Tag: opinion

Apple Maps (and user irresponsability) can be deadly!

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Thursday 2012-12-13

It happened near of Mildura, a regional city in the southeast of Australia with hot, semiarid climate. Police officers had to rescue several car drivers who got lost in the middle of nowhere without water, food or even cellphone reception while suffering temperaures as high as 46 Celsius (~115 Fahrenheit) degrees. All these car drivers had in common that they wanted to arrive to this city, they followed the indications given by the Apple Maps application and they got lost in the middle of nowhere.

Mildura on Apple Maps
In this picture, created by the Mildura police, the purple pin shows the actual location of the town and the red one the wrong given by Apple Maps.

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The death of Microsoft’s Silverlight and the Spanish SIGPAC

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Friday 2012-12-07

Mary Jo Foley, a journalist that follows Microsoft at ZDNet.com, informs that ‘Microsoft pulls the plug on its Silverlight.Net site‘. It seems that Silverlight, whose first release dates from year 2007, is dead by the end of 2012:

Microsoft has closed its primary Web resource for its Silverlight browser plug-in and development framework – the Silverlight.Net site – breaking loads of links out there to resources and discussions on Silverlight, as noted by blogger Tim Anderson on ITWriting. Clicking on those links dumps users into a bare-bones Silverlight informational page on Microsoft’s MSDN site.

The move added insult to injury for those developers who are feeling increasingly disenfranchised by Microsoft’s decision to back away from Silverlight.

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A quiz about Apple, the shameless company

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Saturday 2012-08-25

I have a question, for you, smart readers of this humble blog. Maybe one of you can help me.

On August 24th, 2012 a jury in a federal court in California, United States of America, ruled that the South Korean company Samsung violated some of Apple Inc.’s patents. Among the violated patents, some of them are as absurd like a rectangle with round corners.

However, in 1994 Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, claimed that «… we have been always shameless about stealing great ideas.»

So the question is: how can you claim that stealing is great and years later sue a competitor for doing the same you «shameless» did?

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Supporting anti-SOPA Blackout Day

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Tuesday 2012-01-17

I will support anti-SOPA Blackout Day. Thus, on January 18th this blog will go dark from 00h00 to 24h00 UTC… provided the WordPress plugin I have installed works fine. ;-)

Mister Burns likes SOPA!

Added on January 19, 14h21 CET

It seems that the blackout is beginning to yield actual results:

PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed

Members of the Senate are rushing for the exits in the wake of the Internet’s unprecedented protest of the Protect IP Act (PIPA). At least 13 members of the upper chamber announced their opposition on Wednesday. In a particularly severe blow for Hollywood, at least five of the newly-opposed Senators were previously co-sponsors of the Protect IP Act. (Update: since we ran this story, the tally is up to 18 Senators, of which seven are former co-sponsors. See below.)

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arstechnica.com: PIPA support collapses, with 13 new Senators opposed

Added on January 22, 02h11 CET

SOPA, PIPA postponed: Nice work, everyone

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the PROTECT-IP Act, known as PIPA, have both been postponed from being voted on in the House and Senate respectively.

[...]

Though both bills have been shelved, both SOPA and PIPA are far from dead. What is clear, however, is that the bills will not return in their current form.

[...]

This isn’t Washington losing. This is Washington listening to the people that it represents. The delay of any action on SOPA and PIPA is a victory for us all, from news publications to ordinary folks on the street.

Nice work, everyone.

ZDNet.com: SOPA, PIPA postponed: Nice work, everyone

Die, IE6, die: the IE6 countdown

Posted by Diego Alberto Arias Prado – Monday 2011-03-07

Once upon a time, after the first browser war, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) was the king of the web browsers. IE6 was the most used web browser, given not only its technical merits, but also the dominance of Microsoft on the desktop operating system market and its anticompetitive practices.

Bill Gates, the United States v. Microsoft trial

Bill Gates, USA v. Microsoft Trial (picture taken from Wikipedia.org)

IE6, as well as IE5, was a pain for web developers – like me – because of its many and intentional incompatibilities. The additional work needed to make a website viewable with IE6 was error prone, frustrating and time consuming.

The first IE6 beta version was realeased in March 2001. About 51 months later, the first beta of the next major version was released. Meanwhile, IE6 also became obsolete: for instance, other web browsers like Firefox, Opera or Safari featured tabbed browsing or full support for PNG format images, while IE6 didn’t.

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