Beranger is ranting about patent trolls again (this time Kaspersky Labs) – so, while I find this whole patent trolling utterly stupid, I just gotta realize, I pretty much don’t care about it anymore. Linux is “mostly” protected as long as it is not mainstream and for the rest: give me a break, They won’t patent protect the freaking wheel (besides we’re talking about IT, bunch of ones and zeroes, it’s not human lives)! I’m not in the innovating business and if all hell breaks loose, like I don’t know, we end up having one OS only, well, it would suck. But that’s all. Many things suck yet we manage somehow, usually without fixing it, mostly because we’re just too tied up in our small crap powerstruggles from everyday life to corporation business.
Posts Tagged ‘future’
Patent trolls in the IT world
Sunday, February 15th, 2009Second life first (and last) impressions
Sunday, May 4th, 2008I downloaded Second Life and gave it a try; since being a fan of fps games – I won’t beat about the bush – the disgusting look of the virtual world uglyville really really surprised me. I know about Havok and how hard it is to manage entities in such a big world (the islands), but graphics was glitchy, unstable and downright as ugly as good old vrml. The polycount is ridiculously high and of course they target the average Joe, who knows nothing about lowpoly modelling (when a tutorial shows how to make a necklace out of toroids I’m getting utterly sad), but who is willing to pay to upload a photo of his dog or to customize his hairdo.
JavaFX and others
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007Lately I checked out Air, Flex, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight and JavaFX; still I’m not satisfied. Air is pretty cool, but mostly (at least for the flash part) is tied to Flex, which is not that cheap for me (though I like the new direction with the Eclipse plugin); OpenLaszlo is very tempting and I might install Tomcat just for fun – this is better than Silverlight, which not just costs a helluva lot (you need Vista Enterprise / XP Pro, Visual Studio and probably Expression for the chrome) but also is fully tied to the browser and still smells like alpha tech (I know, I know, it’s RC1) – on the other hand competes with Flash and has some good potential. JavaFX is very cool (easy to deploy, good range of developer tools and is free), BUT it is as slow as crap. I can hear the Java folks whining, that Java is not slow; well, I really don’t give a damn about Java, but what I see is that JavaFX demos are slow, clunky, eat up cpu and feel unresponsive. On an amd64 3200, with 2gb ram. So Flash wins hands down compared to JFX and I think, Adobe still has a very strong advantage compared to the others.
Conclusion? Adobe has the lead here, while Microsoft really really got out of innovation (what’s this major shit with os-level ad-injection and drm secure channels?). Sun is waking up, but Java starts with a handycap which it really deserves.
Fat clients are back
Thursday, July 26th, 2007Saw some Opera fanblog yesterday, where these cute “opboys” had been praising their “widgets” and how Gears is crap, while Opera is superior. We had one fanboy around, for a very very short period of time if you understand what I say, but that’s not the point. What is? Javascript is in the phase of rebirth and is very close to be an alternative to flash/air/silverlight/whatever. The fat client is back, no matter what you do – people (including our clients) like the Web, they like their browser and they treat it as a platform independent application launcher. Whether it is good or not, I will not judge now, but unless some clever guy presses the big red button, the net is here to stay. Right now Tamarin is getting closer and we can only hope, Ms will realize soon who’s browser is the bottleneck for innovation.