Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 18th Mar 2009 11:48 UTC, submitted by PLan
In a move that would certainly shake up the computer industry quite a bit, IBM is reportedly in talks with Sun Microsystems about the possibility of IBM acquiring Sun. Sun is going through hard times at the moment, and has been actively looking for someone to be acquired by.
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Google added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/15/13 23:03 UTC
"During its Keynote today, Google announced new features coming to its flagship search function - you know, that thing we all started using Google for. VP Amit Singhal spent some time discussing what Google's search functionality will eventually morph into. Google's strategy is summarized by three words: answer, converse, and anticipate. Singhal explained that many of the pieces of these upcoming changes can already be seen in products that Google has recently introduced - namely, Google Knowledge Graph and Google Now, with perhaps a splash of Google Glass, too." I hold on to my hat every time Google changes Search. It's such a vital product in my daily life.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/15/13 21:46 UTC
"Wired has obtained a copy of a cease and desist letter sent by Google to Microsoft today, demanding Microsoft immediately remove the YouTube app from its Windows Phone Store and disable existing copies on consumers' devices by May 22. The YouTube app for Windows Phone - developed by Microsoft not Google - strips out ads and allows downloading, both violations of YouTube's terms of service." Incredibly petty. Just come up with a solution, you bunch of kids.More News »
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Hate to break it to you but Linux is still not as scalable as Solaris or AIX.
It's also not quite as rock-solid in a fileserver/domain controller role as Netware was. It was very hard to kill Netware 3.12 or Netware 4.
All of these operating systems also have something Linux doesn't. A stable API/ABI that doesn't change every kernel revision. Of course most Linux fanbois call that a feature.
I love open source OS's and software, don't get me wrong, but my love is for the one true original open source UNIX. BSD.
GNU/Linux is NOT a magic bullet to the world's problems and is chock full of plenty of flaws just like any other platform.
Sun has plenty of brilliant technologies, some of them are even in Solaris. DTrace, zones, ZFS, etc.
Just because a bunch of people can clone the functionality and offer it for free does NOT make the free product better. Just because you can poach that product's users with your free buggy implementation doesn't make your product better. Show me some REAL functionality that has appeared out of a vacuum in Linux? If you say GNOME I'll slap you.
Where's the killer features GNU/Linux has that no other free UNIX or commercial UNIX has?
It's unfortunate that SPARC hasn't caught on seeing as how it's an open platform where you wouldn't have to license the damn instruction set to make your own version.
Just because Sun can't dump $4,000,000,000,000 into polishing a slow horrible turd of a CPU architecture until it hits the 5GHz mark doesn't mean that anything non-x86 is crap.
Just because Linux is free doesn't necessarily make it "better" than real SysV or BSD.
While Linux has a cool development model that ensures fairly rapid innovation, it falls over in many situations because of it. Nothing ever has time to fully mature before it's replaced with a new and fairly buggy re-implementation. Nothing is truly polished. It feels like a giant beta release all the time. BSD isn't quite as bad.