Rubénerd!

Android may overwhelmingly be the target for malware in the mobile space, but as usual the media have got the details wrong!

Kyubey has the Android logo's eyes and ears!

McAfee's Threat Report for the second quarter of 2011 (PDF link) listed iOS as having no malware, and Android as having an order of magnitude more malware than any other platform. Understandably, the media have pounced on the latter... well, not as much as they would have if it were iOS, but still.

While I'm not an Android fan, the problem here isn't the OS but the OEMs that distribute it. It can be an unclear distinction for most consumers who just see "phones" (which is why the whole iOS versus Android debate is silly) but it's important.

While tech savvy folk would presumably prefer an unmodified copy of Android installed on their phones (the Microsoft Signature Experience, but for Google), their third party PlaysForSure hardware manufacturers have a vested interest in differentiating their products from the competition. This may come in the form of alternative user interfaces, additional applications, and/or modified defaults and branding... all of which would need to be thoroughly tested for compatibility with any Android updates.

They say Branding, she's a fine girl...

Unlike vertically integrated manufacturers like Apple and RIM that can push updates to all compatible devices as soon as they're made available, official Android updates have to be made available by these manufacturers, some of which are better Android citizens than others.

This middle man approach unavoidably introduces a delay, which is why a startling percentage of Android devices are still running older versions of the OS. It's not Google's fault, or the fault of consumers.

This potentially may have been one of the reasons why Google bought Motorola: by being the manufacturer they could ensure the latest software updates are always made available for their devices, and in a quick and timely fashion. They have experience with pushing regular updates with Google Chrome, this would allow them to do this on mobile hardware as well.

Given the closed direction of Android they've started with Honeycomb, it could be another reason for OEMs to worry.

Goodbye HP, Sorry you don't want to be in PCs anymore..But we do more than ever. How would you say goodbye to HP? ~ Michael Dell

The same way you were ready to say goodbye to Apple? That company that has enough cash to buy yours now? Don't get too comfortable Mr Dell.

When I went to bed last night, HP were still making computers and webOS devices. A lot can happen in one night!

Then rhymes with "Gwen"

See what I did there?

I don't know exactly when this started, but lately I've prefaced most of my blog posts with rambling bouts of nostalgia punctured with lame attempts at humour, then signed off with a submissive "but I digress" before launching into the meat of the matter. This post will be no different.

My first experience with HP was a year before I got my first iMac DV in the late 1990s. The 200MHz Pentium MMX machine we'd built at Funan Centre was starting to show its age (though ironically it's outlasted ever other machine I've ever built and still runs even now!) and we were on the lookout for something new. Out of the blue at COMEX in Singapore, HP were having a sale on the Brio BAx line of business desktops, and we snagged one.

Compared to the ugly, overly plastic boxes the Pavilion desktops came in, the Brio line looked rather smart with its simple lines and slight curves at the front. The machine had a blazingly fast 450MHz Pentium III (or "Pentium !!!" if you took their marketing seriously), a 8.4GB Seagate hard drive and 128MiB of PC133 memory. Because it was technically a business machine it only had onboard graphics, but it was all someone like me needed, particularly when I spent most of my time in an editor hacking away at my latest favourite programming language and only briefly stopping for some SimCity 3000.

Cooler still was what came with it. It happened to be the first computer I owned that came with a CD burner, and a gigantically massive 17" display instead of the crusty 14.5 I'd been using as a loaner from our original 486 machine from 1991! It was also a fateful machine in that it was the first one I tried Red Hat Linux on back in the day, but that's for another post :).

The only other piece of HP hardware I had from that time was a so-called "handheld PC" Given I was still a kid, my dad didn't trust that I wouldn't drop a laptop, so he bought me this little HP 620LX Windows CE 2.0 device for my birthday one year. For family trips overseas where we'd be away from my beloved desktop, this little machine let me keep programming and tinkering :). As of today, aside from a vertical cyan coloured stripe across one side of the screen, it still works!

Today rhymes with "away"

So now we finally come back to the present. Hewlett Packard, one of the original icons of technoligical innovation and progress, has had a troubled recent history. Carly Fiorina's acquisition of Compaq gave them the server hardware and expertise they wanted, but also a legacy of race to to the bottom hardware.

