In small device mobile computing OSes, there is Android and everybody else.

It is quickly becoming a rout. Android smartphone shipments accounted for 84% of worldwide handsets shipped. 268 million Android phones shipped in Q3 2014? Yep. Apple's iOS lost market share to Android, but then so did everyone that is not Android. Some of the more comical statements in the article are here:

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, "Android's leadership of the global smartphone market looks unbeatable at the moment. Its low-cost services and user-friendly software remain attractive to hardware makers, operators and consumers worldwide.

However, challenges are emerging for Google. The Android platform is getting overcrowded with hundreds of hardware brands, Android smartphone prices are falling worldwide, and few Android device vendors make profits."

So, Google--spearheaded by Android--really is taking over the known universe, but challenges remain for Google? That is an error, sir. It is the handset makers that are experiencing challenges. Google's biggest liability is not continuing to erode the sales of other platforms and somehow being faced with a monopoly. Although, one has to be selling something in order to become a monopoly. This is where it gets scary. Since Android is given away for free, how do you curtail what is quickly looking like a black hole for choice? Perhaps Google's brilliant head of Android, Sundar Pichai, may just be offering up something that some government somewhere can use as a lever. By offering Android with the typical small suite of Google services, that may be a wedge. Other than that, it looks like game over in small mobile computing devices. I have used two devices running 5.0 developer v2+(praise be to XDA), and it is pretty awesome..as OSes go, at any rate. Common folk are going to absolutely love it. ART and Material Design are going to allow even weak devices--like my L34C phone--to fly with Lollipop.

Oh, and Android is alos gobbling up worldwide market share in tablet sales as well.I am all for choice and world dominance makes me queasy, but this story continues to get rosier for Google/Android, and worse for everyone else. Even the once maligned Chromebook sales are booming, but coming from a very different level of penetration than either phones or tablets. I think that Google gets a weird last mover advantage here. Netbooks are dead, and until Windows notebooks are as cheap as Chromebooks, Google has lots of room to scale here.

As of now, Gartner Research predicts that only 5.2 million Chromebooks will be sold this year, but by 2017 they predict that 14.4 million Chromebooks will be sold in that year. Google has the wind to its back. Free Windows had better get here quickly, or this market too, may well go to those clever Mountain View folks; and their simple, yet efficient devices. I dunno what parents are thinking getting their kids Macs. That's just not using the old melon very well. At any rate, Chromebooks may be here to stay, and since their development is now under Pichai's guiding hand, no one is safe.

It is very odd that Google is not focused laser like on the company's quarter-to-quarter performance. Google is commendably a big picture company. As of this moment I feel pretty strongly that Sundar Pichai is THE most powerful person in the world of computer technologies. Ac strong statement, but he and his teams are doing a couple of very amazing things while still helping Google to keep the ship afloat via the advertising cash cow.

Google is de-emphasizing adwords in favor of reaching every person on this planet with Google services, and the almost unfathomable amount of valuable personal data that they will have at their disposal. Google has so many divisions already that the company is morphing into some kind of technological GE. Larry Page is no dummy. By not managing the company on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Wall Street might not back his play all of the time, but over the long haul, Google seems a good bet. A better bet than any other technology company that I can name. Those crazy kids are ambitious, and damned successful, too.

This company has yet to reach adolescence. It was only founded in 1998! Lots of room to grow..an almost limitless amount of room. No company in history has had this kind of cash reserve(62.6 billion USD) at such a young age. The company could have billions more as well, but they keep reaching into new areas and fund everything from their enormous cash reserves.

Google is big brother. Hopefully, this big brother will be beneficent.

Yes, I am breaking my own self-imposed rule.

I suppose this is pretty safe ground since I am represented by no political party. I was radicalized before exiting the womb. My political views have often been mistaken for being those of the Democratic Party. I am a firm believer in self-governance. This is good, functioning anarchism. I am so far out of politics that I only align with whichever political party wants to actually go about saving the planet for future generations. Right now it only appears that the Democratic Party is even paying lip service to the only goal of any worth.

