• Nokia presented the first WP7 phones. The hardware is nice but they won’t be cheap. Sony bought Ericsson out of Sony Ericsson. I don’t see much good coming from that but hey, they probably have a plan.

• ARM is going 64b. That’s clearly for MS but I’m sure Apple will take advantage of that too.

• Remember, your next PC might be a Windows Computer not much different from a XBox.

• Four years after the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said child pornography is great the European Parliament passed a internet censorship bill using child pornography as a straw man. That’s where Europe stands nowadays, you claim something is “for the children” and only 2 MEPs have the guts to vote against. UK Copyright policy is based on made up stuff, we already knew that. PROTECT-IP, SOPA, no uncensored Internet in the US for you even if PROTECT-IP becomes E-PARASITE. You really can’t make this stuff up.

• All this laws are being passed for the children, by people who sanction murdering children and against people who actually hunt and take down pedophiles. Can you please stop using my sons as a banner for your corruption ?

• The iPhone 4S sets new sales record. Apple has real strange flops.

• IceCream is finally out with a new Nexus to go with it. Nothing ground breaking as expected as opposed to VMWare on phones which is … different. Hang tight, the source is coming soon!

• IngSoc is flank speed ahead with full body naked scanners coming to UK train stations. Makes sense, when UK had real terrorism problems with IRA they removed the trash cans. For imaginary terrorism problems they install imaginary security measures. Meanwhile for make believe porn filters make believe experts on the UK censorship plan.

• A Global Warming sceptic decided to run a study on global warming and came back with evidence for warming. That’s science kids. People experiment, come back with data and make conclusions.

• Lets just hope VW makes cars better than IT. Well, I’m sure they do as if they didn’t the damn things would explode if you looked at it funny.

• This is not being a good month for computing. Dennis Ritchie passed way this week. dmr invented C and was a co-conspirator in UNIX so he was involved in almost everything I value in computing.

• iPhone 4S is selling like crazy.

• Oracle wants to bring Java back to the desktop. Whatever guys.

• It was obvious to me 3 years ago Microsoft was cozying up to telcos to screw them over. That’s just the way it is. Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing Mango to Windows Phone.

• Another Berlusconi law lead to wikipedia.it replace all pages with a protest page. This stuff isn’t even news any more. And on jolly Albion major ISPs started a opt-out censorship program. The Resistance is already assembling. And remember that malware/virus/spyware the German Govt came up with for “lawful interception”. Yeah, it was mostly used unlawfully.

• WIPO thinks the Web should have been patented and licensed. That would have been the way to foster development and fast track innovation. Like the saxophone (which apparently was patented). Yes, the president of WIPO said the fastest changing and growing invention in human history didn’t develop as well as an instrument which hasn’t changed in 100 years. Wanna hear something funny ? US Senate is trying to block ACTA in the USA. I wonder what the Obama officials who are oddly close o RIAA/MPAA think about that.

• In USA school fingerprints students, FBI is putting in place faace recognition and DHS is “testing” pre-crime detection. That’s just one day of news. What’s wrong with these people ?

• Steve Jobs passed away this week. A couple of days after the announcement of iPhone 4S.

• Samsung and Google were suppose to announce Prime and 4.0 this week but they canceled.

• I’m sure other things went on this week.

The news of Steve’s death were expected but still came as a shock for everybody. Like if the guy was holding on for one last product launch.

Lots of people wrote extensive, thoughtful and well written eulogies. I will just remark what most impressed me about Steve Jobs, he was a master of simplicity. Simplicity is hard, everyone who tries to write software knows this. For me simplicity is really hard, I’m a crufter so seeing someone churn out products by removing, not adding, features is like magic.

Steve came back from NeXT to Apple, brought UNIX and built an aesthetic and simple UI around it. Then he did the same to the mp3 player and to the smart phone. My first analysis of the iPhone was focused on what it lacked, not what it had. It sounded pretty foolish as soon as iPhones started filtering into people’s hands and it became obvious it wasn’t missing anything. Everything that couldn’t be made perfect was removed. Deliberately. That kind of focus and courage is unique.

• New Kindles, including a $200 colour android based tablet that will totally corner that segment. Even if you try to argue the iPad as some competition in the $600 range, have you looked at $200-$300 android tablets ? So the Kindle Fire will be a tool for a) buy more stuff from Amazon; b) let Amazon look at all your web traffic with Silk’s accelerated mode which works just like Opera Mini but in Amazon’s cloud. Having said that I can’t wait to get one.

• PlayBook is now $300 following the successful footsteps of the TouchPad. That is of course cause people noticed the Kindle Fire is basically the same hardware as the PlayBook and costs a lot less. And probably lets you read your email.

• Intel drops MeeGo and merges it with something else thats backed by someone. It’s not like anyone really cares at this point.

• ACTA was signed this weekend. This is the product of current Western democracy, an international treaty written by private companies, pushed by unelected government officials, hidden and lied about to the general public. The icing on the cake is USA, the country pushing ACTA and trying to make it automatically national law is backing away from it and making it non binding for them as making it a treaty would require passing it through the Senate where it would most likely fail. So the rest of us are just cannucks.

• Didn’t you miss a funny “Microsoft security tools kill X product” ? Well, now MS is removing Chome from people’s computers. Ballmer is so back.