In trying to be Dell, they only hastened the demise of their personal computer unit. Their "The Computer is Personal Again" campaign was embarrassing, couldn't shake off their reputation for being a business company, and fell on deaf ears as creative professionals and those really looking for Something Different fled to Apple.

On the mobile side, their acquisition of the troubled Palm didn't reverse their fortunes either. webOS, in my opinion the finest mobile operating system on the market today, was doomed from the start by slow hardware, face-palmingly poor marketing and a strategic position that none of us understood. It wasn't much cheaper than the also vertically integrated iPhone, didn't offer the breadth of devices of Android, and was only sold in a few select markets.

While for my own personal reasons I'm disappointed in the latter, from a business perspective it makes sense for HP to do this. Junky desktops and laptops simply aren't profitable anymore, and their webOS devices always seemed like an odd fit for an enterprise company who's only other consumer focused devices were high end calculators.

I'll be interested to see where they go from here. I suggest they do some Invent-ing.

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to mirror their site with httrack. I'm a sucker for nostalgia, not that you'd know.

So we all know Android isn't as open as claimed, but could it even be in violation of the GPL? Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents sides with the SFC and the SFLC and thinks it is; I defer to his expertise.

I'm continuously baffled by just how readily so many F/OSS advocates line up to defend Android, even as Google develops it in a cathedral, flips on their definition of open, closes the code to all but select hardware partners, the sues Microsoft for disclosure of this open code. To me, an OS being misrepresented as free and/or open source is far more damaging to the F/OSS community cause than one that isn't.

If Apple used GPL code in the iOS kernel then did this, it'd cause more than a few heart attacks. As I asked back in the days of Antennagate, why the double standard?

In any event, Google owes the F/OSS community an apology and some action. They're a good company and I'm confident they can correct these problems, if they want to.

After months of silence, Apple Australia managing director Tony King has finally come out and commented on why Australians pay significantly more for Apple products and media on the iTunes store than our friends in the US. Which is to say, he didn't say much!

(Photo of Kallen Stadtfeld holding an Australian credit card application form by... me!)

"It's even worse than it appears."

I can only speak from my own experience, but all electronics in Australia are vastly overpriced. Worse still, optical equipment is so laughably expensive I would never buy any of it here. Last time I checked at a mass market camera chain, my beloved but ageing D60 was the same price as the much higher end D90 was in Singapore, and the markup on lenses is even worse.

Unfortunately, Apple is emblematic of a much larger trend of tech companies seeking to exploit Australian consumers, for one simple reason: they can.

I haven't lived back here long enough to comment on the politics, but it sure is hard to justify Australia's geographic isolation and higher taxes as being the reasons for these steep prices, particularly for online stores that sell digital downloads. The numbers don't add up, and those who claim they do are being disingenuous at best.

It's taking far longer than I thought it would, but the internet is finally helping the public to cast a light on these market practices, to wake up as it were. Wow, two convoluted metaphors in one sentence, forgive me. The point is, people are seeing prices overseas, converting into Australian Dollars, seeing what's charged locally, and asking why. Unsatisfied with the excuses given by folks like Jerry Harvey and his GST red herring, and turn to buying material online.

With apologies to Garcia and Hunter

For the most part I'm a liberal (in the American sense) but unfortunately I don't see the ACCC regulating these industries as being a solution, for two reasons. One, whenever you involve money directly, as is the case with pricing, there are enough loopholes that these companies would quickly make a farce of any such regulation. Two, every industry from publishing to electronics is doing this, for their own reasons. This is a structural problem with our economy.

Oh well, as long as I can bypass this and buy stuff overseas there won't be a problem.

Right.

Right?

Coming to you live from the Mac tables on the ground floor computer lab in UTS building 10, it's time for another instalment of everyone's favourite blog post series of which there is only one post: Blogging from University! Today's post, the Mac tables on the ground floor computer lab in UTS building 10.

Was as far as I got, rest written on the train

I'm a people watcher. Not in the stalkerish way that creeps victims out and poses quite the legal challenge when you're caught doing so, but on occasion I've been known to observe people as they go about their daily lives while I'm in a coffee shop or similar locale with my laptop.

So picture this if you will, or if you dare. Dare is a brand of coffee milk drink in Australia, and though its tastiness falls short of the invincibly amazing Farmers Union Iced Coffee of which I got thoroughly addicted when in Adelaide, Dare is rather good.

