The iPhone OS is pretty new so it's hard to know what will be found, if investigated. But if based on recent legal precedents, change won't come from US legal action.

At the end of 2008, Apple's Macintosh "walled garden" practices were brought before Judge William Alsup in the Apple vs Psystar case. Psystar filed counterclaims insisting that Apple's EULA was invalid because it was "tying" Mac OS X to Apple hardware. They were basically laughed out of court.

You can read Groklaw's analysis of that ruling, but my armchair lawyering just can't see too much difference between the OS X "walled garden" and the iPhone OS "walled garden" legally.