Week in review: Galaxy Tab ban, Amazon and IBM humbled

We're nearly mid-way through August and officially into what we call the 'silly season' in tech land. Most vendors tend to hold off launching products or putting out many announcements, meaning the PR industry has to get creative.

However, this week has seen quite a lot of action. Especially in the patent space.

Put it on my Tab. Oh wait, I don't have one.

A German court has ruled in favour of Apple temporarily banning sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple argues that the Tab 10.1 infringes on its design rights by imitating the iPad.

Although we found the Tab 10.1 disappointing and some of the elements in Samsung's TouchWiz smartphone and tablet interface look very Cupertino-ish, we have little sympathy for Apple's position.

Then again, rumours of looters returning stolen Galaxy Tabs in favour of nicking iPads instead may give some tenuous credence to Apple's legal claims.

Cloudy with a chance of thunder.

The cloud is the future of computing! Or so claim many in the IT industry. Unfortunately the cloud can disappear at the drop of a hat such as when a lightning storm takes out some of Amazon's servers knocking out its EC2 cloud computing service.

Of course, nothing works flawlessly all the time, but the cloud needs to be more robust if we're all going to rely on it for our everyday computing. We eagerly anticipate the arrival of this hypothetical more resilient cloud.

Bridge over troubled Blue Waters

IBM, once the master of supercomputers that could play chess and enslave humanity for use as batteries, has given up on an ambitious 20,000 square foot computer. The Blue Waters supercomputer would've been used for complex simulations, such as those of the weather.

It's a bit of a climbdown for Big Blue at a time when we're marking the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC and the 100th anniversary of the company itself . Up next: Heinz gives up making beans because it's too difficult?