That beings me to the point of this post. I have offered to do a number of high skill level tasks for the Dems, but all that they want is me for is to toss them the odd copper.

Groveling for peanuts is downright shameful.

The reason for the post title is that I disgustedly composed this post on 10.27.2014 @ 1100 -500 GMT.

I am only posting it now because of yet further disillusionment with the US political process. I offer up any and all reasonable IT services gratis, and I keep getting asked for a 5 dollar donation. If I went to our local data center, pulled wire and installed say, a caching appliance, I might charge a thousand bucks depending on what kind of software tricks were needed in a multi-vendor, multi-protocol environment. I am offering to do this sort of thing for free and all I get is an extended money grubbing paw. Fucking idiots. I have a working relationship with one person running for office, and her camp has not asked me for a dime. I did a few email hacks in order for her lackeys to rapidly respond to queries and offers of money, young children and so forth, based on geographic information, and that was worth something.

This country is really broken. No one has fix for even the small stuff. The big issues that will likely reduce the population to a fraction of its present size are not even on the radar of the candidates. I would like to believe that some people in elected office are smart enough to see beyond not only the election cycle, but beyond the end of their lives and do something about the issues that are likely to lead to a massive die-off of the species, but there is scant evidence that this is the case.

Elizabeth Warren is a good bet to understand complex and changing landscapes that are part and parcel of ongoing science, but once people reach a certain level in politics, they seem to lose perspective of the big prize. Settling for little victories seems as good a way as any for societal collapse. Natural ecosystems today, anthropogenic systems tomorrow. It is simply a matter of time unless radical measures are taken yesterday.

Okay, hold on a sec. Apple is not a progressive company.

Sure Tim Cook seems to be a much cooler(even tempered) guy than Steve Jobs, but Apple is no where near being a progressive company. Apple's continued use of child and/or slave labor--although to be fair, Apple has done better over the last year to cut ties with manufacturers in their supply chain that continue such egregious practices, but lots more remains to be done. Much of the gains are only brought to light by Apple's inventorying, so please bear that in mind.

As someone that has been to some assembly facilities, the practice seems very, very widespread.

It is not that Apple is less progressive than other technology giants, it is that it is no better. Why people want to believe that Apple is better is due to a lack of rationed perspective.

Apple's stateside feel good policies cannot make up for their across the oceans lack of oversight. There. Not all Apple users are mindless acolytes, but many appear to be just that.

I am going to run with theme just a bit longer..

Back in 1997, when Microsoft saved Apple from almost certain bankruptcy, I had a printing company executive tell me how much faster his Macs were than my Intel boxes. So, I brought in my shiny new Slot-1 PII 400MHz with the new 100MHz bus on a BX chipset in April of 1998 to benchmark against his Mac. I think I paid 1500USD in parts for the whole mess; including a legit Windows 98 disk. I was trying to overclock using a TEC and raising the FSB. I got some good ram and the box was rock stable at 486MHz. It took forever to get to the speed. Well, a couple of weeks worth of work at any rate. The box was really fast for those days. I let the Mac guy use all Photoshop benchmarks and my box which had an up to the second video card(AGP, no less) smoked his 5000USD Apple in every benchmark.

I could have done a better job of overclocking with a PGA Celeron, but the PII 486 was pretty fast in its day. Those early Deschutes core processors did not overclock at all.

On a sadder note, I once left the TEC powered with the CPU unpowered. It froze. I still used that box with Win 98 SE to test 9x kernel software right through to 2006. If I did not cook the motherboard's system bus by overvolting a bunch of stuff, I would likely still have it today. I stopped using TECs after that. They are terrific sub-ambient cooling devices, but today's processors are plenty fast out of the box.

Ahh, a trip down silicon memory lane.

People that are fanatical about things as meaningless as technology products really need to get out more. Seriously.