I had just finished one of my evening classes when I decided to check my email on a computer terminal. I had yet to configure my iTelephone with the [horrid] Microsoft Exchange email system UTS provided, and I preferred not setting up forwarding as I wanted sent email to originate from UTS rather than a disposable account. I'd also been informed from various lecturers that they -- and the spam filters -- place a higher priority on incoming messages from .edu accounts, particularly those from UTS. But I digress.

A mix tapier

Strolling onto the ground floor computer pool in UTS building ten, I noticed bank after bank of plastic fantastic HPs or Dells or whatever they were, complete with 15 inch TFT displays. Most were vacant, so I had no problem finding a machine to use.

Suddenly, as I'd just logged into Windows 7 Extreme or whatever the version was, I noticed a row of shiny new iMacs. And they weren't just iMacs, they were the monsters with the 27 inch IPS displays that by themselves likely havd more resolution than all my displays at home combined, minus their plastic bezels. I rebooted the Windows 7 machine that had taken an age to load the desktop, and made my way over.

The machine accepted my credentials and presented me with the desktop in no time, and they even had Firefox preloaded on the dock ready for my use. It almost seemed criminal to use such an amazing display to read email!

It was then I observed some interesting behavour. Despite the computer lab having an entire row of these shiny 27 inch iMacs, the few people who were still there were hunched over their Dell or HP (or whatever they were) plastic fantastic towers on the other side of the room, complete with their 15 inch TFT displays and long Windows 7 boot times.

The curse of "good enough"

Clearly, while Apple continues to make strides in market and mindshare, more people still feel more comfortable on Windows, so much so that they'd rather use a slow machine with a tiny screen than a clearly superior piece of hardware. I don't mean for that to sound fanboy-ish, but even a Windows aficionado would be hard pressed to claim a budget Pentium tower compares to a current iMac.

A friend from one of my classes put forward the theory that those who spend multiple hours in computer labs at university are more likely to have less disposable income, and were probably more likely raised on cheap Windows boxes. Another chided that they had to use Windows because Macs can't run the right software, a claim I found harder to believe given most of the people were merely using Firefox in that computer lab late at night.

I suppose that while generally people will take the time to learn a new system if they can see tangible benefits (Mac, Linux, so on), most are still perfectly fine with whatever version of Windows they happen to be using. I suppose it's akin to those who's idea of coffee is Nescafé; if you've never had real coffee and are comfortable with your dehydrated granulated mediocrity, more power to you.

And hey, it has its benefits... it may be more likely those iMacs are free again in the future ^_^.

“Our vision for Android is unchanged and Google remains firmly committed to Android as an open platform and a vibrant open source community,” Android head honcho Andy Rubin said in a statement. ~ Wired

Not content with just copying the iPhone UI, now Google is trying their hand at generating their own reality distortion field. It's open, darn it!

Fortunately there are still enough people willing to rush to their defence. ;)

The manufacturer of my second mobile phone in primary school being bought by my third search engine. Pardon the French, what a mindf*ck!

Legal mumbo jumbo

With the acquisition of Motorola Mobility -- the company that was spun off from Motorola because spinoffs are always as successful as they are on television -- Google has now officially entered the mobile hardware game.

Of course, with all the marketing hype swept to the side, we know why Google did this: for the patents. Clearly still smarting from declining a share of the Nortel patent portfolio then complaining about it in a rather sorry way, they're now out on the offensive. If you want to sue them for the patents they're violating, they can sue you back!

For a blog of nerdish interests I've talked for far too long about legal nonsense for a while now though, so instead I'd rather talk about the tech itself.

Talking about the tech itself

As I said above, this acquisition (I always though that'd be a great name for a ship) is Google's first move into the hardware business for their handsets. While it may be a further step backwards in their alleged openness, it seems like it was a logical business decision.

In response to the fragmentation and mixed user interface experiences their hardware partners were deploying in order to differentiate their products from every other Android device, Google entered the game with Google branded phones. These reference implementations, dubbed the Microsoft Signature Experience, allowed Google to claim handset makers were free to implement Android however they saw fit, but that there was a Right Way To Do It.™ Namely, that they should use Android exactly as is.

With a hardware division under their wing now, it seems entirely possible Google will develop their own vertically integrated device.

While the likes of HTC are welcoming the move officially, you've got to think their rhetoric about protection from patents will soon be overshadowed by fear. I mean, as a consumer why would you get a Google phone from someone other than Google, particularly given Google develops most of Android in house in an Eric S. Raymond Cathedral and has access to large swaths of closed Android source code they can use to their competitive advantage.

