OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

This is the Moto X. Can it save Motorola?

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-01 Google 40 Comments

So Motorola built a phone that's marginally smarter, slightly more comfortable, and a little bit more usable than most others. And while that may never displace Samsung or Apple, it's an important first step. This new Motorola is listening. Listening to customers who want their phones to feel more personal. Listening to critics who endlessly complain about battery life. Listening to an industry that knows the spec race is out of hand. And, perhaps most importantly, the new Motorola is listening to Google when it says solving people's actual problems, simply and beautifully, is the path to success.

The Moto X looks interesting, but I doubt it can handle the competition. Specifications do seem to matter in the shops, and the Moto X doesn't measure up. On top of that, how are they going to do the custom design thing in other parts of the world?

‘Samsung agency is buying off StackOverflow users’

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-01 Wireless 23 Comments

Apparently, an advertising agency hired by Samsung is trying to buy people to post questions about the company on StackOverflow. This is what Delyan Kratunov was asked to do (he declined):

All we need you to do is talk about the SSAC (Samsung Smart App Challenge) and get the word out. How? We were thinking about 4 questions on Stackoverflow over the span of a month..... as well as replies to posts made by other members. Don't worry about finding the questions to reply to because we will send you links.

Stay classy, Samsung.

Google extends Windows Phone syncing until December 31st

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-01 Windows No Comments

The Verge:

Google has granted new Windows Phone users another extension to access its Sync service until December 31st.

Good on both Microsoft and Google. I hope the resolution of this situation starts a new trend where companies do their best not to let their petty squabbles hurt ordinary consumers.

Regarding the ITC’s exclusion order against Apple

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-01 Legal 49 Comments

Recently, the ITC ruled in favour of Samsung, issuing an exclusion order against certain Apple products, barring them from being sold in the US. Several people have called upon president Obama to step in and overrule the decision (e.g. this guy) - however, not only would this set a very bad precedent for non-US companies, it would also simply be incredibly unfair if you actually look at the ITC ruling itself. Because of this, it is quite unlikely that Obama will step in.

Improved smartphone sales pushes Sony to profitable quarter

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-01 Wireless 29 Comments

Like LG, Sony's smartphone division is now also doing quite well:

In the three months between April and June of this year, Sony saw both a "significant increase in unit sales" of its Android smartphones and an improved average selling price per handset. That's at the heart of the company's improved profitability.

The common parlance that only Samsung is profiting off Android is, as I've said before, simply no longer true. All it took for companies like LG and Sony to become profitable with Android is to, you know, stop making crap phones, and start producing good ones.

Shocker.

NSA program collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the net’

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-31 Internet 72 Comments

From The Guardian:

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

This is not PRISM - but a different system. The slides are damning, as always.

It validates claims made by Edward Snowden, and makes it clear that US government officials have been lying all along. There's no court order required for any of this - in a supposedly modern democracy. Crazy.

Wii U sales collapse further

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-31 Games 25 Comments

Just 160,000 Wii U consoles were sold worldwide between April and June, along with 1.03 million software units. The figure is a 51.3 percent decrease on last quarter; the console has now sold 3.61 million units around the world despite Nintendo's initial prediction of 5.5 million systems moved by the end of March.

To put the 160000 figure in perspective - Microsoft sold 140000 Xbox 360s in just the US, in June alone, and that's after a sharp sales drop, for a console that's 8 years old. Nintendo is not doing well.

Google flip-flops on network neutrality

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-30 Google 29 Comments

"In the net neutrality vision of the world, broadband providers simply deliver packets as they are paid to do. When it was just a set of online services, Google happened to fall on the side of citizens and used to advocate against broadband companies controlling the pipes. Now that it’s an ISP itself, Google is becoming a net neutrality hypocrite." This is why trusting companies - any company - is simply a bad idea. Companies don't care about you, and those that say they do are liars.

Did Android 4.3 save my Nexus 7?

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-30 Google 18 Comments

Other than reports that the Android 4.3 update has improved performance on the Nexus 7, Google seems to have addressed the performance degradation issue as well. "It appears that Google has fixed the performance degradation problem with the Nexus 7 by finally adding TRIM support in Android 4.3 (which also applies to all devices that have been upgraded, though I never had any performance issues with my Nexus 4), as noticed by Brian Klug at Anandtech. This means, in theory, that performance on the device should remain usable, even as time goes on and I continue to use my tablet to do all of the things it was designed for. I'll be watching it closely (and probably be very vocal about it if performance drops off a cliff as it did before), but I actually have a usable tablet once again, and I didn't have to shell out upwards of $200 again to get there." My Nexus 7 feels like new now that I've wiped my custom ROM and installed stock 4.3. I'm skeptical about whether or not Google has managed to solve the performance loss over time though, since it seems to be caused by low-quality NAND, and not by software.

Submitted by daff 2013-07-30 Amiga & AROS 19 Comments

The interview details, among many other things, the follow up to the AmigaOne X1000: "The Cyrus development is the future replacement for the Nemo motherboard when the supply of P.A. Semi CPUs finally dries up or the price becomes commercially unviable. The Cyrus board was the original Revision 1.0 prototype and was completed towards the end of last year. Cyrus Plus is the Revision 2.0 board which includes additional PCIe and PCI slots. The Cyrus design is based on the Freescale P5020 CPU which is a dual-core 64-bit PowerPC SoC. It also supports DDR3 RAM and includes an improved Xena/Xorro combination." Crazy powerful hardware for an operating system that doesn't even support any for of SMP. I admire the hardware they've been able to build and sell, but the real issue is, of course, AmigaOS itself - touch-ups, sure, but it's still heavily outdated in almost every aspect and can't really make much use of the powerful hardware it is given.

