David Adams Archive

Financial analyst Charles Sizemore predicts that over time, a persistent Microsoft will come to not only thrive but dominate in the mobile computing space, because Apple has no "moats" to prevent customer attrition and its insistence at heavily controlling the ecosystem will drive customers away, while Google's offerings are too "shoddy." It's a bold prediction, but I suppose betting on Microsoft to be persistent and build on its strengths is a safe bet. But will persistence and flexibility be enough?

The BBC reports on a Turing scholar's recent claims that by today's standard of evidence, there's reason to doubt the commonly-held belief that the famed computing pioneer committed suicide in response to government persecution over his homosexuality. To be clear, he does not claim to have disproved the suicide theory -- only that the cyanide poisoning that killed Turing could well have been an accident caused by his careless at-home experimentation with dangerous chemicals.

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"Good news, open source enthusiasts: as they've done with pretty much every one of the Android phones and updates, Samsung has posted the open source code for the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Galaxy S II's operating system. While the update itself is only available in Europe and South Korea, any international version of the i9100 can apply it, and with the open source code ROM builders and other modders will be able to do more advanced ports and advanced ROMs."

Notorious competition law offender Microsoft has asked the EU's competition department to look into Motorola's behavior regarding patent licences vital for h.264 video. Microsoft complains that Motorola doesn't play by the usual rules and wants to decide by itself how much they want to charge for patents it owns. According to Microsoft, acceptable behavior for patent owners is to licence patens vital for industry standards at rates of single-digits-cents per device and ask for double-digits-cent amounts only for patents not necessary for implementing such standards. Since according to Microsoft's complaints at least some of the patents abused that way are related to h.264 video encoding/decoding, one has to wonder how much MPEG LA's ensurance of patent safety is now worth.

If you run a web site or service that runs afoul of US law, and that site is hosted overseas, then the US legal system doesn't have much recourse, right? Wrong. Because the .com, .net, and .org top level domains are managed by a US company, the government can come to Verisign with a court order and seize your domain, effectively shutting you down. And because of a quirk of internet history that made the US-controlled domains the de-facto standard for web sites, this is a situation that's quite possibly permanent.