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”.