Nokia frustrated with slow Windows Phone development

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-29 Wireless 95 Comments

Nokia's vice president Bryan Biniak: "We are trying to evolve the cultural thinking to say 'time is of the essence'. Waiting until the end of your fiscal year when you need to close your targets, doesn't do us any good when I have phones to sell today." Later Biniak adds: "As a company we don't want to rely on somebody else and sit and wait for them to get it right." There was a simple solution to this problem.

Submitted by judgen 2013-07-29 Desktop environments 17 Comments

"In the longer term, most Razor-qt components will fully be integrated into the LXDE-Qt and both teams will focus on the same project. Looking further ahead, the GTK version of LXDE will be dropped and all efforts will be focused on the Qt port. We, the main developers and administrators of the projects, will try to figure out where we align and where we have differences to grind out."

Chromecast: exploiting the newest device by Google

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-29 Google 8 Comments

"We had a lot of internal discussion on this, and have concluded that it's more Android than ChromeOS. To be specific, it's actually a modified Google TV release, but with all of the Bionic/Dalvik stripped out and replaced with a single binary for Chromecast. Since the Marvell DE3005 SOC running this is a single core variant of the 88DE3100, most of the Google TV code was reused. So, although it's not going to let you install an APK or anything, its origins: the bootloader, kernel, init scripts, binaries, are all from the Google TV." This thing just keeps getting more awesome.

The ‘Australia tax’ is real, geo-blocking to stop

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-29 In the News 10 Comments

"The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications today released its report on IT pricing in Australia, making 10 recommendations and concluding that the long-discussed 'Australia tax' is real." One of the recommendations is to make geo-blocking circumvention legal - and as a last resort, the committee recommends the government to make geo-blocking illegal altogether. Pretty strong language.

Fuck the Super Game Boy: introduction

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-29 Games 24 Comments

"The Super Game Boy is probably the coolest piece of video game hardware in existence. It's also probably the biggest wasted opportunity in video games. It's been pretty much entirely forgotten about now, because - as is pretty common with neat hardware made by Nintendo - very, VERY few games ever really took advantage of it at all. And it's a shame, because the unique visual style of Super Game Boy-compatible games, in addition to just looking really neat, can teach a lot about effectively using colour in games. The ones that do work exist in a really bizarre stylistic place."

Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-28 General Development 104 Comments

"There is a reason I use 'old' languages like J or Lush. It's not a retro affectation; I save that for my suits. These languages are designed better than modern ones. There is some survivor bias here; nobody slings PL/1 or Cobol willingly, but modern language and package designers don't seem to learn much from the masters. Modern code monkeys don't even recognize mastery; mastery is measured in dollars or number of users, which is a poor substitute for distinguishing between what is good and what is dumb. Lady Gaga made more money than Beethoven, but, like, so what?" This isn't just a thing among programmers. The entire industry is obsessed with user numbers, number of applications, and other crap that is meaningless when you consider programming to be art. When I post a new item about some small hobby operating system, the comments will be filled with negativity because it's no Windows or iOS, whereas only ten years ago, we'd have lively discussions about the implementation details. And then people wonder why that scene has died out.

Submitted by MOS6510 2013-07-27 Windows 22 Comments

Windows NT turned 20 years old today. From a 1998 story about NT, written by Mark Russinovich, "I'll take you on a short tour of NT's lineage, which leads back to Digital and its VMS OS. Most of NT's lead developers, including VMS's chief architect, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced NT's development. After I talk about NT's roots, I'll discuss the more-than-coincidental similarities between NT and VMS, and how Digital reacted to NT's release."

Samsung passes Apple’s iPhone in smartphone web usage

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-27 Wireless 19 Comments

"StatCounter's latest Internet Wars Report found that, in the month of June, Samsung devices accounted for 25.43 percent of smartphone Internet usage, compared to 25.09 for Apple's iPhone devices. Samsung has moved into the leadership position in smartphone web use over the course of the last year, which has seen the South Korean tech giant's share grow from 19.46 percent just 12 months ago." Android sales outpacing everything else is starting to show up in usage statistics.

‘Android tablets leading Europe, iPads slipping’

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-26 In the News 73 Comments

"According to the CONTEXT data, Android tablets now account for 61.2 percent of the Western European tablet market, more than double the 25.1 percent recorded the same time last year. Apple iOS devices, meanwhile, fell to 37.2 percent of Western European tablet market sales by distribution, from 71.2 percent at the same time last year." This is nothing short of a catastrophic collapse of iPad market share in Europe. Furthermore, "This analysis also screens out the effect of Windows 8, credited in some quarters with helping to drive increased tablet market share and cut into Apple’s tablet lead, but in fact with little to no impact, according to CONTEXT." And yes, Windows 8 on tablets is a dud.

Chipping away at the smartphone leaders

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-26 Wireless 32 Comments

"In smartphones, it's not all about Apple and Samsung anymore. For several years, these two companies have dominated the mobile phone-making business, successively one-upping each other with ever sleeker, more technologically sophisticated iPhones and Galaxy handsets that left would-be rivals grasping. But now the competition is stirring, and consumers are giving another look to brands they once ignored." Not only is Samsung now more profitable in mobile than Apple (next goalpost please), smaller Android manufacturers, such as LG, ZTE, and Lenovo, are making huge inroads, and are raking in growing profits - in fact, these three now belong to the top 5 mobile device makers. The common parlance that only Samsung is making a profit off Android is simply no longer true.