Pacoup.com

March 2, 2010, was a both a joyous day and a sad day for Opera Software. Once again, they had released an awesome browser, intently calling it “The fastest browser on Earth” while benchmarks revealed Google Chrome, or the latest Chromium build to be fair, was still faster.

I believe Opera 10.5 to be faster than the non-beta Chrome 4 release on Windows, but I haven’t confirmed this myself. That does make Opera 10.5 the fastest shipping browser on Earth, at least.

In any cases, you have to at least respect Opera for making such strides in performance, as well as interface integration with Windows 7 and Mac OS X. The Mac part isn’t so impressive, although they at least thought of making the browser frame the same gray as the actual OS X shell (certainly not pointing at Chrome’s pitiful integration here), but the Windows 7, and might I say not just Windows 7 but all other versions, is just amazing. Heck, it supports the jump lists and the tab thumbnail stuff of Windows 7 perfectly just like IE. In fact, it’s better than IE, adopting the a Office 2010-esque interface instead of the traditional file menu which is sure to only be replicated by other browsers which will follow suite, Firefox being a good example, and probably even IE 9. Microsoft did invent the new interface concept with Windows 7. I don’t see why they wouldn’t go with that in IE 9 now that even Paint has it.

Oh, and let’s not forget Opera 10.5 now has the sexiest JavaScript pop-ups ever. It’s so awesome, I often forget it’s just a regular alert.

In any cases, let’s just go over the benchmarks now. By the way, this is Peacekeeper benchmark from Futuremark and I’ve included the Complex Graphics result in the final geometric mean because this test doesn’t cover IE which doesn’t support the canvas element.

So, apart from the freakish speed increase in Google Chrome, earlier tests on Chromium 4 revealed the complex graphics score to be around 4500, let me underline the fact that this is just really, but really fast.

It’s actually quite staggering at what point these browsers leave the others in the dust. Now as you know, Internet Explorer is quite slower than Firefox, but I won’t put it here because I can’t access version 8 on the particular system I’m testing it on. So just for fun, here is how number 2 king of market share fares against Chrome and Opera.

All is not so beautiful for Chrome though. At numerous cases I’ve seen slower computers casually die at the hands of Google Chrome and a fairly heavy and horribly coded site. Although these aren’t the kind of uber-slow sites you’ll meet everyday, it still includes a lot of them because the world thinks anyone can make web sites, which is true, however not anyone can make them well. In fact, about 99% of web sites out there use broken HTML.

Although not something you’ll encounter on modern computers equipped with dual-core processors, older machines or netbooks are bound to be included in the sad bunch. I haven’t particularly tested that with the latest Chromium, but usually it goes that Chrome has the slowest page-scrolling speed, while IE just manages and while all three of Firefox, Opera and Safari manage to re-render the page without too much pain.

I have a saying that goes “the faster your system, the faster Chrome will be in comparison to other browsers”. In other words, you might find situations (e.g. Netbooks) where using Chrome is actually a slower solution than Firefox or Opera.

Point made, I still think we have to tip our hats to the Chrome Team and the guys at Opera for being so aggressive on performance. High performance code is highly optimized code, which also means the programmers are very good programmers, so you really have to think that the guys behind Chrome and Opera are brilliant engineers that should earn all the praise in the world, unlike, for instance, some people at RIM, Microsoft and Adobe.

What’s wrong with the iPhone?

If you’re reading this post, you might be wondering what the hell is wrong with the iPhone for anyone to refuse to buy one. Actually, you may already know, but chances are you’re one of those happy iPhone or iPod Touch user.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with the iPhone itself. The iPhone is a great product that works better than any other smart-phone currently on the market. Yes, it’s even better than the famed Nexus One. It also has tons of apps to back it up which make the iPhone experience very complete.

What’s wrong with it is the company behind it and their practices. I’ll explain in this article why I think Apple doesn’t deserve anyone’s money and why I chose to stop buying any products from them. I’m an ex-Mac fan who almost bought an iPhone.

