Grumpy Old Man

After a raft of injunctions against Samsung, in a dispute over patents and the ‘look and feel’ of the new Galaxy tablet, Apple have now decided to start threatening retailers in Europe.

You have to wonder why Apple appear to be so scared of the new Samsung tablet. According to reviews the Galaxy is good but no class beater. The legal action is even stranger given that Samsung supplies important electronic components for Apple’s iPad. So why all the lawsuits and where is it going to stop? Is Apple’s next move going to be to demand that Samsung hand over details of individual Galaxy Tab customers so they can go after them? That seems to me to be an obvious next step, given Apple’s behaviour so far.

I decided a while ago, as Apple became more and more litigious, that I would never buy another Apple product. However, this does not mean that Apple will never get another penny from me in the future. Apple, like other big players in the IT market, have a huge portfolio of patents. These relate to all aspects of computing and especially to mobile devices.

Chances are that any mobile/internet/wireless device I might want to buy will have an Apple/Microsoft/Google/whoever tax built in. Unlike the taxes that our governments levy, it is well nigh impossible to know who is getting the money and equally importantly, how much each party gets.

Until consumer rights are improved to give us an irrevocable right to such information, (from the purchase price down to how much Mrs Chang gets for assembling each iPad) the only way to be sure you are not contributing to Mr Jobs’ war chest is to just stop buying consumer electronics.

After a raft of pointless UI changes and a move to a senselessly rapid development cycle, the Mozilla developers have decided in their wisdom to make it harder to find the version number in Firefox. Way to go guys, that will solve so many problems in one go.

The rot at Mozilla Central started when Mozilla released the alpha quality Thunderbird 3. It auto updated itself without first directing users to the “What’s new page” so that we could check if we really wanted to update. TB3 was buggy and slow, introduced UI changes that many didn’t like/want and broke the Lightning calendar plugin. Even worse, the Mozilla developers insisted that because we liked tabs in Firefox we’d love them in TB3. I ditched Thunderbird at that point.

It was only a matter of time before Mozilla started messing around with Firefox.

It is a remarkably refreshing revelation to find out that this style of arrogance towards your customers, typified in the past by Microsoft, has nothing to do with your software being open or closed source. It has to do with the fact that organisations forget that their user base, their market, is built on mutual respect and not on an immutuable right to exist.

Opera have just joined the ranks of “companies unable to write auto update software”. My working install of Opera, running on a Macbook with Tiger auto updated itself yesterday. Of course, the Opera auto updater, like the Skype for Mac auto updater fails to check the OS version used before it installs the new version.

Yes, you guessed it, the version of Opera that the Opera auto updater installed was not compatible with Tiger.

So it was back off to the Opera website, where I tried to find the last good version of Opera. I thought I had been using 10.63 but once re-installed it refused to fetch webpages as did 10.62. Eventually I discovered that the last version of Opera for Tiger was 11.11 and re-installed that. Voila! My bookmarks and Speed Dial were back as they were.

So this week’s brickbat goes to Opera. It is a shame as I thought Opera were better than the rest. Nothing like a cock-up to bring you face to face with reality.

Suffice it to say that auto updating is now turned off in my copy of Opera.

Here is a post for those of you out there involved in designing home routers. In particular those of you involved in the important design details of the positioning of buttons. IF you are going to put a button on the box, to toggle the Wifi on and off, put it somewhere where people can’t accidently press the button.

Here is a good example of where NOT to put such a button. This one (round button, bottom left of the picture) can be actuated accidently by placing an EeePC on top of the router. It took me a while to figure that one out. This process of discovery was not helped by the fact that the Wifi on/of indicator LED was very dim.

Another half hour of life wasted by one small, poorly thought out design detail.

Oh, for the days of mechanical toggle switches on consumer products, that show clearly, (by dint of their orientation), which state they are in.

The thought just popped into my head after writing the previous two posts.

Given that most people confuse new ways to sell you things with new technology, can a socialist join in with the capitalistic, pseudo-monopolies of the current internet age?

An anti-capitalist protester with an iPhone? An Android-bearing card carrying communist?

Would it not be better to embrace the new, self-empowering world community of open source technologies and eschew the capitalists attempts to enslave us again?

I’m a technophobe? I don’t think so. If I’m a ‘phobe’ of some sort then ‘commercephobe’ would be a better term. People confuse a phobia of restricted commercial practices with luddite-ism.

Ads everywhere, mobile devices tethered to the company that sold them to consume products sold by the same company.

That, is essentially what I am against.

After all, you wouldn’t think of buying a car from Shell, locked into a contract with Shell for fuel, locked into buying your car accessories from the ‘ShellStore^TM‘, with ads, sponsored by Shell, flashing across your speedometer as you drove, would you now?

If you next car was a BP car, you’d discover that none of the cool Shell accessories you’d installed on your Shell car would work on your BP car.

Yet people accept such things when it comes to mobile devices, like phones, e-book readers and tablets. Car manufacturers must look in envy at Apple, Google et al and wonder how they get away with it.

Now in this stage of the internet we are experiencing the internet equivalent of the land enclosures acts.

Everyone trying to wall off a bit of common, open internet space and push internet serfdom on the rest of us.

The internet is dead, long live the smartphone app.