Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.

These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?

Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.

This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.

That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.

Only in the Bush era could a treasury-looting boondoggle this bad actually go all the way to implementation.

These machines can be defeated by any illiterate petty criminal. Hello... body cavities?

Every actually respectable expert is on record against them, from Bruce Schneier to El Al's former head of security.

This is not just garden variety incompetence. The program was so wildly and thoroughly stupid that it goes beyond negligence into prima facie malicious intent. The bigs from the vendors and the feds on the procurement side should see prison on the grounds of corruption alone. It's no different than selling the army a billion dollars worth of non-working guns or vehicles to pocket the profits. God willing, someday we'll watch the trials on CSpan.

That's leaving aside the laugh-till-you-cry repugnant aspects of what they actually did - which is, let's not sugar coat it, take nude photographs of thousands and thousands of children.

Like Palm, these people squandered a multi-year lead. They had a lock on a wonderful customer base and supplied the dominant smartphone-precursor device to the world, and failed to follow up on through an inability to execute. What happened to the original scrappy, farsighted RIM, that created the Blackberry platform to begin with? Gone - eaten up in the ugly process of becoming a large incumbent business. Now they live on inertia, and their management can't execute their way out of a paper bag. An old story, and a common one.

It has been obvious for many months that RIM was a dead letter - not just behind in the race but lapped many times by multiple competitors. I mean, the Playbook? Really? If you weren't short RIM, sue your broker.

These distinctions, while quite valid in their context, are irrelevant to the creators of alternative platforms that take a holistic approach to developer productivity and capability. Android is a platform that is composed of languages, APIs and tools that work extremely well together as a coherent whole, benefiting from synergies that can only occur as each part is made to fit with the others. HTML5 is a sloppy mess that is half attempts at incremental evolution by pragmatists who want to offer rich client features to an already deployed web browser audience, and half accident.

700k+ smartphone OS devices sell in a day. They are already bleeding over into non-mobile form factors. Developers care about two things: what can I do and how easily can I do it? If the browser teams don't get their act together, in a few years the best answers to those questions will not involve Javascript or the DOM if the majority of users see the web browser as just another app they don't use much anymore, because it's slower, uglier, less reliable, and more complicated to use than another app, that they can find in their menu of apps, or install from a marketplace of apps.

WebOS interestingly was an attempt to leapfrog the standards bodies and build a viable platform with Javascript/HTML/CSS. It failed, so it's up to the remaining players now if they want to keep trying.

OK, I get it. Javascript is the best client scripting language around, and you know better than Google. And "doing what an asynchronous XMLHttpRequest does" is uniquely easier in Javascript. I could give you a free education in the relative merits of Javascript versus language X, Y, or Z, but really, you're starting from too far behind intellectually for a slashdot post to help you. Not to mention, recapping a decade worth of widely known debate in the language design community is a waste of time if you won't believe it from me anyway, right? And what are the odds, if you didn't believe it from all the quarters of the internet it was already coming from? Such as, oh I don't know, just for instance, the authors of the largest, most complex, and most widely used rich-client Javascript applications?

Other languages are out there to be explored - you may find them interesting or you may hate them. But if you pick favorites more easily than you pick up new platforms, you could find yourself out in the cold when your favorites become obsolete. I leave you with that - good luck.

It is worse. Quite a bit worse than emerging alternatives. So much worse that the web could become gradually marginalized as a rich client platform if it isn't replaced. But don't take my word for it. Google has said so as well, and they know a thing or two about client-side scripting. PHP was originally quite simple in implementation, but it was purpose designed from the very beginning for its primary use to this day - a scripting and template language for dynamic website development. MySQL was directly intended for data storage - which is still all we use it for. Apache - a web server. OK, subversion tried to use it as part of their network layer, and look how that ended. :) Linux - an OS kernel with a Unix heritage. Android and iOS have been cleverly and purposefully designed to be rich client platforms - they already do more than what HTML5 hopes to achieve, and better. Companies are not making mobile web sites - they are making mobile apps, and these platforms are growing quickly enough that "mobile" is going to be a term that dates you after the end of the traditional desktop OS, when these new platforms become so ubiquitous as to erode the distinction.