Needless to say, very interesting developments. And feel free to call them Motoroogle too; I just came up with it in my head but I'm sure I haven't been the first to.

I intended to do a week of these, but so far I've only talked about three technologies I couldn't live without! Maybe its an "every second day" thing.

Does that scene count as anime fanservice?

At the risk of boring my regular readers with the same repeated story, despite being born in Melbourne and Sydney respectfully, my sister and I went to school in Singapore. In the Lion City (or Gitmo Nation Chilli Crab for you No Agenda folk), the humidity is stubbornly high, and the temperature follows a predictable 30 degree pattern during the day, and around 24 at night. There's a reference to Jack Bauer losing his cool there somewhere.

For those not acclimatised to such weather (and famously, even for the father of the country himself), air conditioners provide a much needed reprieve, though their prohibitively steep running costs in a city state which already distributes expensive electricity means those of us who can take the heat a little better look for alternatives.

The solution is the humble house fan. Simple in construction, lightweight and affordable, the house fan is a wonder of engineering. They contain the cooling awesomeness of a ducted fan, with the familiar convenience of a box... if its a box fan of course.

Be still, my sore arms

As compared to the manual labour involved in operating a traditional fan (or a crude fan replacement device such as a board) most house fans feature a power cable, and are equipped with dials or buttons to control speed, rather than more rapid arm movement. This can be most beneficial, as it means one doesn't need to resort to fanning others either.

Interestingly enough, they also feature on their user interfaces the ability to set a timer for the device to shut off after a predetermined length of time, mostly to satisfy the specific concerns Koreans have over fan death:

Fan death is a widely held belief prevailing in South Korea that an electric fan left running overnight in a closed room can cause the death of those inside. Fans sold in Korea are equipped with a timer switch that turns them off after a set number of minutes, which users are frequently urged to set when going to sleep with a fan on.

For me though, the wondrous house fan isn't just about cooling me down and preventing my death in the process, but to calm me down. Little Ruben got used to the gentle, reassuring sound of house fans growing up, and they're enough to put him to sleep even now. Surprisingly, so ingrained is this association with fans and sleep, he even needs one running in his room in the dead of winter, much as other people need teddy bears or their childhood blankets. Now he just has to wonder why such a discussion lead him to speak in the third person.

House Fans in Challenging Times

Unfortunately, the humble house fan is under threat on several levels, ranging from changing attitudes to scientific folk who like to point things out.

It has been raised in several circles (see what I did there?) that despite their advertised function, fans actually posses no cooling power whatsoever. While they do help with evaporation which may cool the user of a fan down temporarily, they are incapable of cooling rooms down themselves unless they're positioned in such a way as to draw cool air in from another source. In the heat of summer, this could only come from a large block of ice or an air conditioner, which would be messy and expensive respectfully.

In Singapore and increasingly Australia, air conditioners have also started to permeate through society more pervasively, so much so that the writer of this entry attempted and largely failed to write a double entendre. Whether this is an attempt by the Carriers and Daikins of the world to spin fan manufacturers out of business is something only a cool financial advisor could answer, as he twirls from a fixed point.

Thirdly, there is a concerted effort to specifically have my beloved "box fan" made redundant with the introduction of differing shapes for the fan housing. The circular fans with bases so popular at the turn of the century are enjoying a comeback, with the durable and reliable metal being replaced by a flexible, crude oil derived substance that's lighter and breakable enough to ensure their manufacturers are able to continue to sell units to the same customers.

In any event, the house fan to me is a gloriously wonderful piece of advanced technology, and I simply couldn't live without it. Wait, weren't these posts all supposed to have a heading asking if I could live without the technological device in question?

Could you live without house fans?

The house fan to me is a gloriously wonderful piece of advanced technology, and I simply couldn't live without it.

Plenty of people on Twitter today were sharing a link to this story from John C. Dvorak in 2007 that was just too good to pass up ;).

The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.

There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive. Even in the business where it is a clear pioneer, the personal computer, it had to compete with Microsoft and can only sustain a 5% market share.

Imagine if John had been right and Apple ceased development after the first failed iPhone. Spare a thought for Android developers, who would be left for them to copy off? Microsoft? Would we all be using Kin-like devices?