CrankyRants.com

Don’t feel like waiting the few weeks to get an iPhone? Feel a little queasy about pumping more smugness into Apple’s already bloated sense of self by giving them a ton of money for little more than an ipod with a speaker?

Then you need to check out the newest phone from HTC, the “HTC Touch”, released Wednesday to T-Mobile customers. Sporting a 2.8-inch, 320-by-240, 65K-color touch screen and Windows Mobile 6, the HTC Touch offers many of the snazzy finger sweeps and swoops touted by Jobs and the iPhone as “groundbreaking”.

With the HTC Touch, a user can scroll through contacts, songs, or documents with simple finger movements, and can easily sync tunes and files with Windows Media Player and Vista systems.

No doubt Apple will find some way of suing for infringement of the technology that they rightfully stole themselves. Of course, Apple has a way of doing that. Xerox Parc point-and-click interface ring a bell, Stevie?

We’ve all seen the newest head-slapper spark across the network in Twitter.com, and have wondered along with “why didn’t I think of that” the similar but more important question… “why the hell is that so popular?”

For those who haven’t experienced it, Twitter is a mini-blog. A tool to tell the world what you are doing every minute of your day.

“I’m writing a wicked-cool SQL statement right now!”

“I like my raisin bagel. A Lot!”

“I wish my cat wouldn’t look so sad when I eat my raisin bagel and not give her any!”

…and so-forth. This is what we’ve come to. For those who don’t want to go the LifeCasters route like Justin.TV and his Truman-Show side show, there is Twitter. Here’s the catch, though. Unless you are signed up with friends who care about you and your eating habits… no one will ever see it. The content isn’t really worthy of indexing by reputable search engines, so it is literally the same thing as opening your car window on the way home from work and shouting to the busy highway… “I stapled 20 sets of documents today! Wooo!”

The guy in the semi next to you might hear you, and might even alter his personal life… changed forever by your impassioned exclamations. Or he might just return to his cheeseburger dinner and roll the windows up.

For the tens of thousands who are now regular Twitterheads, it’s a spiritual experience and there is no swaying them from their path. And thanks to cool tools like TwitterVision and TwitterTroll.com, the anonymous can be immortalized, if no more than for a few seconds or a few days. But in the end you have to wonder who has the patience and stamina to keep up with the work after the novelty has worn off. Find out at www.twitter.com/crankyrants. I’ll bet it doesn’t take long.
 

“No, really. Our deal with Microsoft will really help the open-source community. Really! Look how much Microsoft has helped the Java cause!”

That is, essentially, what Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos has frantically claimed, flanked by massive military brutes wearing black shades and windows-logo cufflinks. Under a new deal announced Monday, Xandros and Microsoft agreed to a broad set of joint technology and marketing initiatives. The companies plan to develop software that will link Xandros’ System Management tools with Microsoft’s System Center with plans to give IT departments an easier way to manage their combined environments.

More troubling, however, is the fact that Microsoft will extend “patent covenants” to Xandros’ Linux customers, waving its right to sue them for using what the company claims is Microsoft technology embedded in Linux. “For users, it’s a way of saying that if sparks fly between Linux and Microsoft, they have insurance,” said Typaldos.

Obviously, the open-source community is pissed. This “deal with the devil” plan all but puts another nail in the argument that Linux does not use Microsoft Patents, as has been argued in the Novell case. In response, they are re-working the GPL license to prevent future deals. Under the third version of the General Public License, expected to be published in final form this month by the Free Software Foundation, similar deals that were not inked by March 28 are forbidden. As a result, it would appear that Xandros will not be allowed to distribute open source code licensed under GPLv3 because of its relationship with Microsoft.

Typaldos doesn’t seem worried, stating “If you are a businessperson, you can’t worry about every eventuality.”

Thus the commercialization of Open Source code has taken another leap forward, screwing everything good about it in the process. No great surprise, I suppose. But that doesn’t make it any easier to accept.