Patents promote monopoly practices

This is an article that was featured recently on Engadget about that talked about all of the patents Apple is going after in a lawsuit against HTC. More specifically, this targets the Android, but if we were to actually apply most of these patents, Apple would have total monopoly over the smart-phone market and the PC market because no one else would be allowed to sell similar products.

Some patents, like the object oriented operating system, are just so broad that it’s ridiculous it’s still patented. Essentially, it would mean Microsoft and the Linux community would be infringing on Apple’s patent.

This goes even further in stupidity with things like the Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices. This patent is what enables the iPhone to shut off its screen and controls when you bring it to your ear in a call. Some manufacturers like RIM, creators of the BlackBerry, avoided the patent with solutions like the click-screen of the Storm, essentially preventing your ear from screwing with the controls unless you were to really push against the phone and click on the screen with your head. RIM’s solution actually works very well, although the actual click screen mechanism itself isn’t so great, but HTC didn’t think about that and implemented the same face-recognition technology as the iPhone on the Nexus One, Google’s Android handset.

You can see how far these things go into the realm of simply patenting technology we take for granted. It’s as if someone was being sued for making an RPG game because Square Enix had already did it with Final Fantasy. It just doesn’t make sense. You can’t patent a genre. And in the same way you can’t patent technological features beyond a certain point or what you get is pure monopoly.

I encourage you to read the Engadget article just to see how dumb Apple is being with all their patents. When companies have great ideas, they should just defend them by making the best out of them. I don’t even understand why Apple is suing HTC. The iPhone clearly doesn’t need patents to differentiate itself from the competition.

Freeloaders are not welcome

If you never were part of the open source community as a developer, this is something that’s perhaps a bit hard to understand. Essentially, it goes along the lines that when you create open source software, you expect the community, or anyone who uses your software, to give back in one form or another.

For example, take the Webkit browser engine. It’s open source, so everyone contributes to it, but when companies like Google use it for commercial products, they also freely give back new code to the community and help in developing Webkit. This is how it always should be.

Real open source projects are community efforts and companies who use them should always give back. If they don’t, then they break the collaboration process and become a nuisance to the community, because they just suck off everything it produces for its own personal profit.

This is exactly what Apple is doing and they have been doing so at numerous instances. One of the best example is Mac OS X. Apple took in code from FreeBSD and still does, but never gave back and made its operating system proprietary, keeping secret everything they did on top of the open source community’s hard work. No-one in the BSD world got any benefit from Apple’s effort, but Apple got every benefit from their efforts.

It’s also the case of Webkit, where Apple took in the KHTML project from KDE and just scrambled off with their own engine, that, while being open source, doesn’t make their web browser or the one on the iPhone any less proprietary. Had it been a real open source efforts, Safari would probably be a distribution of the Konqueror web browser featured in KDE and the KHTML project wouldn’t be so technologically late and backwater as it is today.

Neutrality is crucial to our future

Neutrality is probably the number one reason I refuse to every develop anything for the iPhone platform. Why? Because Apple decides whether your app goes to market or not and there’s nothing you can do about it because the App Store (a.k.a. iTunes) is the only sales channel for the iPhone. This wouldn’t be problematic had Apple only blocked dangerous or copyright infringing apps. However, Apple did way more than that, and lots of businesses saw their efforts in vain because Apple decided to cut them off from the App Store because their app duplicated the functionality of one of Apple’s.

Because of this, and lots of unknown reasons too, apps such as Google Voice, multiple video streaming apps, and web browsers not based on Webkit, are blocked from the App Store.

So, for a smart-phone, this might not be so dramatic at first glance, but let’s look at it this way. The iPhone is now a true platform by itself and is as important as Windows and Mac OS X are. If Windows would have been like the iPhone OS, Firefox would have never existed because Microsoft could have simply blocked it from its “store”.

See where this is problematic? Non-neutrality impedes on innovation and the freedom of choice. Apple is not neutral and locks in its users to whatever they decide on.

And so…

This is why I decided to boycott Apple. It’s one thing being proprietary, it’s another just being evil.

For the majority of computer users, updates are nothing more than a bothering pop-up and a loss of time. Even worse, some non-Internet-aware users don’t even know why they should update, let alone understand the update dialogs they face.

