And it will remain in a crippled state. The minimum spec for Android Honeycomb is a dualcore Tegra 2 (A9) chip. The Nook has a single core A8 chip.

Which makes the title:

And since it makes no sense for the Nook to jump to a more expensive dual-core processor, it means we now have four mobile OS variations from Google:

1) Chrome OS
2) Android 2.x for Phones
3) Android 2.x for Tablets
4) Android 3.x Honeycomb

Then add HTC, Motorola, Samsung and DELL slapping incompatible UI and extensions on top of each of those offers.

The way it's going, Google fragmenting their OS solutions will soon be a drinking game.

Ok, that's wrong, and despite multiple accounts of being corrected, people here keep perpetuating this myth. They're not going to revisit it. The decision is final.

MPEG LA's defines non-free view as "AVC video sold to end users for a fee on a title or subscription basis". So it's very simple: can you view the entire video without being required to purchase it? It's free. If you need to buy it/rent it/subscribe for it, it's not free. Having ads or merchandise or other indirect profit models around or over or in the video is irrelevant.

Right, and who gets to decide what is good here?

1) A wide consortium of companies working together on creating H.264, academia, guided by respected standards organisations: ISO, IEC, Apple, DAEWOO, Dolby Labs, France Telecom, Fraunhofer, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Philips, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Bosch, Samsung, Sharp, Siemens, Sony, Ericsson, Columbia University, Toshiba and more...

2) Google. Which bought some small company making codecs.

And yet, the automatic assumption is Google has singlehandedly pulled a rabbit out of their hat, because all some people need to know is that it's "free", and may any other annoying details and facts be ignored.

On one side, we have H.264 designed with the feedback of a wide consortium of experts, companies and respected standardization organisations, and very clear and apt licensing rules.

On the other side, Google and their technically inferior, buggy H.264 clone with an untold number of IP violations. But don't take just my word for it.

The above clarifications renders this remark baseless. The problem in this debate is some people prefer to arm themselves with an ideology fueled narrative and a set of outdated or outright wrong talking points about supposed "bait and switch" threats and preserving "freedom", and don't bother to even check what they're talking about.

"David After Dentist" is served as H.264 right now and tens of millions of people have seen that H.264 by now, in their browsers, smartphones and so on. Today.

How much did little David pay? Nothing. First, MPEG LA has never, and has pledged to never in the future charge for serving free of charge H.264 content over the web. That includes sites with ads like YouTube. Second, little David would never even dream to serve the traffic of millions of video views online for free, even with WebM. Serving a video to millions of people costs money. In fact it costs more than the money YouTube spent to encode that video to H.264 using their officially licensed encoder. But YouTube covers both costs, so to David, it's his free speech, free as in beer, in H.264.

Try to reconcile that with your scary picture of the future with H.264.

I'm not biased against Google, I'm biased against their poor choices of late, primarily because they seem like poor choices. And maybe slightly desperate.

May I remind you the "reality of the situation" is yet about to happen. I know that from the point of view on Slashdot, every next year is the Year of the Linux on the Desktop, and so on, but although the future of WebM seems so simple and clear to you, I wouldn't call any bets yet if I were you.

I'm trying to point out that Google is climbing steeper and stepper hills lately, so I believe the odds are against them. They might just as well pull a rabbit out of their collective hats, but we're yet to see that.

You guys cheer, but for Google, this is only a part of a bigger game: the platform battle. If Google loses the platform users access them through, which is currently mostly desktop browsing, their core business: ads (with search) may fizzle out very quickly.

Hence why their hurried entering into markets that are quite foreign to them, such as mobile (Android), browsers (Chrome) and, somehow, also video codecs (WebM). With their politically clumsy attempts at hedging bets that keep the platform available to them, they have managed to piss off all of their former corporate pals at Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, MPEG LA etc. etc.

I know the apparent "openness" of their choices makes some of you guys feel warm and fuzzy, but make no mistake: no one else is amused. Google has been singled out by the big platform keepers for extermination: Google has to throw everything in this battle and win the platform, because if they lose to their former buddies, it's over.

Check this blurb:

"Federal air security officials said the initial error that led to scrutiny of the Massachusetts Democrat should not have happened even though they recognize that the no-fly list is imperfect. But privately they acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed."

How do you avoid being embarrassed again? You white-list the people who have enough power, visibility or popularity to be sufficiently noticeable.

