OpenTangent

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

Scepticism is incorrectly believed to be a stance of closed mindedness when in fact a sceptic is always open to all information. Not everyone decides to or can afford to become a scientist but that does not exclude people from taking part in a world of logic and rationality. A sceptic is a person that has consciously decided to be a part of that world and is always mindful of accepted facts while remaining open to new information. It is vitally important that as sceptics we place our focus on facts rather than conclusions lest we risk falling into the trap of faith which might cause us to adjust the evidence to fit a desired conclusion rather that adjusting the conclusion to fit the evidence. There are a number of religions in our world and while things may have been more aggressive in the past the faithful now use passion as their medium to compete with other religions. "My religion is the most real because i have genuinely felt the awesome power o...

WikiLeaks is undeniably a great asset to the freedom of information movement . Geoff Morrell, pentagon spokesperson urges WikiLeaks to "do the right thing" and remove all copies of classified US military data on the invasion of Afghanistan  from their websites so that enemies of the US are prevented from using the data to gain an advantage. This is blatant disrespect for the audience since any enemy of the US would have acquired the data long before it made it into the limelight. So either the US government is trying to make an example of WikiLeaks to prevent leaks in future or they want to prevent the information from permeating further into the public domain due to embarrassing or possibly incriminating information . If the former was their intention then they would have been far more stern than to just release a removal request through the media. With little effort i came across the Collateral Murder videos on ...

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 ...

For thousands of years people have subscribed to culturally accepted actions and beliefs in order to achieve a sense of belonging . This is a natural desire in a social species but we now face a fork in our evolution since the information age has forced the emergence of global culture and at the same time has forced us to accept rationality through readily available information. It's community versus rationality and i'm sure everyone reading this knows that community will always win but there's hope in the fact that the community of rational thinkers is growing strong. The inspiration for this post was an article by Muhammad Karim  which was written as a reaction to Zapiro 's recent comic strip depicting Muhammad . That was of course a reaction to the "Everybody draw Muhammad day" group on Facebook which has since disappeared with no explanation but  censorship is another debate. I support "Everybody draw Muhammad day" because of my stance on f...