Adding to the commotion, developers do make mistakes and horror stories from updates, including drivers that stop working, bricked video game consoles and wiped-out iPods, are common talk.

That’s a highly problematic schema and lazy developers are mostly at fault for creating the update-allergic crowd that computer users today are.

Features, bug fixes and speed optimizations

Because of a weird trend in which developers seemed to believe hardware was getting so powerful they needn’t optimize their systems, a lot of people today associate newer with slower. They were right, until recently, where a company called Google magically reversed the trend, using speed as a selling point. Almost surprisingly, it worked wonderfully and Google had succeeded at chewing away more than search engine market share in 2009.

Still, the idea that newer software is slower, largely aggravated by slower and slower Windows releases, is still stuck in people’s head today. Should you still believe this? No. Making slow software is no longer an option today and both Microsoft and their competitors are greatly improving the speed of their software. Windows 7 is a very good example. Not only is it faster than its predecessor, Windows Vista, it’s even faster than XP, Vista’s predecessor. Upgrade-allergic excuses like “my system isn’t fast enough for Windows X” are not valid anymore. Multicore systems get even better performance benefits, thanks to better programming practices in regard to multicore optimization.

So, upgrading your software today is a good idea if you want a faster system. There’s also very important bug fixes that come along with updates, not to mention added functionality.

Security

As paranoid as lots of users are on the Internet, it’s funny to think that the one thing they don’t think about is updating their system.

Actually, about 80% of updates you get for your system, be it Windows, Mac or Linux, are security updates! That means a security hole has been discovered and has fortunately been patched, but it won’t be if you don’t update. It’s not enough to simply have a powerful antivirus.

A lot of people ask me this: “Does this mean my software previously had the security hole all along?”
The answer is yes and no. In the case of features update, or even security updates, more security holes can be created, so there’s a chance that if you keep up with updates, you might have been vulnerable for just a short amount of time, so no, usually you didn’t have that particular security hole all along.
The reality, however, is that the reason it’s being fixed is because it has been discovered. Cases in which only attackers know about a security hole are actually very rare and most often, even if your system has a security hole, no one will actually know how to exploit it until it gets patched, a.k.a. discovered.

This is also why it’s extremely crucial to patch your system as soon as the patch is available, because a discovered vulnerability is most often being actively used against users, hence the reason why it was discovered and patched. Obviously, there wouldn’t be a need to patch security holes if no one was exploiting them.

If you decide not to update for X reason, it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get attacked. With reasonable security, say a router that prevents your computer from responding to unknown ping requests, unless you visit a site, you’re computer is as safe as if it was disconnected from the Internet. The concept of a computer being infected over night while you’re not doing anything on it is nothing short of ridiculous with today’s technology. However, one misstep and your privacy could be jeopardized instantly. This goes as far as identity theft and financial fraud, all because you decided you’d put off that update for later.

Firmware upgrades and the crucial backup

For all of you people doing firmware upgrades on their BlackBerry, iPhone, iPods and cie., please, please, please back up your data. Too many times have I heard about people loosing all their music from their iPods because of a firmware update. I just don’t know why your songs are even only on your mobile device. Heck, you don’t even have to make a firmware update to lose that data.

I understand that Apple is at fault for making such bad upgrade software (history tells of Apple device updates to be very dangerous for your data, unfortunately), but please just simply backup your content so that a developer’s mistake doesn’t catch you off guard.

In any cases,

And by all means, you should always update your software.

Actual quote from the Bada developer web site.

Samsung bada is a new open platform that enables a richer user experience in applications on Samsung mobile devices.

Realistic interpretation from myself

Samsung bada is an open smartphone platform based on Linux, that, while targeted to run on lots of Samsung mobile devices, current and future, remains a self-serving effort devoid from partners. Face it, Google might be selling its own mobile device, which is isn’t even manufactured by them so might as well say they’re not selling their own device, they are still partnering with multiple companies. In all of bada’s texts on their web site, not once can the word “partner” be seen. It looks like Samsung doesn’t really intend on using bada as a true open platform for multiple manufacturers but really as an excuse to have people develop for it and eventually buy Samsung phones. The prospect is interesting nevertheless, especially considering the amount of Samsung smartphones out there, but the face value pales in comparison to Android’s goal.