Oh, and Steve Jobs was a visionary of sorts, just not as great as legend as made him out to be. If you really want to see who the movers and shakers were in the development of the personal computing were, see The Innovators. While author Isaacson leaves out much of the contributions Xerox PARC computer scientists made, it is a pretty good read. One book cannot cover a revolution that is perhaps now just being made, but as an overview, it is acceptably good. The book gets too much praise--like most every popular treatment of a subject--from people not in the field. Not a word about Bill Joy. That is a crime.

Material Design invades web UIs, HTML5, and free beer!

It is all very odd, but I am seeing evidence that many really popular websites are migrating to the new Android 5.0(Lollipop) look via CSS even before Android 5.0 is launched. Not necessarily the animations, but the focus on minimalism with fewer images than what was the current trend until very, very recently. I see no mention of this elsewhere, but "flat" layout is really becoming pervasive on some very large websites. Of course this is driven by four rational site design criteria.

1) The rise of the mobile web

2) Standards compliance sans evil Flash..it is pst due to put a nail in the coffin of Flash/Shockwave. Adobe be damned!

3) The maturation of good web design requires easy footprint pages because not everyone has high bandwidth connections.

And four..

4) Android 5 is really elegant, and web designers are certain to try and emulate much of Material Design in websites, as this gives the site user familiar terrain with which to navigate, explore, and buy.

I am waiting for high adoption of HTML5 as only this month the W3C has finally called it done. This is terrific news for people like me that code only a few sites per year, and I can finally get on with going to the next step as I have been writing been writing in "XHTML 1.0 Strict" for nearly a decade.

As per usual, the terrific group at The Mozilla Foundation via Firefox 3x is best in W3C compliance. I have 33.0.2 installed, and it is my favorite browser. You have to love open source projects. If you're interested in what is new and cool, as well as what is not so good, Mozilla offers release notes with every update. Be careful as adding extensions rapidly increases system RAM use, and even free of extensions, Firefox enjoys using lots of system RAM. What you get in return is speed and the highest level of compliance to adopted Web standards. For geeks(some would say that I am more a nerd) like me, that's a totally acceptable tradeoff.

Sorry, no free beer.

I know that writing about artful web design using a stone stock Blogger template is not a display of any skill at all. I spent a few days writing pages that incorporated the PHP, but Google kept breaking my code back in 2003 using Javasript. Now I do not have the ambition to screw around with the Blogger APIs to write a nice, tidy template.

Here is an example of a site that I developed, but I told the owner that they were limited to one homepage image. The image was the background image. I tried to pull up an older homepage via archive.org, but none show the background image. That site used to look much more minimalist without sacrificing any features. I lost the account because the chief officer and I had differing opinions as to what an eCommerce site should appear to the visitor. If you go to archive.org, you can see the neat little homepage sans the background image.

I had a bunch of pages written using TopStyle 5 and a portable version of the CoffeeCup Editor, but for some reason the HTML will not load into any browser to take a screenshot.

It is one of those days. I am too disheartened to grab some code from my server, or even screens that I sent to clients on CD as that are buried in the stacks of thousands that I have.

Tim Cook comes out..Why the hoopla?

I guess that if you're the CEO of the company with the highest market capital on the planet, coming out as a gay person is news. Why? Of all industry sectors, technology has always been more accepting of various shades of sexual preference. It is women and certain other-than-white groups that still have it tough. I remember the early days of personal computing and online services as being apologetically egalitarian. Cook's admission should shock no one.

My SO thinks that I live in a tiny bubble where everything is defined by logic and reason. She is, unfortunately, mostly correct.It is not as if I am actively trying to hide, but more a matter of not being able to engage with large swaths of American life. I blame commercial television. I get no new data, and then the show cuts to commercial. This must not stand!

Sorry. The UPS man just delivered me two Nexus 7 2nd gen. tablets, and I had to open them up and inspect them.

TV still sucks.

I still have not decided on a new direction for the blog. Please do not force me into penning screeds about the gadget of the day, and just how lame they really are. It really baffles me that endgadget and gizmodo has readers. The writers simply do not have the silicon cred to do the job.

