• Verizon is hellbent on dragging USA away from mobile darkages and promises 30% LTE coverage till the end of 2010.

• Nintendo promised a 3D DS next year. And that’s no-glasses 3D too! Meanwhile, iPhoneOS quadrupled gaming share in a year. Granted, this is 2008 to 2009 so it went from 5% to 19%. The interesting thing is while the DS took a small hit from 75% to 70%, the PSP went from 20% to 11% which means the “market cap” shrinked to half.

• Google escalated by serving .cn requests from HongKong. HongKong is already a sore point with the PRC so this could go south.

• The Guardian says Israel cloned real British passports to use in wet ops. This is the super safe passports designed with the sole purpose of keeping us safe from terrorists. Meanwhile, a airport worker took naked pics of a coworker using the “security” scanner and cellphone. The main difference between the photographed worker and your wife and she’s traumatized and will probably get a fat check while your wife would be a terrorist and be detained without accusation for an undetermined period of time. Are we safe yet ?

• A German organization of child-abuse survivors [spoke out against censorship in the name of “protecting children”]. I’ve always said child pornography is used as a strawman for political censorship and economic interest and that’s absolutely morally despicable. The victims add censorship actually works for the aggressors by hiding the crimes and not doing anything effective to stop the practice. Are you actually against child abuse ? Then pressure for a real investigation of the Catholic church.

• Funny things about Microsoft Windows Phone 7 series, turns out it doesn’t do copy’n’paste and handles singletasking like PalmOS. While Microsoft dreams of world domination Palm’s stock took a plunge.

• Turns out people like Disney (oh the irony!) made piracy sexy and MPAA/RIAA don’t like that so they’re finding a new word to describe online private sharing of copyrighted materials. My suggestion, scurvy rascalling! And on more shenanigans, Google claims Viacom did some undercover uploading of its own while crying foul about “illegal uploads”.

• On censorship, UK joins the ranks of Venezuela by approving the “Digital Economy Bill” which is about blocking sites and disconnecting random people instead of digital economy.

• The US Intelligence community tried to take down Wikileaks. This in itself isn’t much of a surprise but it’s amusing one of the reasons invoked is countries such as China, North Korea and Russia block access to the site.

I’ve looked at the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator from the SDK and general assumption of the UI is: The user has a giant mental map of the UI landscape and navigates throughout the menu real-estate moving the phone screen viewport like a window.
While different, I’m fairly unconvinced it’s any good.

Singletasking. No copy’n’paste. Push Notifications. Different UI. Centrally controlled single source for apps. Standardized hardware platform. Capacitive touchscreen. Free (as in beer) SDK. 3D Games. 2010 launch.

Uh, what do you mean 2010 ? I bet up to that last one you were thinking I was describing iPhoneOS 2.0. But no, I’m describing Windows Phone 7 Series. That’s a whole lot of embracing, and only 2 years delayed.

I’m still looking for the extend. Don’t tell me it’s the develop for Phone/PC/XBOX stuff cause that’s just going to make me smile faintly.

Em tempo de PEC é sempre bom lembrar o PREC e o José Mario Branco sobre o FMI em 1979. Letra aqui e aqui e música parte 1 e parte 2.

A situação é feia e exige sacrifícios. O PEC é um plano de sacrifícios. Tive acesso à tabela que o Governo usou como guia para conceber o PEC.

É simples perceber quem é que tem que ser sacrificado. Ainda me resta algum dinheiro para pagar os milhares de milhões desaparecidos na banca xico esperta, os TGVs que não vou usar e os robalos que não vou comer. Pago por mim e pelos que não pagam e deviam pagar para dar dinheiro aos que não deviam receber.

A lição está aprendida. Na próxima voto no PCP. Se é para queimar que ardam todos e que o fogaréu dê espectáculo. Já tenho slogan e tudo:
“PCP, ninguém se fica a rir”.

Microsoft is very excited about unified development for PC, XBOX and Mobile. They’re talking about the exact same game, with minor adjustments, on all 3 platforms. Most people can see some kind of fault with that reasoning. They can’t.

