OpenTangent

There has been a lot of chatter on the Internet recently about Google image searches occasionally redirecting to a Bing image search. After experiencing this for myself I decided to look into the matter and what I found was quite an elaborate hack

Just posting a few screenshots of  Cyanogenmod 6.0 . Cyanogenmod 6 is based on Android 2.2 FroYo .

A successful corporate alliance inevitably results in a competitive split . This was first demonstrated to me back in the days of the Apple/Microsoft allience vs IBM . Once perception had changed and people realised that innovative startups could take on corporate giants, Gates then realised that he had to get the upper hand in silicon valley . Apple was backstabbed by Microsoft and the alliance was off in favour of competitive innovation ultimately benefiting us as the consumers. Many years down the line Apple had allied with Google since Microsoft was the new giant in town and Apple had a vendetta to fulfill. Apple's iPhone appeared and quickly took center stage since Microsoft overlooked the need for mobility. Once the smartphone market was mature Apple once again got the short end of the alliance stick when Google's Android became a major competitor to the iPhone and Eric Schmidt was forced to leave Apple's board . A...

It's been said that the hype around HTML5 and CSS3 has been exaggerated and even abused for marketing purposes . It's certainly true that HTML5 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary but it addresses so many obstacles for web development that i believe the impact will warrant the hype. There are some major technological advances such as HTML5 WebSockets and the popular  video and canvas elements but i think the real advantages will come from CSS3 (the style sheet mark-up language that accompanies HTML5). CSS3 will allow designers to make very rich interfaces with relatively little effort and without the need for any third party plugins like Flash. With these two standards specifications in place, web applications rather than  legacy PC applications  (as Google calls them) should become a very viable option. There was another bottle neck for web apps however and that was the inability of web browser's of the time to rend...

Just another iteration in the web codec saga; Google's WebM project and the included  VP8 codec  has been released under the unadulterated open source BSD license . For me this is the turning point in the open vs proprietary battle as video is arguably a prominent aspect of computing. With previously dispersed standards and licensing, video support in computers and devices like smart phones and DVD players was difficult and expensive. We now have the ability to serve the best possible video to even the cheapest of devices and now that it's open, thanks to the BSD license there's a good chance that digital video as a whole will stay open. As can be expected; Google once again takes an active approach to open standards . Initially they amended the BSD license with patent clauses that would deter patent pirates like Microsoft from entering into lawsuits against Google. Those clauses would effectively disallow the use of WebM and the VP8 codec by the suing party if a lawsuit ...

As predicted , Google is actively ensuring the openness of the web by open sourcing the VP8 video codec developed by On2 Technologies  which Google bought for $124.6 million .  Ogg Theora was the codec that open source advocates pushed to use as the standard for HTML5 but it was noticibly inferior in performance compared to the proprietary H.264 codec which was backed by Apple and more recently Microsoft. If claims are true that VP8 can save up to 50% bandwidth usage over H.264 then VP8 will be the clear performance champion and since it is going to be open souced and therefore free to be used by anyone and in any browser, H.264 no longer puts up much of a fight. All web browsers and devices will soon have high quality streaming video without the unnecessary royalties.

I am constantly questioning what it means to be ethical and although it is definitely a complicated matter I've always felt it's best to hold onto some pillar of certainty. For me that pillar is honesty, if you're faced with a difficult moral dilemma it's best to choose honesty. That of course is also not always a black and white situation, in which case i turn to a lesson i was taught as a child; not telling someone something you know they would want to hear is also lying. Hence, i can say with a good degree of certainty that censorship is unethical. The Islamic search engine I'mHalal has a haram system which warns about or outright denies certain search terms depending on their haram level. If a person is not already willing to avoid certain things before arriving at the search engine then the objective has already failed, and if an individual is not aware of why certain things are classified as haram then rightly, they cannot be expected to avoid them. Goog...

Almost every year for the past three, four, even five years we have had claims that the year to follow was going to be the year of desktop Linux. The following articles are of no particular relevance but serve as proof of how at the end of every year someone feels that the following year will be 'the' year: 2004 the year of desktop Linux 2005 the year of desktop Linux 2006 the year of desktop Linux 2007 the year of desktop Linux? - Seems like hype died down in 2007 2008 the year of desktop Linux - Going strong again in 2008 though 2009 the year of desktop Linux ..and of course, one for next year: 2010 the year of desktop Linux If we think of the year of desktop Linux as being the year in which it begins to grow in popularity then we've passed that year over a decade ago. If the year of Linux is actually the year where it takes majority share then i think we still have a few to go. But i think the year of desktop linux should rather be thought of as the point wh...

" The Cloud " is often confused with the Internet, probably because the Internet is officially portrayed as a cloud in diagrams . A cloud is in fact an application or suite that runs on a server and is served to thin clients , traditionally through a browser but not exclusively. The Internet is a great facilitator to such a deployment. Pretty much all processing and data storage is kept on the server and the user merely taps into it remotely. Obvious advantages of cloud solutions are centralised deployment and maintenance and also the ability to access applications from almost any device that can run a browser . There is also the major advantage of mobility, allowing users the freedom to work from anywhere with a connection. In recent years we have had major strides in mobile technology like netbooks and 3G as well as rapid price reduction for said hardware and services, pushing the mobility envelope even further. The desktop remains a tool for the professional but wit...

One of the internet's greatest strengths is the fact that it is decentralised. With the emergence of cloud computing powerhouses such as Google and Facebook we are seeing the decay of a decentralised internet. Majority of our time online is spent "logged in" to some or other cloud infrastructure which has sweeping power over our personal information. Now i'm fairly lax about Google having access to my personal info because they have been true to their "do no evil" motto and let's be honest, it is alot better being served adverts that are appropriate to my interests. But i think we should all be aware of how Google has softly and gently pulled our pants down and is now carefully bending us over the kitchen table while reassuring us that this is what we want. The signs are there, regardless of how comforting the process may be. The same holds true with politics, any party may have good intentions initially but given enough time with enough power, justi...