Javascript and HTML clearly and obviously did not have the current rich client feature set in mind at their creation. That evolved over the many, many years. Worse, Javascript is just not the best scripting language to begin with. Even without being doctrinaire about whether certain kinds of dynamism have stood the test of time as good elements of language design, among similar scripting languages, there are just better alternatives than Netscape's mid-90's little sideline improvisation. The entire first era of Javascript involved implementations so poor, unstable, and limited that they were barely adequate to implement image rollovers. Even the most basic features that led to "Ajax" - anything resembling network IO - came years later and were pioneered by a different team at a different company - Microsoft. And it took even a few more years before anyone had the audacity to use it for i.e. Google Maps - in no small part because of how poor the platform was, and how different it was from the original intent of the creators.

Javascript is something of an accidental success. As with many languages before it, its users valiantly cope with its flaws and do their best to dress up the squalor they live in, but it's not funny for Google anymore. They have to develop, maintain, and test one of the largest JavaScript codebases in the world, and the it's-the-90's-and-I'm-high-on-cocaine-at-4am-and-it's-due-tomorrow scripting language design philosophy is not helping them. In fact the story of the last few years has been the quiet proving out of the "extra keystrokes for correctness" paradigm, from simple assertions (including "type assertions" aka good old fashioned strong typing) to unit tests to highly complex integration tests of harrowing complexity.

If I understand correctly, Google already writes much of their JavaScript in an intermediate language that adds certain features. They have long needed a compile step anyway for compression/"obfuscation" and I suspect it was a natural outgrowth of that. This appears to be another step in the evolution of that development pipeline.

There are many interesting developments brewing in the browser these days. I wish the browser guys luck, because I think have just a little longer to get their act together before the world gradually changes out from under them, and a purpose-designed, clever, far more powerful platform, such as Android or iOS, might actually start to change the web browser's position in the computing ecosystem. A modern scripting language is only part of the price of admission to staying relevant as a platform.

It starts with a few companies who "only" want to collect $5, or $10, or $35 per Android device. I suppose we can all nod our heads and agree that the mighty should be able to throw their weight around. It feels right. Who cares about the details - we're sure Linux must have stolen something. Otherwise how could it be so great? And so cheap?

But nothing stops the flow of new complaints. Do you know how many software patents there are? How many new applications per day? How many are obvious, trivial, or overly broad? Soon it will be a dozen companies collecting a Linux tax - forget merely on Android - and then it will be 30. A gold rush will ensue - get on the list of people who have to be paid off. Name your own price - the world's high tech giants will have to pay up! But, oh dear. iOS will suddenly have the exact same problem. Do you know how many patents they violate? So will Windows Phone. So will Blackberry. So will those little "learn to read" kiddie computers they sell in Toys R Us. So will everyone.

When it finally becomes more than just a few pariahs and evil actors in the tech industry who try to enforce their patents, it ends with every product having dozens and then hundreds of lawyers showing up to tax them. The only question is, how much economic damage will we do to ourselves before we finally take the obvious step and abolish software patents - which were never even allowed in the first place in Europe, India, and China. This economically pernicious barratry is so obviously stupid that it makes the US an object ridicule abroad.

The tacit policy of allowing software to be patentable reduces competition, stifles innovation, breaks healthy markets, and diverts money to billion-dollar portfolio buys instead of jobs. The only thing it reliably accomplishes is enriching lawyers - the least economically productive activity imaginable.

A lucid and trenchant analysis.

The world waits with baited breath for your solutions for increasing energy generation, food production, and water purification.

Oh and all this while we are about to run out of the millions of years of solar energy we just burned up in the form of fossil fuels.

Oh, you expected someone else to figure these things out. I see.