This is clearly a stupid claim for Fox to make,and i don't see them getting this tech banned any time soon.

I worry a little bit about what it will lead to though. TV companies aren't going to give up and go home, and businesses still want to advertise crap to us. I foresee a near future where all these ads will just get moved into "banners" (or similar) and displayed/overlaid *during* the show (this may happen at the source as part of the broadcast, or by the TV - youtube style). At this point we'll probably wish all we had ad-breaks back...

While I agree with the point you're trying to make(that we should question our sources), I get pretty much the same results for your query on bing and google. Any summaries that indicate a favourite, pretty much all favour chrome (this is true on both bing and google, and isn't all that suprising if recent changes in market share are anything to go by)

I don't see any evidence of deliberate bias here.

Interestingly, the most obvious difference is that the top entry on Bing, is a paid ad for IE9.

Google pretty much admitted it was copied - claiming it was accidental (the same guy wrote it for Oracle and later, Google). It has since been replaced. The jury - completely reasonably - found that it infringed. This is no longer in debate

The question is whether it is worth anything.

Google says no. Oracle's own expert witnesses said no. The judge - who has apparently revealed he is a programmer - says no. Oracle are arguing it's worth millions.

Someone is desperate here, and its not Google

It's also less impressive when you consider that Washington state, where MS is headquartered, produces nearly 75% of its electricity from renewable sources (hydroelectric source) anyway. In effect, MS could easily be making zero effort at all to use "green" energy, and still be able to quote impressive looking figures.

Since you're arbitrarily comparing Microsoft founders to Google CEOs (as if that was even in any way relevant to his story) it seems a little ironic you'd bring up private yachts, when Paul Allen is infamous for his own "mega yacht"

I'd like to know too. I'm always surprised (Well not really) at the number of ordinary people (ie. non professionals) who seem to have access to Photoshop (And no, not, "Elements"), then ridicule (or act bemused towards) others for using GIMP

"Soooo... you spent $500 on Photoshop... Really? Really?"

I agree GIMP objectively isn't as good (I'd love to be able to justify that $500) but at least i didn't steal it.

The list of new features looked awesome until i read this:

"GIMP 2.8 relies on a newer version of GTK+2 that unfortunately has partially broken support for graphics tablets such as Wacom. If your graphic tablet doesn't work in GIMP 2.8 as it should, we recommend downgrading to 2.6 until we release GIMP 3.0 that relies on GTK+3 which has fully functional support for advanced input devices."

Shouldn't reliable graphics tablet support for image editing software be a huge priority? If broken tablet support is merely a footnote, who exactly are they aiming this software at? Because its apparently not graphics designers...

I don't want to sound negative, because the software is free, and its actually pretty good, and no, i don't have time to go fix the bugs myself, so i shouldn't complain. It just seems that there's constantly some major issue that seriously decreases its usefulness. Oh well, 2.6 it is then (though tablet support in 2.6 is flaky too - at least on windows)

But seriously when? At what point will governments wake up and realize that the patent system is paralyzing entire industries? How bad does it have to get? Maybe someone should set up an NPE to sue Congress, in the hope that it will wake-them-the-hell-up.

Actually, i think development tools/technologies is something that MS *is* good at (Even though, in an increasingly non-Windows dominated world, lack of portability pretty much ensures that i don't use most of them) For what it's worth, VS is still the best IDE out there (imho).

But none of that matters to consumers who just see Windows, Office, and a string of underwhelming products like Zune, Kin, Bing, and IE.

I was simply reiterating the point that MS, as a brand, doesn't appeal to consumers, so MS products aimed at those same consumers, have little chance of success.

I think your post might be seen as unnecessarily anti-microsoft, but i agree with much of what you wrote.

Microsoft as a brand isn't "cool" - probably never will be (Again? was it ever?). Just look at Apple for seeing how valuable this can be.

I suspect that, even if most "regular" people aren't actively anti-MS, then at the very least they just don't care. The only MS product i see people getting excited about is Xbox. Google and Apple release new things all the time, and people are interested to see what they'll do next. MS? Err... Office2013 anyone?

The nerdy, tech crowd (who's opinions are all over the web) generally have little goodwill left for MS. Rightly or wrongly, there *is* anti-MS sentiment. Some may think this is stupid, but its common.