In my opinion, where it really happens is at Google and Apple. Everything else, be it Nokia Maemo, Samsung bada or Windows Phone 7 Series, seems to be almost bound to become nothingness in the future.

Nevertheless, it’s nice to see that a lot of companies play the open source card to go against Apple’s iPhone. That’s a mighty good thing for the open source community, especially Linux, despite much of it being a coolness factor cover for an otherwise not much community-developed platform.

This resembles Firefox and Chrome. They’re both open source, but one’s not really community-made. On that word, that’s a whole other debate and matter.

I just found this funny, but that quote from Dick Brass “But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter.” just tells one thing to me.

All those gadgets still come from American innovation, and Canadian innovation for BlackBerry (although I wouldn’t call today’s BlackBerry innovation) but it’s still North-America.

I guess the American tech industry is still influential to say the least…

I almost laughed when I read this article by Adrian Ludwig on the Flash Platform Blog.

Apparently, Adobe, or one of its developers at least, thinks that the argument “Flash technology isn’t open” is not valid for the following reason:

The Flash file format specifications are open and unrestricted, so Apple can build their own Flash Player if they want. If Apple wants the source code to the Flash Player, we’re happy to provide it, just as we have to many other device manufacturers.

First of all, the Flash file format specifications are open and unrestricted, yes, so they get that. But a specification only goes a certain way and it’s often used as a lame excuse to pass by as “standard” or “open source”, which clearly it isn’t. Microsoft does the same with the OOXML format for Office, amongst other things, but in reality it’s just an excuse for making Office less proprietary than it already is. What’s good if the rest of the software is proprietary…

Apple can build their own Flash player, yes, indeed. And so does the open source community with projects that have miserably failed to achieve real compatible Flash engines because the format wasn’t truly open yet. It is now, but Flash Player itself isn’t.

What’s funny is Adobe says “If Apple wants the source code to the Flash Player, we’re happy to provide it, just as we have to many other device manufacturers”. Does this mean you don’t provide the Flash player source code to the community, because all reports show it’s not open source. That’s yet some other BS to pass by as an open project.

And about that “openness”, it really isn’t because the specification belongs to Adobe. Real open projects don’t just get to have open source implementations, they get to allow everyone to participate in developing it. That’s not what Flash is; Flash is a closed ecosystem where the only entity who get’s a choice at what you can do with it is Adobe.

This also goes for OOXML and Silverlight. It’s not open, it just tries to hide under an open umbrella. Java, on the other hand, for example, is truly open. The JCP, or Java Community Process, allows anyone to participate in the spec, so Java is a public decision matter, and Oracle has recently voiced itself as dedicated to pushing the JCP process beyond what Sun did (Oracle recently bought Sun) to make it even more accessible to smaller contributors, making Java technology a real open standard effort.

Open technology needs to belong to the public for the greater good, not to a company. Make no mistake, the Adobe Flash Platform is not open.

Probably the most bizarre thing to happen to me recently was this, a mind-blogging re-design of Google which popped up on Google.com (not country-level domains) only on Firefox, only on my computer (within a classroom network) and for only 5 minutes, just enough to show puzzled friends. Unfortunately by the time I though about taking a screen-shot of the search results, which is quite the shocking experience, it had already been took off.

You can actually see more of this on related blogs like this one: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/all-new-google-com/, which for some weird reason refers to the horrible design that weirdly makes Windows XP look like the future Chrome OS as “awesome”.

Actually, after doing some more research, I discovered you can enable the new design with a cookie. Last time Google did this (with the fading menu), they eventually forced seemingly random users and most likely Gmail users who beta things like me to use it and eventually made it a Google-wide feature. Looks like this new design is going to be very real, whether you like it or not. Hit the link for the JavaScript code to make it live.

In any cases, I’m really starting to wonder where the engineers have gone at Google. They used to decide colors based on white-box testing techniques and efficiency; the two latest “innovations”, the fade bar and the new design, really look like newbie mistakes a designer would make so that Google looks “cool”.