When the small people are encumbered, no one in the TSA is embarrassed. They're fine with it.

They use the cheap mass produced screens already used in portable DVD players. This is why many of those 7 inch tablets are also 16:9 and not 4:3, which makes more sense.

You know actually, in computers, we call these "pointers" or "references" ;)

I agree with your general point, however.

Quite right, and described here by the Abstraction Inversion antipattern.

Which is to say, it's nothing specific to a brain, but a common occurrence in systems of any kind, including computers (quick, multiply 357 * 289 on your Wii... no, going to the browser and asking Google doesn't count).

People can learn methods to do fast math, and this guy (who specifically points out he's not mentally 'different') has books that teach you his methods.

The fact the article's author appears surpised at the notion we can't outright address a set of neurons in order to perform algebra is probably a clear sign that the article is targeted at the less-than-informed-and-easily-impressed general public. The generic references to "some scientists", "psychologists think" and "we have brain traffic jams" with no particular reference or support doesn't help either.

I'd like to think people who deal with technology are rational, so if in your dealings with Oracle you have learned of some objective reason why people should avoid OpenOffice.org now, I believe you should share it, if your contract allows.

If there's no objective reason, then quite simply keep using OpenOffice.org and keep an eye on the situation between Oracle and LibreOffice.org.

In our daily lives we use the services of companies that have wronged us by means of poor policy, or unprofessional employees, but if we took a hard stance every single time and dropped everything, even at no clear alternative, society would not last for long.

If you live in US, did you stop using oil fuel and oil based products (i.e. basically almost everything around you) when the BP oil spill happened? I guess not.

Don't confuse "uses" with "has".

When Nokia ships a phone with customized Android, their money/time investment into it is magnitudes lower than that of creating another platform from scratch (relatively speaking).

Although, you reveal another problem of the industry, which is treating the OS just some nuisance they need in order to peddle their low-margin hardware, with no regards for consistency, quality, or long-term effects.

It's why smartphones, tablets and PDA were dying as concepts, before Apple came and injected enough hype back into them so Nokia, HTC etc. start trying again.

To me this illustrates that Nokia is not aware of the 80/20 rule and has no focused coherent strategy for their OS platform.

At the same time as Nokia's competitors are hard at work proving the world needs only one smartphone platform, and it's their one platform, Nokia is one company making two platforms...

Tech-inclined people like to complain how their non-technical bosses are easily swayed into bad tech choices.

It seems tech people as just as easily swayed into silly conclusions by fact-free ideology and hearsay.

To me, this article defines a very good future for Java, to both those using the open JDK, and those needing more in the enterprise. I'm sure once the echo chamber gets tired of their "Oracle is evil" chant, they'll figure out they've spent all this time screaming wolf over nothing.

A snippet out mod_pagespeed's "rewrite CSS" filter:

"CSS minification is considered moderate risk. Specifically, there is an outstanding bug that the CSS parser can silently lose data on malformed CSS. This only applies to malformed CSS or CSS that uses proprietary extensions. All known examples have been fixed, but there may be more examples not discovered yet. Without this the risk would be low. Some JavaScript code depends upon the exact URLs of resources. When we minify CSS we will change the leaf name of the file (although leave it in the same directory). This could break such JavaScript."

Yet their own examples show other risks, as they rewrite CSS selectors from longer selectors to completely different short selectors (i.e. from "div.class span" to "#id"), which even in their examples are only superficially equivalent, and not taking into account any dynamic content the page may render via JS. So any application utilizing JS would suffer a range of awkward issues, even if your code is perfectly valid.

Talking about valid code, one of their other filters:

"The quote removal filter eliminates unnecessary quotation marks (either "" or '') from HTML attributes. While required by the various HTML specifications, browsers permit their omission when the value of an attribute is composed of a certain subset of characters (alphanumerics and some punctuation characters)."

The rest is predictable and of little use: cache headers, image compression, JS minification, CSS/JS outlining/inlining, whitespace collapsing, and removing attributes that specify defaults. Those are all basic and low yield optimizations that any web developer would, for the most part, have done in his original source to begin with.

Unfortunately Google's expertise in searching doesn't automatically transfer into other areas, and this clumsy tool, which at best does little, and at worst produces broken code, is definitely one of their weaker efforts.

If Cotendo intends to force this option on their users without an opt-in (the press release doesn't clearly say), then that's one distribution network I'm definitely not using.