Nokia buys Trolltech

For 105 million euros, apparently.

The main interest is presumably Trolltech's Qtopia, but hopefully it's also good news for their Qt product (Qtopia is based on Qt) and KDE (a community-developed free software desktop also based on Qt) as well. I'd expect Nokia to be able to make a better fist of KDE than Sun has with Gnome, should they choose to do so.

Perhaps it wouldn't be altogether too fanciful to see this as Nokia's answer to Google's Android. It's interesting that Google Earth is said to be written in Qt — I wonder if there's any Trolltech technology in Android at all?

Trolltech's stock price shows something typical for a new technology company: a nice, steady decline from its initial IPO after a (very) brief burst of enthusiasm in the hours immediately following it, and reaching some kind of support level at about May 2007. There was still a slight decline going on even after this, so I doubt I'd have picked it. I wonder if there's now going to be a burst of purchases in this sector?

Pat Robertson on why the sky is blue

A morning surf brought me to Phil Karn's site, wherein he hat tips James Randi for this quote from the ever-amazing Pat Robertson, explaining why the sky is blue:

I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple to blue, and it has to do with where the light is. You know, the farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing off this earth, uh, the darker it gets . . . I think if you look at the color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on out, it's the shifting of color. We mentioned before about the stars singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors.

The thing is, even if by some extreme chance everything else Robertson believes were completely true, I still wouldn't expect him to be able to articulate his beliefs faithfully, based on that example.

Android

If Android does well in the mobile phone arena then it will pretty soon move to set-top boxes and, eventually, perhaps even as a native OS on a PC near you.

I've been looking a little bit at Google's Android OS for mobile phones. It seems to use a Be-developed technology called OpenBinder that puts a rich object layer between the kernel and the applications (including the OS-level applications themselves). OpenBinder handles threading and IPC too, and seems to make it natural to use a multithreaded approach to the UI - something you're explicity told *not* to do in the less-capable UI development environments that I'm used to.

Just read this fascinating interview (with Dianne Hackborn, a key engineer in the creation of PalmOS Cobalt) for much more about OpenBinder — a name that I think we're all going to hear more often in the next few years.

One of the most intriguing paragraphs in the article is where Dianne states that OpenBinder lets "an application ... put parts of itself it may not trust (a web browser UI, video player, etc.) into a separate process without any visible difference seen by the user". Now let's think... Who might want to be able to have applications distributed between your mobile phone and its own hyperfarm of servers... Why, Google might! If you think of the way Google's been going with online disk space and online apps for your browser, it's not so far fetched to think that one day soon those browser apps might just be front ends for OpenBinder objects running natively on their server farms, and that you'll also be able to access them from your mobile phone — not just from your mobile phone's browser but from its native applications too.

Dianne states in the interview that the Be engineers hadn't yet network-enabled OpenBinder. I presume Google have rectified that situation. Hmm, I would dearly love to know if perhaps OpenBinder forms part of the heavily-modified Linux distribution that they are supposed to run internally. It may be one of their secret weapons against Microsoft: a better .Net than .Net...

I also wonder if the use of OpenBinder is linked to the "All applications are equal" philosphy that developers were shaking their heads over when the Android SDK first came out.

And then, and then... If Google know where your phone is, they also know who else is nearby, and applications could potentially distribute themselves over a nearby mesh of mobile phones. Great for games and business cards, less good for your medical records.

It also becomes apparent that the mobile phone "emulator" in the Android SDK could turn out to be a Trojan horse against Microsoft. There's nothing that limits OpenBinder to a quarter-vga screen. I doubt there's any hard limit in the rest of the Android SDK either. So, what if some genius hacker changes it to a 1280 x 1024 display? Suddenly you've got a VM and a UI as good as anything in Java or Flash/Flex running full screen on your PC, with network communication and distributed execution built in.

If you read to the bottom of the article linked above, you'll see that Dianne went on to work at ... Google. Hmm. We're used to thinking of Microsoft as the ocean, isolating and gradually drowning out everyone else. Suddenly they look as though the water is rising on them. There are already more mobile phones than PCs; if Android does well in the mobile phone arena then it will pretty soon move to set-top boxes and, eventually, perhaps even become the native OS on a PC near you.