End of the year ramblings...

Another year gone, and another year where corporations try to ruin a new technology. Amazon Kindle, allows Amazon to delete books without your permission. Many authors had their books deleted from customers Kindles for various reasons, all of which never had any moral right to delete them from a Private persons device without permission. This pushes people to go and pirate books. Why? This is the only way you can get a book and not have someone delete it without your permission.

The iPad was released, and then 10,000 Android copies trying to catch up to the iPad were released and failed. They fail on being badly designed hardware, horribly old and locked down android, or are way overpriced. Samsung chose to price themselves higher than an iPad. Other chose to price at too low of a price point or try to lock out the users. All of them failed.

The talking heads on the news claim the economy is recovering, reality shows that it is not. 3D tv explodes onto the market with rampant failure. The TV sets cause headaches in some and the glasses cost $150.00 or more. None of the hardware or systems are comparable causing almost no adoption except by those that think they have to have the latest thing. This does not stop the marketing engines from plastering the word "3D" on everything they can find. real home 3D is still at least 3 years off.

Ubuntu linux releases it's best Linux desktop yet. XBMC releases the most polished release ever bringing the world of high end home on demand video to the poor ($599 for a 2 room setup versus $19,000 for what was available previously) Google TV was released with great ideals and was only used as an example of how greedy corporations are... Within weeks of the release all network websites were redesigned to block it. Comcast afraid of the strong competition from Netflix uses corporate extortion tactics to either block them or make them pay for access to their customers forcing the FCC to pass a net neutrality law in hopes of blocking such tactics in the future. Problem is the law is poorly written and allows giant loopholes.

Overall technology did not change much. The potential was there. But really silly reasons got in the way. I predict that the next year will be more of the same. Lawsuits to protect old business practices from innovation. Greed will win over progress. Ignorance and Apathy will allow marketing machines to continue to drive the public away from the issues that affect them; and redirect their focus on the next new shiny to distract them.

I really hope that the world proves me wrong. There is potential to do great things out there if the public stands up and demands that they are allowed to happen.

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