A number of open source pantywaists are getting their knickers in a right sheepshank over the burgeoning alliance between champeen of open source code, Google (really? Tell me and the rest of the community out there, what’s the secret algorithm, then, Squirrel Boy?), and proprietary graphic media overlords Adobe (you know, they didn’t invent Flash, they only bought the company that invented the stuff). It’s no secret that there is going to be netbooks and tablets by Christmas which will support Flash running the Chrome OS and be out there competing and getting a fair share of what traditionally had been Windows (and Linux’s) share of the market. Part of the scuttlebutt about that fabled meeting between Dear Leader and Squirrel Boy on the coffee shop patio touched on how Google is going to be influencing Adobe on improving the code in Flash, perhaps finally making it open source, though I wouldn’t bet on Flash going GPL or LGPL, probably closer to MPL. Another part of the scuttlebutt is that Jobs wanted it confirmed by looking straight in Squirrel Boy’s face whether or not Google and Adobe has been feeling each other out for eventual merger. (You’d think the part of the reason Jobs is abandoning Adobe is because Google is embracing it ?) Say what you will about Squirrel Boy, though, the engineers at Google insist on writing tight elegant code that gets peer reviewed to death before it goes out into the wild. Adobe, Microsoft and even Apple, on the other hand, have been known to release unsecure code, either knowingly or unknowingly, until some white, black or gray hat hacker informs the community, the company involved or the rest of the world, forcing a quick (or not so quick) patch. If Google’s engineers get to fiddle underneath the hood of Adobe Flash, one of two things may happen: 1.) They’ll probably think, “What a load of crud!”, throw the whole thing out and insist on starting from scratch, or 2.) pare down and eliminate all the buggy and useless stuff and make Flash both speedy and secure. I’m betting on the first option, myself. A third unstated option may be, why not stick with HTML 5****, and work on making that work more smoothly, more quickly and more secure, and to hell with Flash, Silverlight, Pivot and JavaFX? If that option crops up, I’d blame the blind idealists within Google’s code monkey tribe. Part of what makes Google successful is that they used open source code from day one in their operation and are now the eighty ton King Kong in the free and open source world, paying for and dictating the direction of where a lot of that code should go and that’s okay for most developers (except for a few justified paranoid cases out there). Microsoft is failing because they own the code they roll out and want to make the whole world use and pay for that code through the nose and dictate how the users employ the code. Then they ditch or disable that code just enough that you have to buy an upgrade that does exactly the same thing. People are getting sick and tired of that, especially since the Redmond brand of code is really, really, really sloppy, is still buggy and gets in the users way. People buy into Apple’s stuff because it’s code looks cool and elegant and doesn’t get in anybody’s way when they wanna’ do something (most of the time). People don’t mind upgrading, in fact, line up for days in anticipation of the new stuff. Google’s stuff is simple and just works. And if there’s a problem or the stuff don’t fly, out it goes, on to the next project.  Adobe’s stuff is slow, unwieldy and complicated. Now it needs a smart injection soon, especially if enough iPads take off to seriously influence how developers use video and graphics on the web. Who knows, if Google fixes Flash to the satisfaction of a certain man in Cupertino ….

****The HTML5 editor is Ian Hickson of Google, Inc. Just thought you ought to know, folks. So, that’s another reason Dear Leader may have been having that nice chat with Squirrel Boy.

Gizmodo reports the Apple CEO met Google’s CEO today at Calafia (run by former Google chef Charlie Ayers) in the Town and Country shopping center in Palo Alto. Update: Body language analysis here.

Heil, Schmidt!

You know, a company is only as good or as bad as the people behind it. And right now, Google is clearly schizophrenic. Sergey and Larry, they’re still idealists, they really believe their company can be good, not evil, while the guy running the operation for them, Squirrel Boy, is no better than than the guy described in this posting by Dear Leader – and in all fact, is probably worse. He’s got one recently retired Yahoo engineer thinking of him in terms of Hitler – which means Eric better hire a personal bomb removal squad to precede him before he enters any room –

For a price, this can be directed at almost any private citizen within continental USA

though these days, people are more likely to use one of these babies, if they grease the right palms in the Defense Department or the CIA or even the guys that manufacture them. Actually, Eric is reminding me a lot of Richard Nixon and his crew. Very sneaky, underhanded, lot of dirty tricks and constant denials, despite the evidence. For instance, if you’ve got a web presence but somehow rubbed Eric or one of his upper level minions the wrong way – congratulations! – you’ve made the infamous Google blacklist – which means you don’t don’t show up at all on Google web search, unless you’ve got a set of lawyers more squirrelly than Google’s. Then, of course, we all remember whenever you did a web search for news of the iPad in the first few days after its debut, nothing but negative reviews and so-so reports at the top of the search, while the search results with negative reviews of the Nexus One were absolutely buried. Now if this doesn’t come off as monopolistic anti-competitive behavior, I don’t know what does – and I know this behavior is monopolistic and anti-competitive.