If you saw the keynote, or at least read stuff on Engadget, you know that the iPad doesn’t support Flash.

The fact that the iPad does not support Flash goes hand in hand with the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which both never supported and still don’t support Flash. In fact, it might just be part of Apple’s strategy; that is replacing the number one Flash application which is video playback with native support, a.k.a. HTML 5 video, and leaving all the extra power to the development of iPad/iPhone/iTouch apps.

Although only a rumored strategy, it’s clear that it’s what they’re doing, and the iPad goes a long way in proving it on top of what the iPhone already did.

One of the big markets for the App Store is video games, and video games can be programmed in Flash. In fact, Adobe is testing touch functionality for its latest Flash 10.1 release which is in beta as of this writing, clearly a threat to Apple’s ecosystem of apps if they were to support Flash. Instead of having to go through the App Store and everything that’s bad with it, developers would simply have to use Flash to put their apps to market, which incidentally would also make those available to everyone and not just on the iPad, clearly something Apple wants to avoid.

An iPad without Flash; a complete web platform?

Arguably, a web browser without Flash is far from complete. It wouldn’t even support the most visited web sites like YouTube. Apple solves this problem with the YouTube app, but that was only an obvious fit for an iPhone where most Flash apps wouldn’t even make sense because of the smaller screen.

On the iPad however, you’ve got an entirely different story. Users will be asking for Flash as they see that many web sites are not supported. But the same has already happened with the iPod Touch and the iPhone and has also brought myriad web sites to change their strategies and go away from Flash.

In fact, the current web development trend is to do the most stuff possible without Flash, or any other plugin for that matter. It’s already a dead-end for Silverlight, which still doesn’t have a lot of market share, and it seems Java is losing ground too in an area that’s beginning to reject anything called a plugin.

Possibly even more staggering, browsers like Internet Explorer that fail to support newer HTML capabilities are quickly losing market share. It’s quite simple in a user’s mind; if it doesn’t work, they’ll look elsewhere, and that all starts in the hands of the developers.

Apple is casually riding on this wave and hence, a flash-less iPad makes more and more sense, and whatever Google decides to embed in its future Chrome OS will probably see its way to Safari too, given both are based off the Webkit engine. Given that all three iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad use Safari, they’re very well-placed platforms for the future of the web.

The Chrome OS Strategy

Although clearly Google isn’t in the same camp as Apple, its strategy for Chrome OS seems to be very much plugin agnostic, albeit for different motives on the ground of how apps can be developed for its products; that is it has no intention of profiting from closed systems and trapping developers in them.

Although still an economical game, Google is profiting from the market in a very different way, and thus allowing developers to do anything they want on Chrome OS is not bad for them, which is very different than the situation Apple is in. I don’t expect the Chrome OS not to have Flash, especially since Google is part of Adobe’s Open Screen Project which aims to bring Flash support to every mobile platform in existence. It wouldn’t make sense for them to drop Flash, and although Google still has the time to make YouTube entirely Open Video, I’m not sure they’re quite there yet. In fact, I expect Chrome OS to support all three Flash, Silverlight and Java, much like the current Google Chrome supported Silverlight despite Microsoft not offering any support for it. This is very much in line with Google’s way of doing things, which is simply to make stuff accessible as possible.

A prime, but maybe simply obvious example of this is Google Search and Microsoft Bing. Google Search still works on Internet Explorer 6 while Bing gives out a JScript error and fails to display the background image. Sure, the fading thing on Google is simply absent on IE 6 (who cares really, I still think it’s an annoying feature) but you have to give it something for the fact it doesn’t throw an error at you. That’s Google saying “please use something better” with a little Chrome add everywhere and Microsoft saying “upgrade or just go away, 9 years of support is enough” to 20% or 13% (depending on which sources you refer to) of the Internet population as of this writing, clearly demonstrating Google’s stance on how it serves up the web.

