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I wish I was there to ask a question.

Larry talked about how the development of technology (broadly) is so much more important than commercial squabbles, which are petty by comparison. He mentioned how standards are vital to that happening.

But then Google (via Motorola) is doing exactly the opposite. They have commercial squabbles with Apple and Microsoft over certain (non-standard) patented features, and they respond by seeking injunctions over standards-essential patents and trying to force an unfair settlement with that kind of threat looming over them. That’s not rising above the fray; it’s descending to new lows Apple and Microsoft would never go to.

That basically means that if I’m a new phone maker, I need to make sure that I keep on the right side of Google (and just lie down when I think they’ve infringed on my rights), or otherwise I can’t use industry standards like GSM, 802.11 WiFi, or h.264.

Larry and Sergey are smart, logical guys. They must see the contradiction in what they say (and probably believe) and what they’re doing. Larry said they sometimes have to be practical over principled, and I want to know if they intend to pursue this level of “pragmatism”, even if it leads to the destruction of industry standards.

4 days ago on Larry Page to tech world: 'Being negative is not how we make progress' 2 replies 7 recommends

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I very much agree. It’s no easy feat to put up any building, sure, but the original WTC towers were the tallest buildings on the planet when they were finished. They were symbols of America being at the top of the world – not only building the tallest building, but doing it twice!

Their overall style might not be very interesting, but the fact that there were two of them makes all the difference. You can’t discount that. Even the Mona Lisa is made of tiny brush strokes – sometimes you need to consider the entire work to appreciate it.

Building design is hard. It’s hard because buildings don’t live in isolation. They impose their character on their surroundings, and they both define and reflect the mood of city. We have a complex relationship with them, and its both very difficult and very important to get them right.

This building looks awfully generic. It has no records to boast, while being tied to mournful sentiments. IMO, New York is not a mournful place – it’s a place of enormous diversity and vibrancy. This building is the opposite of those things. A better building would respect 9/11 while refusing to be defined by it.

You can do that even without the funds of Dubai. Look at London (the Gherkin, the Shard, etc) for examples of how a similarly diverse and vibrant city chooses to express itself.

8 days ago on Is One World Trade Center really the tallest building in the West? 1 recommend

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Apparently the next (2.3) update is going to have layer styles. That will be a game changer.

But Pixelmator is still brilliant as is.

10 days ago on Pixelmator 2.2 goes after graphic design with new shape tools and vectors-first UI

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It looks a lot more like Apple Maps now, IMO.

That’s not a bad thing – Apple’s maps always had a nice visual design, but were lacking in data quality.

11 days ago on New maps, chaps 3 recommends

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I remember this guy from the intro. Didn’t they poach him from PayPal? I remember that PP weren’t too happy about that.

Here we are:

PayPal also notes that from 2008 to 2011, Bedier was helping PayPal negotiate a commercial deal where PayPal would serve as a payment option for mobile app purchases on Google’s Android Market. “At the very point when the companies were negotiating and finalizing the Android-PayPal deal, Bedier was interviewing for a job at Google without informing PayPal of this conflicting position,” the lawsuit claims.

Src: PayPal lawsuit alleges Google stole trade secrets

11 days ago on Google Wallet and Payments VP Osama Bedier leaving the company

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So you’re proposing Google break web standards and bring in a host of Android-specific web APIs? And then you propose that everybody from Mozilla to Amazon do the same?

No. We do not need a more fragmented web. Are you sure you’ve never worked for Microsoft?

Besides, if you do that and break compatibility with other browsers, you lose the whole point of going to HTML in the first place; what exactly would be the benefit of using HTML+JS if you require developers to build in a lot of proprietary stuff that won’t work anywhere else? Why not just stick with what they have then?

Web standards continue to move forward, but it isn’t a lack of APIs that makes the Facebook native app so much faster than the web app. You’re acting like native performance is just there within grasp but it’s a lack of APIs that’s stopping anybody getting there. It’s not.

Blink is an open-source project. If you want to understand the issues, have a look and contribute.