Schmidt is shit! Schmidt is shit! Schmidt is shit! Schmidt is shit!

Brin and Page and all the other shareholders out there, before the government steps in and installs oversight over every company that is in the search engine business – starting with yours –

Page, Brin, it pains me that we're apart, but I feel betrayed ... but you can make this right ... it is within your power ... look inside yourselves

do the right thing – purge this asshole and his dingleberries from your company now – and you will not only be on the road to being not evil again – you will also be in good graces with Saint Steve, once more.

For the sake of the children.

UPDATE: You wanna’ another reason to have the stockholders dump Squirrel Boy? Read this and then pass it around. Microsoft should be suffering the worst case of indigestion by a corporation since the Time-Warner AOL merger, but Schmidt The Shit screwed that up big time. Sometimes it’s best to shut up and let your enemies hang themselves. Unfortunately, it looks like Schmidt may be single-handedly hanging Google.

not a lot of happy Vikings, I can tell ya' ...

I’ve been following with interest the current pickle being suffered by Iceland. If you think what’s happening in Greece is a goddamn shame (if you work for Goldman Sachs, you’re probably on a number of Greek intelligence hit squad lists as we speak), you should see the problem Iceland’s naive young class of know-it-all know-nothing investment bankers pulled, the country is so broke right now, the best deal offered them by the UK and Denmark was that every man, woman and child on the island has to surrender a quarter of their income for the next eight years to clear the books. That amounts to $5.3 billion dollars, which Bill Gates could blow out his ass without ever missing it, and is a drop in the bucket compared to the colossal debt the good ol’ USA managed to get into but probably won’t find itself in the same situation as Iceland because China owns our debt and it is their own best interests that the US Dollar doesn’t collapse either overnight nor slow leak like a worn out tire.

Iceland, eh? Does Bjork come with it, 'cos I'd really like to bjork Bjork, you know ...!

Hmmmm .... A North Atlantic fortress ... volcanoes ... OMG, I'm Syndrome!

I feel bad for the poor Vikings, and in a way, I feel it’s probably our fault, after all, we did train the little villains who brought this calamity upon their little volcanic berg. So, I suggest Iceland do exactly what my former next door neighboring competitor did last November – call the banker, hand over the keys to the building, and call it a day.

A bargain at $5.3 billion, folks, free hot water and all the cod you can eat!

That’s right, the Icelandic government should call their UK and Danish creditors to the table and declare, well, we’re broke, so we’re leaving the country and handing this piece of real estate over to you, ‘cos we’re outski, comrades. And then we, the good ol’ US of A, take in all 320,000 of these delightful but somber Vikings, and plant them in reservations in Montana, Alaska, and North Dakota. Hey, it’s only 320,000 people, that’s less than the New Orleans Diaspora. They speak English so damn well they’d assimilate better than rural Minnesotans transplanted to the suburbs of Houston and Dallas.

Here's the pitch ... she's a Danish nudist stranded on a Wisconsin farm with two gay guys ... a riot, right? It'll go five, six years, just like Wings or Yes, Dear

There’s an upside, too, we get to have Bjork here all the time, I’m sure she can make the transition to kooky sitcom actress or cable TV reality star. The UK and Denmark can then figure out how to make that Nordic geyser farm in the North Atlantic into a profitable tourist spot or even sell it to Larry Ellison, he could turn it into his own personal spa, fishing, boating and private lair. Gad, Google would buy it up in a minute and Squirrel Boy would move there immediately and turn into his own private fortress to rule the world – moo-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Now, is that a face only a geek could love, or what. Update: another angle of SB can be found here.

Have you been following this? Some kerfuffle about Eric Schmidt’s special friend and her blog, (cached version, hosted by, um, Google’s Blogger) and allofasuddentheblogwentpoofanditsnotthereanymore? Sounds like a Valleywag Special Edition© to me.

Sure does look like a certain tech CEO.  TechCrunch thinks so, too.

Dr. Eric Schmidt is in Davos, and couldn’t resist sneering at the Greatest Creation In The History Of The World. BTW Eric, your guys at the Google Store shipped my stuff to the wrong address.  Then the folks at your vendor Gateway never bothered to write back.  And for some reason, they accidentally stuck an extra one of those blinky pins in the box, which we didn’t order. Appreciate it. Peace out.

Now there’s a headline sure to get people’s attention.  Remember the story about Bing getting stuck onto the iPhone as default search? That’s not by accident.  Read on.

Well, well.  That’s what you might refer to as “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”  The relationship between the two giants isn’t on the best of terms these days, as Dear Leader reminded us a couple of weeks ago. So this article suggests that Google might get the boot as default search app in the iPhone, in favor of The Bingster.