Linked by David Adams on Sat 31st Jul 2010 06:05 UTC, submitted by fran
Microsoft had its annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, and Steve Ballmer answered questions about what the company's answer to the iPad was going to be, and whether Windows Phone 7 was going to be a part of that product strategy. He said, "We're coming . . . We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows." Ballmer and Microsoft so don't get it. I can't believe Steve Ballmer is making me feel sorry for Microsoft.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour 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."More News »
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Geez Louise!
Such notions might be true in the Apple RDF, but not in the real world.
Of course, 90% of the GUI that is common today was developed at Xerox years before Apple computer existed. Apple fans can argue that Apple "bought" the technology and hired some Xerox employees. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the modern GUI was not invented by Apple.
Furthermore, the first open sales of computers with a modern GUI began in early 1980, with the Three Rivers Perq: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PERQ
So, the Perq GUI computer was being openly marketed and sold three years before the first Apple GUI computer appeared. In regards, to the time-line of innovation, it really doesn't matter when an invention is marketed and/or sold. I mention these facts merely because a lot of Apple fans somehow equate marketing and sales with innovation, but Apple was not the first in either area.
The Perq had almost all of the features that we see in current common GUIs/computers: mouse and/or trackpad; floating windows; floating menus (drop-down menus are just floating menus stuck to the top of the window/screen); drag-&-drop; GUI animations; etc. It even had the first dock: http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/perq/photos/accent-small.jpg
There were other GUI computers/OSs before Apple, including the Xerox Star and Visi On. Incidentally, an early public demo of Visi On is what inspired Bill Gates to create Windows -- not Apple.
Wow! All of those zillions of touch screens that appeared in the 1980s on ATMs and on slot machines came from Apple? Apple certainly started the "touch" revolution!
Yes. I remember that it took a very long time for OSX to get to the point that my friends using OS9 weren't scared to use it.
Does it ever occur to anyone else that Apple fans often make-up fantasies in their heads and, then, proclaim these notions as fact?
Apple certainly did "good" on their Iphone touch interface with: cut-&-paste; typing ellipsis; typing numbers; and making readable file names: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2470148&tstart=45...
Let's not forget the wonderfully effective Newton touch interface (which was preceded by others, including a Sony touch pda). "Eat up Martha!"
Oh. That goes without saying! Apple has a long history of never "launching" anything, until it they are sure that "it just works," such as:
- overheating original Mac (tell-tale sign of things to come);
- the round mouse;
- overheating laptops;
- ipod batteries dying;
- lack of connectivity;
- non-standard, proprietary connectors;
- glass laptop touchpads cracking;
- Imac 27" yellow screens;
- Imac graphics issues (black screens on boot-up);
- MacBook plastics cracking;
- MacBook fan "mooing" (fixed with firmware);
- Time Capsule PSU death;
- iPhone 3G/3GS case cracking;
- G5 cooling issues;
- Magsafe connector/cable shorting and burning;
- Mighty Mouse ball susceptible to constant malfunction from dirt;
- Machined laptop enclosures that bent (caused them to go back to plastic);
- Iphone 4 back glass suceptible to shattering;
- and, last but not least, the Iphone 4 antenna fiasco!
This is just off the top of my head -- this list is not exhaustive -- and, probably, the number of serious engineering/design problems in this list is greater than the total number of similar problems for the last decade from all of the major, non-Apple, electronics manufacturers combined!
[Part 2 of this response is posted below]
Edited 2010-08-01 23:17 UTC