With Google pushing JavaScript where it’s never gone before, introducing a new programming language and buying On2, it looks like Google is aiming for a plugin-less web too, and gladly so is the rest of the world (see the HTML 5 crowd). There is gap in Google’s strategy though, how do they plan on making complex apps possible for the web?

If you were to listen to the way Google apprehends Chrome OS’s goals, they clearly are not gonna promote Linux-based apps development on it. In fact, they might as well disable this possibility, but recent developer talks has negated the disabling possibility by confirming Chrome OS will have an embedded multimedia player that works seamlessly within a Chrome browser tab. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were made with Go, Google’s new programming language. In my opinion, the Chrome browser will eventually turn out to be a Go virtual machine, allowing complex web apps to be deployed natively directly in the browser, much Java except it would act like JavaScript. There’s also the possibility for Go to be supported across Webkit, which would make Safari also supported, and hence enable the iPad to run the apps. That’s bad for Apple, but good for Google, so guess what’s gonna happen.

Also, talking HTML 5 and all future things non-flash, let’s not forget Google bought On2. On2 is the codec company responsible for VP6, the first video codec supported by Flash. They are now up to VP8, a codec which clearly surpasses H.264, the current codec of choice for both Flash and Silverlight, as well as HTML 5 video on Chrome and Safari. On2 is also responsible for releasing VP3 as open source, which gave birth the Theora and OGG, the current HTML 5 video open codec supported by Chrome and Firefox. It’s no wonder Google bought On2; they’re probably on to open sourcing VP8 and making it an HTML 5 video supported codec. If that goes out, the open source community will obviously jump on it, Mozilla included, so Firefox will surely support it. This also gives a logical rise to the possibility of YouTube eventually running on HTML 5 video, something Theora can’t achieve because of its compression inferiority to H.264.

Where’s Microsoft

Frankly, I don’t know. Except for the very cool video hardware acceleration for Internet Explorer 9, they’re tests don’t even make it faster than Firefox 3.6 at loading web pages in general. The only possible future for Microsoft would be Silverlight, but if we are to believe how the web is evolving, that’s clearly not where the world is going.

It’s a sad thing because despite being real dogs; that is being extremely slow, developing on Microsoft software is really a breeze in comparison to similar offerings. However, the market has proven the tools are far from being what determines what developers will develop for. If it were so, Microsoft wouldn’t be losing ground.

Adobe Flash vs Developers

Whatever the future of the web, it’s still the future, and the current reality is that the Adobe Flash platform is currently omnipresent. What’s more, the mobile industry only represents a little over 1% of the global web, which while maybe untrue for wares such as Facebook, is very true for the rest of the world. The main browsing activities still happen on full-fledged browsers, even when people are on Netbooks, and not supporting Flash means not supporting YouTube and lots of other web sites.

Because of that, there’s a strong possibility that the full browsing expectations of consumers on the iPad, given its display size, might just backfire at Apple when thousands of consumers discover it doesn’t support their favorite online destinations.

In the end however, it’s really just a fight between Adobe Flash and developers. Firefox has proven that the real people who are pulling the strings behind the web market are the developers, much like Google Android is actively proving the real people pulling the strings behind the apps market on mobile devices are developers. How? By actively pulling away market share from places developers stop supporting and actively giving market share to newer, more developer-friendly mediums. There’s market share, but there’s convictions for a better future.

Firefox is the very proof. Web developers have boycotted Microsoft’s Internet Explorer so much that users are moving away from it at a rapid pace for the simple reason web sites just don’t work on it anymore. Internet Explorer is currently losing market share at the rate of 1% to 2% per month. This means that in approximately 3 to 4 years, if it keeps on dropping, Internet Explorer’s market share will have greatly plummeted at which point it will be a minor browser with its only chance of survival being shear technical prowesses, something it’s currently very bad at.

This gives rise to the fact that if developers decide to drop Flash support and go to something else, Adobe will see its Flash plugin die, putting both Google and Apple in a very good position.

