Google buying Motorola is a strong defensive move against both Microsoft and Apple on two fronts: patents and user experience. Apple is vertically integrated and Microsoft controls Nokia (without having had to buy it). Between that and having filed or acquired a lot of patents, these two pose formidable threats to Android. Buying Motorola lets Google fight both of these threats in one go. As Larry Page’s blog post makes clear, Motorola has a huge trove of mobile IP, having invented the first ...

Google buying Motorola is a strong defensive move against both Microsoft and Apple on two fronts: patents and user experience. Apple is vertically integrated and Microsoft controls Nokia (without having had to buy it). Between that and having filed or acquired a lot of patents, these two pose formidable threats to Android. Buying Motorola lets Google fight both of these threats in one go. As Larry Page’s blog post makes clear, Motorola has a huge trove of mobile IP, having invented the first ...

I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable. Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook. The emails were comma separated. Outlook didn’t like that – and popped up a dialog saying something was wrong, including suggesting that I replace commas with semicolons. I copied the email...

I complained about one pet peeve on Monday (stock certificates for startups) and can’t help myself with another one today: programs that complain about user inputs that are easily fixable. Yesterday I copied a bunch of email addresses from Jobscore and pasted them into the bcc field of an email in Outlook. The emails were comma separated. Outlook didn’t like that – and popped up a dialog saying something was wrong, including suggesting that I replace commas with semicolons. I copied the email...

Unix has some very powerful commands available. For instance, the simple combination of “rm -rf” if invoked by a superuser at the root would pretty much delete every file and directory on the system. Because such power is available systems are often configured to provide for some measure of protection from accidental disaster (e.g. thinking that you are in some directory way down the tree when you invoke rm when in fact you are in the root directory). This week I encountered two situations wh...

Unix has some very powerful commands available. For instance, the simple combination of “rm -rf” if invoked by a superuser at the root would pretty much delete every file and directory on the system. Because such power is available systems are often configured to provide for some measure of protection from accidental disaster (e.g. thinking that you are in some directory way down the tree when you invoke rm when in fact you are in the root directory). This week I encountered two situations wh...

I have been carrying around a Nexus One for a couple of weeks (in addition to my somewhat nervous feeling Blackberry). There is a ton to like about the Nexus. It works fantastically well with all of Google’s services. The setup is a cinch – just sign in with your Google account and let the phone and the cloud do the rest. The screen looks great and transitions between apps are fast. It can run multiple apps simultaneously. The turn-by-turn directions are awesome. Given all that, I find it sur...

I have been carrying around a Nexus One for a couple of weeks (in addition to my somewhat nervous feeling Blackberry). There is a ton to like about the Nexus. It works fantastically well with all of Google’s services. The setup is a cinch – just sign in with your Google account and let the phone and the cloud do the rest. The screen looks great and transitions between apps are fast. It can run multiple apps simultaneously. The turn-by-turn directions are awesome. Given all that, I find it sur...