Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 14th Feb 2011 20:54 UTC
So, Mobile World Congress is going on over in the beautiful city of Barcelona, and there, Steve Ballmer held a little speech about Windows Phone 7's past, present, and future. Especially the future interests us, as a lot's been planned for this year: copy/paste, hardware-accelerated mobile Internet Explorer 9, and, yes, multitasking!
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Member since:2008-03-17
The parent asked why he cared. I think the history of Microsoft's behavior can well be seen as a justification to care about such things. It is nice to see that Microsoft is learning some humility and is trying to compete with better products instead of market domination for a change.
I for one believe that if a company has a crappy strategy they should be penalised for it. The rate that Microsoft has been sucking so bad should have had a greater effect on it. Once they consistently stop sucking (as opposed to having isolated successes) then they deserve to live.
Member since:2006-02-15
I for one believe that if a company has a crappy strategy they should be penalised for it. The rate that Microsoft has been sucking so bad should have had a greater effect on it. Once they consistently stop sucking (as opposed to having isolated successes) then they deserve to live.
That is a rather harsh view on the world. "If you fail you should be punished for it in addition to the negatives effects of having failed already."
To be honest, I think Microsoft has been doing a lot better recently than ever before. Sure, they STILL do some mean things and play dirty tactics, but atleast they are opening up in some cases and are indeed trying to think of the customer instead of just themselves. A good example of that is the H.264 playback support for Chrome, a competing browser.
They still have some lengths to go to earn my trust -- hell, I doubt they can ever earn it back -- but I still appreciate the good things they do.
Member since:2009-08-18
News
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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Member since:
2006-02-23
That might well be, I already said this was some time ago and many corporate IT departments are just as incompetent. They mostly have MS certified people working there. The point is that Microsoft has a very large footprint in the IT world, until a couple of years ago there was just no escaping this, it is becoming somewhat easier now.
It is nice that some tools such as Thunderbird have caught up with Exchange support, but this was not always the case and it is certainly not due to Microsoft. Also the damage they did to web standards caused many frustrations amongst web developers. Microsoft deliberately sabotaged Kerberos. It refuses to open up its own protocols and file formats preventing good OpenOffice support. They prevented Beos to be installed at OEMs. I can go on...
The parent asked why he cared. I think the history of Microsoft's behavior can well be seen as a justification to care about such things. It is nice to see that Microsoft is learning some humility and is trying to compete with better products instead of market domination for a change.