Meh. I am off to have dinner and get some sleep.

I should stop blogging about ebola..with reasoned internal discourse.

Now that multitudes of blogs have sprung up dedicated to ebola--and the West Africa outbreak in particular--I see no reason to continue in like form. It seems odd that the great majority of these bloggers have even less demonstrated knowledge about infectious disease as even I possess.

The rise of blogs dedicated specifically to ebola has risen even more exponentially than the West African outbreak. One needn't even do statistical analysis to demonstrate this. I first drafted an ebola post on 25 Jun 2014. The post was left as draft as I had a new retinal vein occlusion to contend with, and I was really quite frightened over the prognosis. My eye is till ungood, but intense exercise that results in retinal vein perfusion gives me good results.

Back then, there was misplaced hope that the epidemic would be contained in short order. My first post remained a draft until I deleted it roughly a month ago. The reason for this exegesis on my initial concerns about the ebola outbreak is that in the interim months, the number of blogs--or sub-blogs dedicated to ebola has risen to nearly 50,000. This figure was arrived at moments ago by searching Google using "ebola blog" replete with quotation marks. When the quotation marks are removed, the number of hits rises to over 30 million. There are now a few people actively covering the epidemic.

I find it striking that a sampling of ebola blogs that are digitally penned by non-experts fare even worse than I do when commenting on the rise and course of the West African epidemic.

I now use the Newsnow.co.uk "app" to get my daily ebola updates typically whilst breakfasting. Since this seems as good a channel as any to get updates at less than 5 minute intervals, my work on ebola is done.

As a concerned citizen of the world, I may make the odd ebola post, but that will be the exception. Oh, another thing about NewsNow, it is the richest source of data, as NewsNow currently pulls from 44,351 sources. Let us not be fools. Some of the "news sources" are nothing but uninformed habitats for vitriol. The way I differentiate myself from that group is by avoiding inflammatory rhetoric...most of the time.

Since I have no agenda for my blogging future..writing about technology gadgets is almost as dry as writing about semiconductor theory and implementation. That vast amounts of people buy into the gadget of the week pushed by corporate profit goals is more of a realm for sociologists than technologists.

Then there is my aversion to writing about people's weaknesses. I need to come up with a new and narrow focus wherein I can actually add something substantive to the level of discourse. Hard technology blogs are read by few, and while it has never been about garnering a large audience for me, I would prefer to not toil endlessly in total anonymity. That's the rub.

Other than some technologies I only have a reasonable understanding of the following areas:

1) Living well under one's means

2) Innovative home repairs and improvemnts using novel materials

3) Investing

4) Botany. I should note that I have had a passionate interest in applied botany since I was perhaps 5 years of age. I minored in botany at a leading school on the subject.

5) Mineralogy and paleontology. Again, I have been a passionate collector since I can recall; and even had a brush with fame as co-discover of the source of arsenic in local well water when I was 12 years of age. It was quite awesome to co-author a paper with a geology professor before I was teen.

I know about other things with varying levels of depth and passion.

I am taking a break until 30 Oct. and will hopefully have both a more eclectic blog, and a more substantive blog. See you in three days--or four if you prefer to count things in that manner.

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There are some things very wrong with people. Apple vs. Android vs. Windows vs. Unix flavors

One wonders how people in comment threads conduct life outside their boxes..presuming that they have lives.

In nearly every article where one device's virtues are extolled versus another's, cyber rants seem to spontaneously break out. I am no fan of anything that is not truly open source. Given that, I am not fanatical about open sourced projects.

I have had two Apple products in my life. An IIGS, and an iPod nano(2nd generation?). I have only had one Google/Android device, but I have two more that should be here within 5 working days.

I have had dozens of windows machines as I get paid--at least in part--to develop code for the Windows environment.

I fall in and out of love with various flavors of Linux.

The problem seems to me is perhaps that people identify too much with a brand. I am actually quite certain of this.

