A guy walks into a hospital with a broken arm and a broken leg. The doctor goes "We can fix you, but it'll cost you an arm and a leg."

RIM's Revolutionary All-Original New Phone

Without spending any unnecessary time on making unnecessary fun of RIM's dire state of competitiveness, their ridiculous "Wake Up" ad campaign in Australia, or their business plan of acquiring better third party developer support by outfitting them with "very, very stripped down" versions of the phone...

...To the left you will see what the above mentioned phone looks like. To the right is a totally unrelated phone.

Gruber on Microsoft and Skype

Microsoft should just buy Skype so they can make sure the Windows Phone version is top-notch.

Good one!

My theory is that Microsoft considers Skype an equity rather than a product to integrate into their software, or a resource of talented developers.

Auto-Installed Malware Hits Macs

Be afraid. Be very afraid. We haven't heard of such things since the good ol' days of Windows 95 and IE6, but now there's an auto-installed trojan on the loose, and millions of Macs are infected.

The malware affects OS X users who use Safari with Java enabled. Follow through here to check whether your machine is infected.

The new iPad and "competition".

The new iPad was announced yesterday, and although I'm not in the market for one myself, I consider this the one that is really worth getting. The two major improvements are a Retina display and a good camera, likely the same as the one found in iPhone 4S. Those two things were critically missing in the previous iteration. Sure, a faster processor and 4G LTE wireless network support are always welcome, as well as the numerous software improvements.

Meanwhile, the press are split into two factions: Apple admirers and Apple opponents. The latter group is currently reporting their usual crazy statements like this one:

For Apple’s rivals, most notably Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., the incremental improvements in the latest iPad may be just the opportunity they need to establish themselves as legitimate competitors to the world’s most valuable company.

This corporate bullshit talk sounds very familiar to me. Spoken from first person, it's a denial of one's own poor performance. Notice how the article is not even denying that the new iPad will dominate the market; instead, it uses ambiguous lingo to get you to think so. All for a good cause, I guess. The cause, of course, is making money from serving advertisement to people who read the article.

I'll go ahead and make a statement of my own: if Apple hadn't come out with a new iPad this year at all, they would still dominate the market with their old tablets. iPad 2 is orders of magnitude better than anything else on the tablet market today. In fact, Apple created the market, and pretty much owns it. There is no competition. As popular as Kindle Fire has been, it is not competing with the iPad; it is competing with Kindle and other e-readers. The reason for that is that while Kindle Fire is a decent e-reader, it is horrible for pretty much anything else.

You can lead your horse to water, and eat it too.

Sophie Madeleine / Happy People

Yes, happy people refers to people who listen to Sophie Madeleine's wonderful tunes. But in this case, Sophie Madeleine is opening for a band called Happy People. Notice the difference in capitalization.

The show is happening this Friday, 8 P.M. at the Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg, and will also feature Patrick McGrath and Mother Moon. Come for the hipster spotting, stay for the show! See you there!

93 North 6th Street

Brooklyn, NY 11211

(718) 302-1180

Over 100,000 gather to protest rigged elections.

Moscow, Saharov Avenue, December 24th 2011. The wide city street, wide enough to fit about 20 car lanes, is completely filled with people. So completely filled, in fact, that my blog cannot contain them within bounds! These people are protesting the falsified elections that favored the United Russia party, and the impending indefinite reign of dictator Vladimir Putin.

December 24th Protest in Moscow (Via Yuga)

There seems to be a debate about how many people actually showed up to the protest. The figures in different reports vary between 29,000 and 120,000. I did some approximate head counting and math myself, and I'm estimating that there are about 108,000 people in this picture. Meanwhile, Belorussian TV is reporting that the protest was a total failure, and only hundreds of people showed up instead of thousands.

Newsflash: Putin's party steals votes.

Of course we already knew that, but this time there's paperwork to back it up.

Official ballot count, as indicated in the paperwork:

1. Communist Party of Russian Federation - 285
2. United Russia - 271
3. Just Russia - 218
4. Apple - 167
5. Liberal Democratic Party of Russia - 133
6. Right Cause - 16
7. Patriots of Russia - 15

Numbers reported by the Central Voter Commission:

1. United Russia - 662
2. Communist Party of Russian Federation - 295
3. Liberal Democratic Party of Russia - 133
4. Just Russia - 118
5. Apple - 67
6. Right Cause - 16
7. Patriots of Russia

Vladimir Putin's party, United Russia, clearly stole 391 votes. That's a lot more than they had.

If that's not enough, here's a screen capture from a news program reporting voter turnout, with the total making up 147% of the population!

Pulling the plug on Google Wave.

Google Wave has been in a terminal coma for over a year now, and Google is finally disconnecting the life support:

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team