One size fits all tends to end up with whatever the worst platform can handle. This kind of works from XBOX and PC, with the XBOX being a crappy PC and PC developers being used to develop for crappy PCs. It doesn’t exactly work cause controls on a PC are much richer than on an XBOX. And console games are simpled down versions os PC games anyway.
But let’s face it, a Snapdragon mobile phone isn’t exactly a crappy PC. It’s not even a PC, it’s just a low power CPU with lowend 3D graphics. You’ll end up playing on your 2000USD PC a game your phone can render.

What works is having, not versions, but aspects of the game. You play some parts on the XBOX or the PC and some parts on the mobile. Example, on an adventure game you play some wicked 3D combats on XBOX and do your adventuring on the mobile taking advantage of all the nice things a mobile has, such as a touch screen and mobility. This isn’t rocket science, Nintendo did this with Zelda on Gamecube+GBA (expect the cable made it awkward), and in the end what you need for a compelling game is making the best experience possible all around, not go easy on the developers.

• Big news this week was Apple, in a kind of deuche bag move, decided to sue HTC out of existance instead of going after Google like a big boy. This is obviously a signal to Motorola and Android loving US carriers. On more Apple news, Steam is coming to OSX.

• Verizon promises LTE overlay of the 3G network by 2013. They should probably attack non 3G markets first but hey, it’s their network!

• On a greatly overhyped move Nokia added Skype to the Ovi Store making it easier for regular folks to use it. This is not the carrier armageddon it was touted to be but it’s a sure signal Nokia doesn’t want to depend a whole lot on carriers for the future. On more good Nokia news, non-DRM is coming to Comes with Music.

• On DRM news, Ubisoft’s online DRM got cracked within the day. Problems affecting the DRM servers shut paying customers out while unpaying uncustomary enjoyed and Ubisoft claims it was a DDoS and even the singleplayer boxed versions download parts of the game so pirates don’t get the complete game. Man, I almost wish Ubisoft had something I actually want to play. Remember kids current DRM is just about annoying YOU.

• Turns out cyberwas was not all it was up to be. Who coulda’ve thunk it ?? There is no cyberwar

• And after closing up shop in Portugal Blockbuster is further going bust in the US. And cause paying customers really love to be treated like criminals late fees are back cause you know, Netflix and iTunes doesn’t exist in Blockbuster’s world.

One of the reasons Microsoft is on the way down is they gave up on shipping products. The last few things that made a blip don’t actually exist. Let’s review. There’s Surface which never could make it as a product, there’s project Natal which was announced 18 months ago for 4 months ago, Windows Phone 7 Series which will exist in real hardware at best, next Christmas and now Courier which they promise will be really awesome if it ever exists.

I can imagine Ballmer standing before the Board going “We’re going to make a killing next Christmas, just you wait. We have this really really amazing stuff just about ready to come out”.

• Bloom Box claims to have develop a miracle fuel cell. Other people say otherwise.

• On ACTA news, the EU Commission claims not to accept the disconnect provsionins. As an EUian I’m fairly concerned about how that will translate into action but things are looking up and public pressure seems to be having effect. If you’re inclined to read such things there’s a leaked EU memo about the proceedings here and Michael Geist’s digest is here

• The US IP Alliance says using Open Source Software is equal to not respecting copyright. Maybe they should ripoff some “if you use OSS the communists win” posters. For the record, OSS is based on copyright and only copyright law enables OSS licensing.

• Living upside down probably causes strange blood flow to Australian heads which push on stupid censorship. To the point of hamfisted, dorky, attempts to censorship self references to censorship. Maybe the Communications Minister should just send itself down the memory hole and he’d all pretend this never happened.

• You might remember last week news broke about peeping tom school officials. Recaping, this is a public school that forced children to have and use the spying equipment and banned personal non-compromised computers. The FBI is looking into the case and the dorky peeping tom principal confused eating candy with popping pills. Without much surprise ACLU and EFF are having a field day and pointing out you can legally videotape anyone secretly as long as you don’t capture sound on the USA due to laws quirkiness. Meanwhile the peeping tom says she’s not a peeping tom.