[Thu Sep 23 20:50:19 CEST 2010]

Browsing around and reading some of the mailing lists I subscribe to, I came across this document listing the top 25 most dangerous software errors. Quite interesting, I think. {link to this story}

[Sun Sep 12 12:50:19 CEST 2010]

Now, this is interesting and, to some extent, unexpected. According to eWeek, Google Android may overtake both Blackberry and iPhone in the short run. This is no easy feat, taking into account how quickly the iPhone is growing. However, the development may happen as soon as the end of this very same year, when the Android OS will overtake both the Apple iOS and the BlackBerry to become the second best sold operating system for mobile devices after Symbian. Not bad at all for the new kid on the block, especially taking into account that it is open software. {link to this story}

[Tue Sep 7 18:50:29 CEST 2010]

Although the news piece was published in July, I have not heard about this until now that a friend brought it up to me. Apparently, Dell's fraud settlement had the side-effect of publizicing Intel's monopolistic practices:

On Thursday, Dell agreed to pay a settlement for fraudulent accounting from 2001 to 2006. The company admitted no wrongdoing, as is the customer in such settlements.

Intel was Dell's most important component supplier. Every tean years or so, Intel unveils a truly competitive processor architecture, from which the company reaps the reward for several years. The 80386 in 1986 and the Pentium Pro in 1995, the fastest chip in the world at the time, are the prime examples. But there are times when Intel isn't so competitive. This was certainly the case when AMD introduce the Athlon in 2000 and attacked the server market with the 64-bit Opteron in 2005. Against Opteron, Intel could only respond with an ageing 32bit architecture based on P6, and an esoteric boutique processor, the Itanic. Intel was loathe to see its key customers acknowledge its rival's competitiveness.

So the supplier made financial arrangement (in the form of credit memos rather than "payments") to ensure its number one customer maintained exclusivity. These had been going on for many years in the form of "Market Development Funds" —but new inducements (initially dubbed MOAP, or Mother Of All Programs) were introduced in around 2001, on top of the MDF programme. These were so great that over a five-year payment, the supplier ensured the purchaser traded in the black for five years.

Who is going to say no to such a deal? Even more important, who can deny that similar deals are not going on to this day? Because the problem, it seems to me, is that we continuously read about these issues in reference to the recent past. However, in a few years we will see news published about whatever shady deals the large corporations are doing today. In other words, we are constantly catching up with these guys. "Free market", they call it. {link to this story}