//begin non-sequitur//Like most enterprise level code writers, I see that Windows is where the most money still resides for development.//end non-sequitur//

I did almost all of my software development in the prehistory of computing on various DEC machines. Since I was awarded--do not ask me how--my Grad. deg. in 1985, the micro computer market was very much in flux. Macs were undoubtedly easier to use than DOS machines, but Windows won that war.

I had to be able to envision what code looked like--quite literally sometimes--when presented with hundreds to thousands of lines of code in order to get my bronze star. Of course, all of us had to be able to write tight code in many languages as well. I fist learned BASIC in 1979, and by 1980 was writing stuff in BASIC, COBOL, and Fortran. I also had a pretty good grasp on assembly language and the Gordian Knot that is uncut machine language. I could use all of these with varying degrees of ease by the end of the 1980 school year.

Since I was an earnest hardware engineering pupil, I had to be proficient in languages for logic controllers. I learned as much as time permitted about every other language while under the care of the university.

Once I donned the cap and gown for the last time, my real education began. It continues to this very day.

I am not the world's best programmer, but I find few tasks that are beyond me. If you can break complex puzzles down into individual pieces--and have the technical knowledgebase to do something with it--things will progress.

That brings me back to these seemingly fanatical commenters touting one set of inhibited coding structure against another. None of these things are truly optimized. The hardware is not magic dust. It is all very much more alike than different. The languages used and the ways in which they are implemented are by nature strangled versions of what they could be. Everything is compromise.

The two camps that seem most antagonistic are the iOS Apple commenters, and the Android commenters.

Having watched both of these hardware and software platforms mature, they are, at base, much more alike in execution than they are different.

I have what is perhaps an unusual view onto these competing spheres. I had to write code that executed flawlessly on the level of the silicon in order to get that piece of paper. I also had to make my own boards with a pretty astonishing degree of complexity and install early microchips to central processing units thereupon in order to pass go.

What many of my classmates found utterly terrifying I actually enjoyed. I cannot paint, draw, or sing. I am at best a mediocre drummer, so my artistic outlet was etched into silicon and lithographed onto circuit boards. Add in a bunch of case specific code, and that was--and is--my artistic outlet.

So, I look at these competing platforms and see nothing but compromises. The great thing about being brand neutral is that I can laugh at the antics of others.

If I have a mantra, it is simply this: get me the best performance per dollar spent. If the software and hardware is not so full of bugs as to render it unusable, I am generally happy.

People that buy into the whole branding game are being played. The fact that many of them seem oblivious to this fact is what all these really unnecessary device makers are counting on..it is really a sad state of things.

Two other things that really irk me are writers and pitchmen that refer to a product's "ecosystem," and/or that this or that feature set is part of the product and/or company's "DNA." Fucking preposterous in both instances. No, we feeble human's are not doing anything remotely close to being as complex as these structures found in nature. STOP SAYING SO!

Please do not tell me that technology products have style, or any such nonsense. It should be a rugged--if a bit more complex--version of a screwdriver. Again, people that buy into a technology product because it is "cool," are corporate tools. In a year--or two at most--that 'must have' device is an expensive door stop.

Stop your inane commenting styles. Your ignorance and lack of the nature of technology and corporate structures are making you appear a fool. Id device "X" was great there would never be a version 2.0.

That is how I see it from the true trenches of technology.

If you would like to contend my points, I will give you a few minutes of my time. After all, I learn much more via the infusion of knowledge from others than I ever could setting up my own frameworks with which to view the world.

I can afford to buy the very best of stuff on the market, but I only do so if it is measurably superior in a meaningful way to another lower priced option.

Spending money on last year's tech.

I bought two Nexus 7 tablets today. They are 2013 models, and they are Asus factory refurbs. Should prove to be good toys. 117.00 ea. These tablets have very respectable hardware and according to sources Google is going to push Android 5.0 out on 3 Nov. to Nexus Wi-Fi devices. It should be fun to mess around with the new groovy animations and ART.