So Google and Samsung decided they ought to delay their press conference to announce the Galaxy Nexus Prime (or whatever they're calling it) out of respect for Steve Jobs' death

Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but large multinational corporations do not delay the launch of a new product that has been anticipated for months because of sensitivity.

Actually, that is a terrible idea. Consumers know Compaq.

The Microsoft-of-the-90s comparisons are overblown. Microsoft didn't get slapped by the antitrust police for being successful. They got punished (weakly) for a series of dick moves against their competitors and even their own OEM "partners". They used their products' power with consumers to drive deeply unfair deals with the OEMs to prevent other products from even being offered.

The only way that Apple could so something similar would be to prevent retail outlets selling Apple gear from selling any competitor's product. There are pretty strict rules about that sort of thing, and (so far) Apple hasn't broken them.

... and is no more toxic than [...] wearing a gold wedding ring.

I have seen lives ruined this way - be careful out there.

The moral of the story is: if you want you want to keep your data safe, for God's sake don't give it to 1s44c.

Pixel Doubling looks terrible but for a lot of apps it can actually be better unless the app is designed to be resolution independent right from the start. Sure you can just scaling any vector drawing and fonts to full the larger screen, but some programs rely on drawing over bitmaps (for instance) in a pixel perfect way. Trying to do any kind of intelligent scaling is going to ruin the look of these apps. I can understand why Apple did it this way.

This is only true if you are an iOS Registered Developer which is easy to set up but will cost you $US99 per year. Personally I find this a small price to pay since XCode itself is free whereas compilers used to cost hundreds of dollars, but it annoys other people.

Have you actually tried one? They have bigger problems than the touch screen, the one I tried was under-powered with an incredibly laggy UI. It did play flash, but couldn't keep up with full screen video, the browser was slow, and the apps didn't work very well since it emulated the standard Android buttons with onscreen controls. At best it was 1/10th of an iPad at 1/4 the price.

Assuming that they aren't total assholes...

What do you base this assumption on?

Based on my experience, at least 80% of the home routers in use still have the default credentials unchanged since they were unpacked. That's a lot of the population vulnerable.

I am pretty sure it is cell phones - I believe [citation needed] that the iPhone (for one) does this as part of the anonymized data sent back to Apple. Google's database is probably kept up to date in a similar fashion.

What scares me the most is that to get the location they demonstrate a plausible way to access the settings on your router (if you use the default credentials.) If I was evil (or more evil) I wouldn't care about the location, I would just changed the router's DNS settings and redirect all the traffic through a server of my choice.

Ostensibly whatever it is Valve is going to be revealing at E3 is going to be a game, a new game perhaps or something like that.

+1 Insightful

Have you published your experiments anywhere? I have done some experiments with the audio tag and have been disappointed with the way it handles short programatically triggered sounds. It works (baring bug, like in Chrome) but I would love to see a better way.

Correct. If Adobe had open sourced Flash right from the beginning and provided a free dev environment it may have been ubiquitous by now instead of being a glorified video codec. But the other reason Flash applications haven't taken off is simple - nobody whose opinion matters wants them to!

Microsoft is terrified by anything that would let it's locked-in customer base easily migrate to another desktop OS. Apple doesn't care so much, but would much prefer applications be developed specifically for MacOSX (and guards the iPhone like Fort Knox). The linux desktop people are busy with other stuff and distrust Adobe. The application developers would maybe like to use Flash (or maybe not) but are hindered by insane licensing fees. The only people (apart from Adobe) who really want Flash are Google, who stand to make more money if applications are pushed out onto the web. Google are the only ones who push out Flash with their browser, and include good Flash support in their mobile OS.

Adobe really tried to get people to develop whole applications in Flash, but I could never see a compelling reason to do this. HTML works well enough for most things (even more with HTML5), anything more demanding is maybe not a good candidate for implementing as a web-based application. Where is the Flash facebook or imdb? They don't exist because they wouldn't provide anything more than what we already have. Where is the cross-platform Flash email client? Nobody cares.

I don't mean to dump on Flash too much - it serves its purpose. Even with HTML5, Flash will still be used for games, advertising, and maybe video for years to come. But it will never be the all-encompassing platform that Adobe wants it to be.