Good
morning ... afternoon??? We're in the middle of a Category 5 Death Storm (tm) so I guess I lost track of time. Snow all day. 12-15 inches. Yea.
So. What's going on the world today?
eWeek's Don Reisinger is
calling on Microsoft to oust CEO Steve Ballmer. Sadly, he's doing so from one of eWeek's
patentedly lame web slideshows. Seriously. Do these things ever take more than 5 minutes to make? And doesn't such a stupid way of writing this sort of usurp the seriousness of this issue? This would have been fine as a normal article. Except you'd see how short it is.
Microsoft's Tim Sneath has
a hilarious retort to
Google's decision to strip industry standard H.264 from its Chrome browser. That is, he compared the decision to the world dropping English for Esperanto. After all, Esperanto has over 10,000 speakers ("broad adoption"). Good stuff.
And for you conspiracy theorists in the audience, Beatweek (whatever that is)
wonders aloud whether Google's H.264 decision wasn't
payback because of Verizon's move to adopt the iPhone 4. (Convolution explanation: Apple is among the many companies that owns licensing rights to H.264.)
Microsoft patched some bugs last night. Which explains why
my PC rebooted and was sitting at the logon screen when I woke up. Sigh.
Speaking of those fixes, it turns out
the widely-expected Internet Explorer fix wasn't among them.
TechCrunch
says that
the next version of Android for smart phones is codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. So does that mean that Honeycomb (v3.0) is only for tablets? Google? Bueller? Anyone?
AppleInsider has
posted one analyst's opinion about
Apple's quarterly sales from Q4 2010: 6 million iPads, 16 million iPhones, and 4.2 million Macs. If the iPad figure is correct, Apple sold about 13.5 million iPads for the year. That's reasonable, and at the top end of my own estimate. I have no opinions about the other products.
By the way, I actually like AppleInsider quite a bit.
I don't read too many Apple/Mac sites, well, virtually none really. But I like that one. I also like
Cult of Mac, which is really odd, since founder Leander Khaney once wrongly accused me of making up something about HP's involvement with Apple during that dark period where HP had licensed the iPod. Sorry, Leander. It's still not true. But I like your site. :) On that note, most Mac/Apple sites are crap, either because they're just toeing the company line to stay in favor (Macworld US) or are partisan rhetoric blogs driven more by hate of the other side than anything else. I mean, seriously. How many 4.5 "mouses" can MacWorld award to Apple products?
Apple CEO Steve Jobs' 2010 compensation remains
$1. He's worthy every penny too.
According to Industry Gamers (because NPD is no longer provided hard, cold numbers),
the Xbox 360 outsold the PlayStation 3 two-to-one in December in the US. I guess we'll see: Microsoft will absolutely publish their own numbers, Nintendo already has, and Sony most likely will as well. "Xbox 360 saw a 91% boost to 2.5 million units sold, whereas Sony's PS3 fell 12% and sold just 1.2 million," it says.
OK, back to work. And then the snow removal begins. Ugh.
