Week in review: Google's DoubleClick deletion dilemma

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When asked if he thought there had been a culture war between Apple IIe owners and C64 users, Tramiel said no. How could there be a culture war, he asked, when one platform has 95 percent of the users?

Later, during a panel discussion, Tramiel offered another observation on the subject while riffing on the fact that the Apple IIe cost more than three times as much as the Commodore 64: "We made machines for the masses; (Apple) made machines for the classes."

The event also yielded another nugget: the first-ever meeting of Tramiel and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. It's hard to imagine how Wozniak and Tramiel couldn't have met before, given that the two were such important figures in the early years of personal computers.

During the event, Tramiel took the time to talk to CNET News.com about his most famous creation and about the current state of personal computers.

The tech world is also observing the 60th anniversary of a seminal creation. On December 16, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, two Bell Labs researchers, built the world's first transistor.

Their device, called a point contract transistor, conducted electricity and amplified signals, a job then handled by bulky and delicate vacuum tubes and other components.

Their colleague William Shockley followed soon after with junction transistors. Although Bardeen and Brattain's creation was first, Shockley's device actually became the basis for a scientific and industrial juggernaut.

Besides making it easier to store information and send signals, transistors had another, somewhat unanticipated characteristic. They could be shrunk at a consistent rate over time, which has made electronic products steadily cheaper and faster.

Getting social
Facebook has announced that the architecture for its developer platform will be made available to other social-networking sites, potentially rendering moot the criticism that its strategy is too "closed"--and potentially dealing a huge blow to Google's yet-to-launch OpenSocial initiative.

Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora posted a blog entry with the announcement. "(We) want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model," Vora wrote. "In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms." A developer page elaborates that "the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work."

In the official wording from Facebook, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network is "making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites" and sees this as the natural evolution of a constantly changing product.

This announcement comes in the wake of three OpenSocial partners--LinkedIn, Friendster, and Bebo--all releasing their own developer platform initiatives independent of the Google-run program.

Bebo specifically designed its developer code to be compatible with Facebook's. As it turns out, that's all part of Facebook's strategy; Bebo is the first major social network to implement this new "open" platform code from Facebook.

Meanwhile, Friendster fully launched its developer platform with more than 180 applications available to its 56 million registered users. According to the social network, the platform is going to be as "open" as possible to make it easy for applications designed for other sites to make their way to Friendster, and vice versa. Friendster is a partner in the Google-led OpenSocial initiative and has said that OpenSocial APIs will be integrated into the Friendster Developer Platform when the much-stalled OpenSocial is "completed and secure."

Also of note
Breaking its silence on one of the worst-kept secrets in portable computers, Dell unveiled its Latitude XT Tablet PC, its first product in the category...After putting a two-unit limit on purchases of the iPhone back in October, Apple quietly raised the limit back to five...Microsoft released its December 2007 security bulletin, which includes seven updates: three are designated as critical by the software giant and four are deemed important.

[shanedr]

Very Troubling

To almost anyone it would be obvious that they need to recluse themself in a similar situation. The only possible reason to review the situation with your chief ethics officer is if you wish not to recluse yourself but also are worried about violating the law. Such an individual should be fired immediately because they are not personally feel bound by ethical considerations.

[inachu]

Caught red handed!

They tried to bring about plausable deniability bt now they can not do that since the website is now copied as evidence.

This will not work.