Looks like I have to give up on the new owner of Borland, Embarcadero. Their solution to the problem of the missing ADO components for Delphi 5 was to offer an upgrade to the latest version at over $2000 and it would come with an upgrade to Delphi 5 Enterprise for “free.”
Since the client will never use the new RAD Studio this is like buying a Ferrari that will never be used so it is legal to put a spotlight on the VW Bug. After 20 years of defending Borland it is time to give up on them. They didn’t even allow my suggestion of donating my copy of D5 Ent. to the customer. I guess it is time to finally move wholeheartedly to Visual Studio.
It has finally happened Apple is facing product delays but more importantly anti-trust probes. For some time now I have been wondering why Apple has been allowed to get away with anti-competitive policies as if they were a protected company. The iPad 2.0 may indeed appear next week as an announcement but there are rumours of delays of months before quantities will be available. The delays may come from their manufacturer in Taiwan because of some design changes Apple made in the last few weeks. This has led to production bottlenecks at the factory and may push the real release date from April back to June.
This may not be a problem for the Apple diehards who accept anything from Apple but it does open the door for companies like Motorola and Samsung to get their Xoom and Galaxy Tab 10.1 units out in the gap. These and other Android 3.0 tablet units from others will quickly fill any orders that consumers make before the arrival of the iPad 2. Apple sold an estimated 15 million of the first units but some analysts have dropped the version 2 estimates from 30 to 23 million units with the difference going to Android purchases.
Switch to the mobile phone sector and the news is just as dismal. In the UK for example Apple has slipped to sixth place where it used to have a very strong market. The winner has been HTC taking the top three places followed by the Blackberry and the Samsung Galaxy S. The difference has been the very nice offers from the Android sellers and the multiple price points that a company like HTC provides.
The biggest issue however and the one attracting the anti-competition rumblings is its subscription service a.k.a. iTunes. The latest storm comes from the new content subscription charges for products like newspapers and magazines. Both the US and Europe is starting to look into Apple’s practices that may drive away some of their suppliers. One issue is that of ”funnelling“ where Apple encourages media suppliers, through various mechanisms, to sell only via the iTunes store giving Apple 30% from each sale. While they can sell elsewhere they are banned from selling for less that the Apple store pricing nor can they link to other content sources.
It really started to become obvious when Apple stopped the Sony eReader from having their application on their devices. Why? Simply because Sony wanted to also link to their store i.e. cutting out Apple from the profit cycle. They certainly have the arrogance but it would be customer suicide if they did the same thing to Amazon. Not only would they cut a large source of material but it would attract more anti-competition interest. Apple has already had to allow more Flash apps because of the scrutiny by the EU and US trade conditions.
Apple is also overpricing its fees. Many point out that they should be five percent but instead they are a lot higher. Some have predicted that by 2014 about 80 percent of the market could belong to Android with as little as ten percent belonging to Apple. Steve Jobs has of course defended the Apple pricing models but others like the Rhapsody group are calling the model “economically untenable.”
Industry News
Proving that they are the contender for nanny state of the world the Australian federal government’s Classification Board has given a “refused classification” (RC) rating to the upcoming Mortal Kombat game. This means instead of the manufacturers making some money in Australia their game will be pirated and distributed that way. Or people will be ordering it on the Internet instead. So in a way the government has given its tacit support to Internet shopping over store shopping. The reasoning for the decision were elements like limb dismemberment, decapitation and disembowelment in a “very detailed” and realistic manner.
One of my many favourite sites for IT news is The Register based in the UK. They recently announced that their Sydney sales and editorial operation is going to start producing more stories from places like New Zealand and Australia. The plan is to give more local stories if you enter the site from say Australia than you would see if you can in from say the UK. There won’t be a lot to start with but they expect to improve over time.
If you haven’t worked it out by now I love technology. Enter a new wireless computer sensor that measures one cubic millimetre in size. The target are the eyes of glaucoma patients to measure the inter-ocular pressure and provide 24 hour a day readings via a wireless connection. The tiny package contains a processor, memory, a pressure sensor, a solar cell, a thin-film lithium battery, and a transmitter into a tiny glass rectangle. It takes a measurement every 15 minutes and is powered by a teeny solar cell. It needs 1.5 hours of sunlight or ten hours of internal lights to keep it going. The limit in size was due to the power capability more than component size. Total power consumption is a tiny 5.3 nanowatts on average. It certainly opens up a new range of possibilities.
Google has temporarily lost tens of thousands of e-mail messages due to a system reset. It left around 150,000 users with blank accounts. Google is working on restoring the mails but it could take some time. If you can’t log in then your account has been affected. What it dos indicate is that anything stored on the Net is not necessarily safe. Many lost their Hotmail accounts a while back and now Google. To use that tired but still very relevant term you still need to do backups.
Mozilla has released the 12th and supposedly final Firefox 4 Beta version. This release brings the bug count fix to over 7000 since the first beta. The latest version also sports speed improvements and faster video display. Plug-in compatibility is better with the hardware acceleration on. You can get your copy here http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/beta/ for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
What happens when the big, nasty multinational picks on the lone hacker? Ask Sony. Alexander Egorenkov, the German PlayStation 3 hacker, has responded to Sony’s copyright infringement court battle by releasing a HV Bible that tells how to make use of Sony’s closed hypervisor technology and allows PS3 owners to hack their own game consoles. Sony demanded that the ‘Bible’ be removed but not only did Egorenkov not comply but it shows how little the big guys understand about things like the World Wide Web. By the time Sony took action many had made copies of the information and by the time you read this I expect it will be available from multiple sources. As one supporter wrote “Just say the word, I will have hundreds of mirrors and torrent links up in matter of minutes. I also believe in freedom, and expecially [sic] in our legally own electronics (consoles also).” You can try for yourself do a search for coolstuff.rar.
Enjoy your week.
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