12 days ago on An idea for a unified Google operating system... 2 replies 1 recommend

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Actually, I think I prefer the BBC tech. Bouncing the image all over the room (ceiling, side walls and everything) is a lot more immersive projecting a larger box around your TV. OK, so you need some space to set it up and calibration takes time, but those are things that could be improved with more research (Microsoft Research is probably much better resourced than BBC Research, and they’re more likely to follow through on things with commercialisation potential while the BBC tend not to).

The reason you would want this is to feel the walls rushing past you as you fall down a pit, or to feel the change in lighting as you move to new environments. Those are passive things that you don’t focus on; peripheral vision.

The Illumiroom thing was a bit wasteful. I didn’t feel the Kinect contributed much (if at all) to a more immersive experience. It lets things appear to bounce out of the screen, but it’s not even slightly convincing (and looks like it would ruin the realism on the screen), and it’s unnecessary for passive, peripheral views anyway.

12 days ago on Surround Video: BBC beats Microsoft with its own immersive TV project 1 reply

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I agree about disliking bottom toolbars – when you have scrollable content, a bar along the bottom just feels so restrictive – like you’re looking through a keyhole.

12 days ago on The Verge iOS app redesign (Mockups) 1 reply

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The thing is that they won’t get any competitive traction that way.

Apple is able to boast huge numbers of exclusive apps, and even the ones that aren’t exclusive are typically better on iOS. Ideally, Google would like to reverse that situation.

If all Android apps were made in standards-compliant HTML5, they would also run on iOS, Windows Phone, and every other platform. Will those platforms then give up their native apps? No; it’d be like it is now – you’d have a Facebook mobile website (for example), and then a Facebook native app which is about 1000x better. If Google were already taking the HTML5 approach, they’d be stuck with the crappy webapp version of Facebook while iOS users had a much better experience.

12 days ago on An idea for a unified Google operating system... 1 reply 1 recommend

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Of course they are! Don’t believe the propaganda in the American media; everything is just rosy in Syria…

12 days ago on Internet traffic from Syria vanishes in the midst of ongoing conflict 2 replies 4 recommends

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Here’s how the DoJ defines anticompetitive tying:

(1) two separate products or services are involved
(2) the sale or agreement to sell one is conditioned on the purchase of the other
(3) the seller has sufficient economic power in the market for the tying product to enable it to restrain trade in the market for the tied product, and
(4) a not insubstantial amount of interstate commerce in the tied product is affected.

1. Separate products are things like location services and all the rest of Google’s services (Play store, Gmail, Maps). You can replace the location service and the other things still work (Skyhook demonstrated this).

2. In order to access those other services like Maps, you must meet some opaque definition of “compatibility” with Google (see evidence from the Skyhook case). If you replace the location service, suddenly you’re no longer ‘compatible’ and you’re blocked from everything

3. The OEMs have contracts with the carriers that say they have to have Google services like Maps, etc. So yeah, Google has ultimate ability to restrict the sale of devices that don’t sign up to their bundling policy.

4. Skyhook was in the original Samsung Galaxy S before Google intervened. Skyhook was forced off and now Samsung is the undisputed market leader for Android devices – of which they’re activating 1.5M a day – so it involves some pretty substantial sums and sizes.

I don’t know what ‘compatibility’ definition Google uses to block this stuff – whether it’s via the OHA or something else. It’s all ridiculously opaque when you try and research this stuff (just look at the OHA website – “latest news” is from July 2011!).

They do give “compatibility” as the reason for blocking this stuff though. I think this is going to be a serious problem for them as the ecosystem matures and other OEMs struggle to compete with Samsung.

It’s not like it isn’t obvious to the OEMs that we are using compatibility as a club to make them do what we want.
- Dan Morrill, Google employee

12 days ago on I'm starting to think that Android will eventually be more Google and less freedom in the future. 1 reply

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More often it’s something like:

You’ve used all your energy points for today!
Wait 12 hours for your energy to replenish or buy a pack of 20 points for $0.99

I hate that crap. Just let me play the damn game. Some of them I’d be happy to buy outright if they didn’t have that junk.

12 days ago on 'Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time' launching in July