There was an interesting piece a few months back, What if Microsoft exited the search business?, arguing that the abandonment of Bing would lead to a near-immediate antitrust action against Google, either from the FTC or as a private action undertaken by Microsoft itself.

It may be that Google needs Bing to hang around as plausible competition the same way that Microsoft needed Mac OS to soldier on in the late 90's as a putative competitor to Windows (and remember, Microsoft was still found to have engaged in illegal monopolistic practices anyways, something that Microsoft arguably never recovered from).

Guess this is different from yesterday's story in Streaming Media, Telestream Helps Launch Open Source x265/HEVC Project, which offers a H.265 encoder, available under either GPL or commerical license.

Just started getting into Roku programming in the last month, and I kind of like the ifPosterScreen's "arc-landscape" 1-D metaphor — for small numbers of objects, it's easier to see the selection when it's placed front and center (as a result of your right-left arrowing) than to just put a little highlight box around it like AppleTV does. CoverFlow does nothing for me on iOS or (especially) Mac, but on Roku it seemed to work pretty nicely.

And it's not like this is the only menuing system available on the Roku SDK. Many apps with a large amount of content -- your Netflixes and Crunchyrolls and what have you -- use a 2D grid of horizontally scrolling lists. I think this is the ifGridScreen, but I haven't used it myself yet, so I'm not sure.

Anyways, this didn't seem like something that desperately needed to change, but I assume they know what they're doing. Roku's picking up steam and they're going to be fine. Would be nice if there were a real YouTube app for it, but I suppose we can't have that until Google gives up on the GoogleTV fiasco.

Any app with an internet connection can track you without your knowledge simply by phoning home with some sort of unique identifier, like a UUID. The only way to not be tracked by apps is to turn on Airplane Mode and never turn it off.

The problem with the UDID was that it was visible across all applications, so that multiple apps that tracked a user via UDID could correlate their results. For example, imagine app A phones home with just your contact info, and app B phones home your porn-browsing history. If they both use the UDID, and I have access to the data supplied by both, then I have the names and addresses and porn-surfing history of anyone who uses both apps. If they use different IDs, then this kind of correlation is not possible. Granted, the IDFA is like this in that it's cross-app, but it can be turned off by the user, as described in the article, which was not possible with UDID.

The "hand in the cookie jar" stuff is typical lazy Apple bashing, but sites gotta get their hits somehow, I guess.

Today's BASIC is JavaScript. And it's already on all the mobile devices. Even evil control-freak Apple's stuff. Young people already know this and do not need your Commodore/Apple/Atari nostalgia trips.

Also, parachute pants are no longer a thing.

Please update your expectations and wardrobe appropriately.

For me, the remarkable thing is that while Paul Graham wondered aloud about the hundred year language, the one we'd be using a century from now, he completely overlooked C and how long it had already remained not just relevant, but dominant. C was released in 1973, meaning it's nearly at the end of its fourth decade, and it's number 2 (and gaining!) on this month's TIOBE chart (from their summary: "Java lost almost 1% of its popularity in September. If this trend continues, C will be number one again next month."). Put another way, C is 38% of the way to a century of dominance, and there currently few if any signs of its imminent abandonment.

ESR once referred to C's "austere elegance" as something C++ lacks, and I think that neatly pins down what I like about C. I've personally been reintroduced to C over the last few years by the lower-level Mac and iOS frameworks (notably Core Audio), and it's truly nice for doing things like signal processing, where the formality and fussiness of higher-level languages and frameworks would just get in the way.

Also, trashing Steve Jobs doesn't help celebrate Dennis Ritchie's accomplishments, so can we drop that from the thread?

...Van Pelt, from "Peanuts", sitting out in the pumpkin patch every Halloween, convinced that his sincerity will be rewarded by a visit from the Great Pumpkin.

I didn't think that anyone was seriously predicting the "Year of the Linux Desktop" anymore, which ran its course as a failed prediction about five years ago, and became tiresome even as a joke a couple years after that.

The flat line that Adobe cited in giving up on AIR for Linux tells the story of Desktop Linux's stagnation over the last few years pretty succinctly, and there were plenty of recessionary years in the last decade that should already have provided ample opportunity for cost-conscious users to switch. Hasn't happened, and there is no plausible reason to think it will now.

It's unfortunate that Schwartz's blog is gone, and that ZDNet didn't drill down a little more carefully to check dates on things. I was working with Sun on the java.net site at the time, through a contract with O'Reilly. As I recall, the story is actually somewhat worse. The rumor mill reported that Android would be using Java, and Schwartz went off half-cocked and praised Google for the "Java/Linux platform". Writing for java.net, I said "But I didn't end up putting this on the front page, because I just couldn't source the Java angle well enough (no offense, Jonathan, but you did say ZFS would be on Leopard...)." (that's the current editor's headshot on the page, not me, BTW).

Not too much later, Google laid out the details of Android, including the Dalvik VM, which meant that Google was only using Java the language (which it didn't have to license) and not Java the VM (which it would have had to). What I heard through the back channel was that Sun was pissed, believing it had been stabbed in the back. This made for a very awkward scene at Sun's mobile-focused "ME Developer Days" a few months later in January 2008: the Sun people had clearly been told to not talk about Android or acknowledge it in any way, which led of a few awkward moments of dancing around the elephant in the room. The first night of the conference, the Java Posse stopped by for dinner, and upon seeing Dick Wall (who at that time worked at Google), the first thing I said to him was "man, are they pissed at you guys."

Relevant dates and links:

• November 5, 2007 - Google announces Android, doesn't mention Java
• November 5, 2007 - Later that day, Schwartz posts blog praising Android as "Java/Linux platform"
• November 12, 2007 - First release of Android source, Dalvik revealed. This blog, written that day, has a pretty good explanation of the fast one Google pulled on Sun. "How did Google manage to get Sun to license off a platform that could very well kill their own? Turns out, they didn’t: their move was even smarter than Sun’s."

Anyways, assuming my recollection of events and this timeline is accurate, Schwartz's blog should not be taken as an indication that Sun knew about and approved what Google was doing with Android. What it does prove is what a lot of people knew then but wouldn't say: Schwartz was a clueless loud-mouthed buffoon who happily fiddled away on his blog as SUNW burned.