*Star Trek – The Next Generation, season 5, episode 18

Like in that episode, it seems that in matters of Flash vs. Apple‘s vision of a "clean", standards conform Internet we are just as much stuck in a temporal loop as the crew of the Enterprise. Looks like time travel has finally been invented and you can have a Déjà-Vu every day if you so desire. Regardless of everybody already having thrown his views out there and a bunch of corporate types having made themselves look like utter dorks just the same, a certain Mr. Jobs, who runs another quite big garage company, couldn’t resist the temptation, so sit back, relax and enjoy the show. He’s of course right on some accounts, but then wrong on just as many others. Particularly disappointing is how he takes a claim to what he calls open standards, when in fact e.g. H.264 is just as proprietary as Flash video, was developed by a conglomerate of commercial companies and to this days has therefore licensing fees attached. It just happened to be available and quite coincidentally fit into their plans for world conquest. Generally this talk about "proprietary" or not coming from Apple always leaves a bad taste – come to think of it, most of what they do is built around a closed business model. Not that I mind – it’s their show and they decide who they let in their circus, but perhaps someone should remind them that when it comes to their own interests, they are quite defensive and actually pro-actively shut out people. This even directly relates to this Flash discussion, as only a short while ago they released libraries that allow third-party programmers to exploit certain hardware acceleration functions for decoding video, meaning that no matter how much resources Adobe had thrown into this, they would never have been able to live up to Apple‘s native routines because they couldn’t access those hardware resources. Makes you think quite a bit about who has an agenda here and why. Don’t even get me started why the companies seem to hate each other so much these days. I have no clue where it’s coming from. Probably it’s the old curse of the greedy trying to get even richer and exploiting every means at their disposal to whack their competitors. Unfortunately neither is in a position they can live without each other, as the symbiosis has gotten so deep, it would hurt both if it came to an end, so we can look forward to more weirdness in this love-hate-relationship in years to come, including CEOs, product managers and many other "suits" acting like kids battling for the shovel in a sand lot.

It’s a good thing, Apple is not in the business of producing fridges and freezers or a whole lot of people probably wouldn’t know how to keep their food cool and prevent it from spoiling. Today’s slightly evasive and shady press announcement that the iPad would be delayed by one more month here in Europe certainly leaves a lot of people quite, quite unhappy. Imagine, you’d have to pre-order a fridge and wait for it 3 months. Kind of reminds me of the times when we were living in a "socialist" country as part of the eastern block and you had to pre-order pretty much anything that was in short supply and if you were lucky, got it after a few months, but mostly only after several years on the waiting list. Anyway, I had my new fridge/ freezer combo delivered just within 3 days and it’s a real nice Liebherr. My other one was getting a bit too hungry for electricity and before ruining myself on that, I rather shell out a few Euros and get me a more efficient model. Incidentally, there’s one lesson here for Apple: Never underestimate market demand and the impatience of your customers. The iPad being so scarce can only mean that the powers themselves didn’t think it would be that popular. Or did they just get cold feet and rushed the release because alternatives like the WePad were sooner ready than they had expected?

You know, I heard something really stupid today: Some strange economy analysts indeed had the audacity to complain about the weather, citing up to 2 billion in "damage" because construction gangs and all the people around them cannot work when it’s constantly snowing and temperatures are so cold, the ground is frozen hard. It’s really weird. While I feel for the workers having to sit at home instead of earning money, this whole case exposes the one fatal flaw in all that. How come, serious construction activity is even planned in January? I have vivid memories of a time in my life when nobody even remotely would have dreamed of doing something that hairbrained. All such activity was put to rest from November to March the next year and the people were sent to doing other things. True, I live in a region that has had very mild winters in recent years and working outside was possible, but wouldn’t logic dictate that you plan for the worst (or the normal case) instead of hoping it doesn’t happen and then get bitten? It’s so ridiculous…

Anybody remember the hysteria surrounding the Millenium Bug and then it never came? Well, seems all was in vain. Indeed there seem to be enough programmers out there that haven’t learned their lesson from it and use single digit year numbers or else there is no good explanation for the credit card/ banking card madness that affects millions of European users. I wonder how I would react if, what has become a common commodity, I couldn’t withdraw money from my bank account. Imagine that happening on a Friday night when you want to go out. What a disaster!

Just the other day, president Obama was handing out medals to a few people, including the grand gents and original founders of Adobe, and what do you know? A few days later he gets one of his own by ways of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. Quite unusual, especially considering that most other recipients, even in the sciences, have to really grow old (sometimes old as in "keep a coffin handy") before getting that golden medal. Well, you Americans better start being proud of your prez, even if you don’t share his political views.

This really is a gem that so nicely sums up what the utterly crooked US patent system has led to. In this short article, Jen-Hsung Huang, head honcho of NVidia, says (paraphrased): Intel believes that everything that consists of transistors belongs to them. Indeed, it seems to some companies it’s not enough to already have a monopoly, but also take other’s money as well by trying to put them out of business over licensed tech. Sounds familiar? Yupp, quite common in the software business, I hear, and it doesn’t even matter if the company name begins with A, M or O. Of course you have to consider who’s talking – a monopolist blaming another monopolist, which unfortunately reduces the credibility somewhat. Still, something to print out and put in a picture frame. And to anyone still not convinced: Open your favorite program’s About box and be shocked about the rows and columns of patents attached.

This just in: Disney buys Marvel! Yes, it really is true. After Pixar literally saved Disney from bankruptcy a few years ago, the merged and recovered conglomerate does a little shopping, apparently. Now, like so many things, I’m not really into comics and series like Spiderman, Fantastic Four and X-Men have been sufficiently ruined with rubbish films already, but still, with Pixar holding the reigns at Disney, there is still a lot of potential for some good stuff to come out of this some day.