Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Social Part May Be Outdated Soon

Image representing Friendster as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase

It is, or will be pretty soon, arguable that Facebook has peaked. Yet many phones designed in the last two years have Facebook as a central part of their strategy. Sure they include Twitter functionality as well, and maybe other sites as well, but Facebook is always at the top of the list. But as we see, the popularity of sites changes. Friendster peaked, Orkut peaked, so many were hot and peaked and then all their users moved on.

It takes a year or more to design a good phone interface, and in that time the hot site your phone is trying to be a conduit for could be out of favor. There goes your fashionable phone -- unless you commit to a design that allows multiple conduits and either letting 3d parties develop these conduits for the new hot sites or having an in-house team that keeps building them.

Meanwhile, it took a number of tries to configure my wireless access point in my reception to share the networking it receives from my office wirless LAN over its single ethernet jack so I could connect my television. Yes, my new television wants to be on the Internet, not something I would thought I would ever say 10 years ago. It took me an hour to find out between all the manufacturers how this should be properly done. How do people without degrees in Computer Science do this? Still, I can now display my flickr stream as a slideshow.

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

HTML5 Will Save Us Again

Genius Mike: Antivirus Firm Warns of New Mac OS X Spyware Application
no click
point to be made: how much malware was enabled on the Win side simply because of the gaping functionality holes in Windows?

FJ!!: and security holes

Genius Mike: how many times in your life have you had to reach for an unzipper, un-rarrer, media player, or more?

FJ!!: UNIX is really gonna be tested now

Genius Mike: my understanding is that unix has already been sodomized and left for dead
Windows has made massive strides
And OS X needs the most work of them all.

FJ!!: UNIX is on your desktop right now
at least the security model

Genius Mike: ja

FJ!!: and that will be tested

Genius Mike: the services will be tested, and the user-gateway (passwords, windows annoyer or whatever it's called)

FJ!! : well, yes that coding will
but UNIX has been working for a while on not letting memory and pointer errors escalate

Genius Mike: yes, and so has Windows
Windows 7 is nearing state-of-the-art

FJ!!: kernel wise?

Genius Mike: yes, and library scrambling
and address scrambling
and stack protection
and so forth.

FJ!!: scrambling seems like such a kludge

Genius Mike: The man who said flashless, javascriptless IE8 on Win7 was the most secure browsing platform wasn't lying
Every barrier helps.

FJ!!: wonder how the NSA plays bejeweled then

Genius Mike: HTML5! the savior of the universe!
How'd you cure your herpes? HTML5!
Who colored the moon taupe? HTML5!
HTML5 is a box of tinctures sold out of a gypsy wagon

FJ!!: I think it made Steve Guttenberg a star too

Genius Mike: :]

FJ!!: I am so posting this on TST