Apple vs The World

If you take a look at the list of partners on Adobe’s Open Screen Project web site, it’s only funny to think the only two major companies in the area not on it are Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft has already voiced its intention of putting Flash on its Windows Mobile phones in the same way OSP partners plan to, but Apple has almost openly declared war against Flash, and one has to think that with all the companies figuring on this list, it’s almost like they just declared standards war against the rest of the world, or did they just ally with the rest of world (sane HTML 5 people who hate Flash for very good reasons) against the rest of the proprietary software companies? Arguably Google’s decision to join the OSP is almost as if they only did so because they wanted to put Flash on their Android so that it would have something to go against the iPhone’s mighty market share.

The Plugin Agnostic Web

All in all, although I think the iPad’s future is questionable, the future is most likely not downloaded apps on the iPad and most likely more Google than the iPad would lead to believe. It’s also plugin agnostic, but unfortunately for those who want to invest skills in developing complex applications that require more than just JavaScript on the web, there’s no real future-stable solution out there, although fortunately only for now.

AJAX is doomed to be replaced, Flash has a very bad reputation and tendency to be rejected, Silverlight is years too late to market and Java on the client web will probably disappear completely shortly after 2010. In other words, for anyone with enough perception to realize this, investing your skills in any of the current client-side technologies seems very bleak.

Fear not however, Chrome OS is scheduled for somewhere in 2010 if I’m not mistaken and with the pace at which companies were moving in 2009 and are moving in 2010 we’re sure to know exactly what’s at stake by the next few months.

In any cases I would be much more excited as a developer to know that I can program something cool that runs native in a browser than to know that I can program something only compatible with Windows, *cough* excuse me, only compatible with the iPad, a.k.a. iPhone OS…

Students of modern education systems today are forced to use the tools the education centers attributed to them. The problem lies within the generality of the programs offered and the inability for students of all genres to choose where such programs will bring them through appropriate choices of tools. Because the available tools to develop projects in high education institutions depend on teacher expertise for evaluation, which is a model based on a hundreds of years old education system, modern technology students keep seeing their talent and choices impeded by these limitations, which ultimately impedes on innovation.

For example, when developing a browser-based game project, several solutions exist today. The most common that comes in mind would be the Adobe Flash Platform, which itself is divided in the Flash Professional authoring tool and the Flex framework. Next up are various solutions, like Microsoft Silverlight or Java Applets and JavaFX, which all offer compelling solutions, some even open source, that can go beyond what is possible on the Flash Platform. Arguably, this all depends on your target market, but for a student aiming to work at a company where Java is the primary language of development, being obligated to program in ActionScript on the Flash Platform impedes on his personal development and his ability to attain his goals, which is in fact counter-educative.

In more extreme cases, you could potentially count tools such as HTML 5 technologies and JavaScript as valuable market options that could prove an extremely good thing to learn for the future of the web. However, the primary source of expertise, graduating students, fails to give track to such nascent technologies and hence slows down technological evolution because the educational institutions they come from refuse to adapt and reform around newer technologies, which is ironic because the same teachers that fail to learn the new technologies often remember the students about how on the market place you have to keep learning new technologies to stay on top. One has to wonder why educational institutions don’t do the same.

Of course, it goes without saying the problem isn’t only restricted to the case of in-browser video games or Internet video streaming technologies. It applies to almost any environment. For example, more design students will be forced to use the Apple Mac platform, while most networking students will be forced to learn Microsoft Windows networking technologies, even if a considerable bulk of the market uses open alternatives like BSD and Linux distributions.

These limitations also have a major impact on the flourishing of open systems like Linux, which end up never getting into educational institutions despite being free and offering the ability for these institutions to lower their cost and in turn lower the amount of taxes paid as well as making education more accessible by lowering tuition fees.

In other words, educational systems should change and become more open to various technologies and guide the students towards choosing the ideal solution for their own career paths. In my opinion at least, this is the way of the Information Age.

While the Qosmio X500 might appear a beautiful beast on this screen,

Toshiba fails miserably at hiding the horrible effects imposed by the poor view angles here:

Ah, sad laptop world…

It’s also ironic that Toshiba prooves at the same time that they don’t have enough money/expertise to host their own video. I don’t know for you, but for me YouTube doesn’t equal hip on a web site, it equals poor independant blogger or something less-than-cool like that.