I think this combination of factors is why MS has pretty much failed spectacularly at every consumer directed product released in recent history (XBox360 excluded, though even that may be down to, in large part, Sony's own failings with Playstation)

NDK was certainly usable long before 2.3 - it was just a pain (and still is, because you still really need to support 2.2).

I can't say for certain which games use the NDK and which don't, but as someone who has ported iphone games (hey, go buy MiniSquadron !!!), i'd say a straight C++ port is much more likely than anything based on HTML5 (Even using the NDK, android phone graphics performance is generally poor compared to equivalent iphone models. Relying on HTML5 , i suspect performance for anything mildly complex would be terrible)

I disagree. Most serious game development *is* done in C++. Even on iOS (where ObjC is mainly used to interact with the OS ). I also disagree that C++ is not the "recommended language of development" - Neither Apple nor Google discourage it (though you could argue that they initially did) and seem to have pretty much accepted that its not going away for game dev.

Even with liberal use of ObjC in an iphone game, a port to Android is still achievable with a modest amount of effort (methodically going through the code and replacing all the ObjC with plain C++). A WP port requires almost a full rewrite, and maintaining a new version of your codebase. Given the low install base, that's almost always just not worth the effort.

I do agree (based on my own experience) that iOS devs do have a tendency to rely on propriety iOS APIs (yes, ObjC) in cases where there are plenty of open source C/C++ alternatives available (random example - loading .png files). If i was to put my conspiracy theory hat on, i might even suggest that Apple is providing a lot of "useful" functionality through its own (incompatible) apis in attempt to make ports more difficult. With a little care though, a cross platform game that can run on Win32, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux, requires very little in the way of platform-specific changes. WP on the other hand is just, well... incompatible.

The developers who might be won over to WP over are those who already doing XNA stuff for Xbox live, and/or pc, but this is a limited group. Seasoned game programmers(Console/PC) have spent years programming in C/C++ and are unlikely to want to make the switch. To me (As one of those seasoned devs) even Blackberry's new QNX based platform is way more attractive than WP. I don't know *any* developers who are doing WP ports who weren't paid by MS to do them (And even then, they subcontract the work out)

With regard to you comment about porting android java apps, i think this is a more complex issue than you suggest. Apps that use the Android Java apis extensively are actually much more tied to Android (UI, OS) than those that are built in C++ (its pretty much unavoidable if you do anything remotely useful with UI). To port them you'd need to implement a good chunk of Android on windows phone. Even then you'd end up with an ugly android UI, looking very out of place as part of your WP experience (and given that how pretty it is, is their #1 (only?) selling point, I'm pretty sure MS doesn't want this!).

In summary, I think MS have made a huge mistake - what they've done *might* have made sense if they were a market leader (like iOS), but with their current tiny market share, having such huge barriers for development is almost suicidal.

IMHO, the Microsoft/Windows brand pretty much ensures no one wants a windows phone. Its about as cool as MS Word. ie. not very. In fact, i think this is why microsoft pretty much universally struggles with new markets.

Blackberry, on the other hand still has some "street cred" and if RIM can make a polished/quality product and get enough developers/apps on board (big IFs!) then they might still have a chance of retaining some market share.

Having a market with 10000000 android apps is highly overrated (in my opinion) since 99.999% of them are throwaway garbage. Instead they need solid core 3rd party apps, and right now they are lacking in that area. Where are Netflix, Kindle reader, IMDB etc (Ok, this is my bias of what a core app is, but i get the impression they are lacking across the board). If these companies don't want to port to BB10, then they should pay them enough so they do! Yeah, it'll cost a lot, but whats the alternative?

RIM are making a push to get developers to port apps (from android/iphone) and this seems, in principle, like a good strategy. MS on the other hand, have made some very dubious decisions in regard to development tools/languages that pretty much force (iphone, android) developers to rewrite entire applications. This is doing them no favors (other than cutting down on shovelware). Sorry MS, my apps use C++ and that works just fine on iphone, android, and blackberry - i'm not even considering porting hundreds of thousands of lines of code to C#, and i doubt i'm alone in having that viewpoint.