Mystery Google device appears in small-town Iowa

  Submitted by MOS6510 Google 9 Comments
"Google calls itself one of the world's largest hardware makers. For the past 10 years, the web giant has designed much of the gear driving the massive data centers that underpin its web empire, but it treats the particulars of this hardware operation as the most important of trade secrets. That's why the Pluto Switch is so intriguing." It's easy to forget large web companies like Google actually design and build their own hardware.
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‘What really made Steve Jobs so angry at Google?’

  Submitted by MOS6510 Apple 81 Comments
Written by Scott Cleland: "With so many fanboys spinning Silicon Valley history, it's sometimes easy to forget about the real chain of events that led to the ongoing Apple-Google thermonuclear war, how the romance turned to hate. This timeline presents an interesting case about why, despite patents and prior art, Steve Jobs had plenty of personal reasons to despise Schmidt, Page, and Brin." Cleland has a very, very good point; quite coherent and well-reasoned... That is, if you haven't got a single shred of historical sense and completely and utterly ignore the 30-odd years of mobile computing development that preceded our current crop of smartphones. It's hard not to be reminded of how certain groups of people dismiss millions of years of fossil records because this record inconveniences their argument. In any case, a comment on the article answered the question properly: "Jobs was a businessman. He was angry he was losing money. Simple."
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Valve brings Steam to your TV today

Games 11 Comments
"Today, Valve will launch the beta of Big Picture mode, a version of Steam designed for your television. That's right. The de facto central hub of PC gaming is now designed to run while you're lounging in your living room - and with a controller, no less. I've tried out Big Picture. It's sleek, intuitive, and groundbreaking in several ways." We've talked about this before. If there's one company that can upend consoles, it's Valve. Everything is falling into place, and I wouldn't be surprised if this - what is essentially the software for the 'Steambox' - will have a tremendous effect on the games industry. Looks great, too.
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‘Tablets are changing the tech you use’

  Submitted by MOS6510 Wireless 21 Comments
"The rise of the tablet has heralded changes big and small across the tech ecosystem, from a booming market for cloud storage to the fall of Flash. If the computing industry was a stagnant pond in late 2009, the introduction of tablets a few months later was less akin to a pebble flicked from the shore and more like a boulder hurled from 10 feet up. The ripples have been widespread and lasting." Simple question: if an ordinary user used her laptop to check Facebook, the news, and read a few blogs, and now uses a tablet to do the exact same thing - how much has really changed? Are any of the things mentioned in this article - the rise of HTML5, streaming video, and internet storage - really the result of tablets?
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Hackday with Jolla and friends

General Development 15 Comments
Several presentations about mobile Linux technologies, such as Mer, Nemo, and Jolla. Mer is openly developed and meritocratically governed mobile Linux core distribution, which was forked from the various components of the Meego project when it was abandoned by Nokia and Intel. Nemo is a community project which continues the effort of the Meego handset branch. And Jolla is a new startup company created by former Nokia Linux engineers, who participated in Maemo and Harmattan projects, and decided to continue on their own, when Nokia lost their interest in Meego. Their goal is to release end user products (initially handsets) using an operating system based on the Mer core and some components of Nemo, which will be providing their own user interface.
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Sony does teardown of its latest Xperia tablet

Wireless 9 Comments
"Today the new Xperia Tablet starts hitting doorsteps and store shelves. And how do we mark this momentous occasion? Well... Sony engineer Takuya Inaba ripped apart the gear and explained what's inside. Okay, more like gently opened. Either way, if you love geeking out on parts, then this is the article for you." Sony - or, well, at least its mobile department - is starting to get very cosy with us on the geek side. I approve - although the company has a long way to go before it cleared its name.
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From Linux to OS X: 1 year later

macOS 82 Comments
"A little more than an year ago I wrote my rant post The Linux Desktop Experience is Killing Linux on the Desktop and for the first time in 8 years I wasn't a desktop Linux user anymore. I spent about a month wrestling with Windows 7, but let's face it - Windows is ill suited for professional Ruby programmers like me (and it's ill suited for most programmers, except maybe Java & .Net I guess). Anyways, it was never my intention to stick with Windows - I was just doing my Mac due diligence. Now with 1+ year of OSX usage I'd like to share a few things about my experience thus far with you."
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Via’s APC, A $49 Android desktop

  Submitted by Boomshiki Hardware 38 Comments
"We've seen a profusion of relatively low-cost PCs and tablets over the last few years, but Taiwanese electronics company Via's APC is cheap even by these standards: it's a $49 low-power desktop computer running a modified version of Android 2.3. Announced today, the APC is meant as a simple way to connect to the internet, so you won't get a great deal of computing power. It contains an 800MHz processor, 512MB of DDR3 memory, 2GB of flash storage, and can connect to a monitor or TV to output a resolution of up to 720p. It also consumes a fraction of a standard desktop's power: 13.5 watts at maximum and only 4 watts when idle."
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Disks from the perspective of a file system

  Submitted by MOS6510 Hardware 33 Comments
"Most applications do not deal with disks directly, instead storing their data in files in a file system, which protects us from those scoundrel disks. After all, a key task of the file system is to ensure that the file system can always be recovered to a consistent state after an unplanned system crash (for example, a power failure). While a good file system will be able to beat the disks into submission, the required effort can be great and the reduced performance annoying. This article examines the shortcuts that disks take and the hoops that file systems must jump through to get the desired reliability."
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Samsung derides Android’s multitouch, Apple praises it

Legal 55 Comments
"While Apple's technology is a 'very nice invention', the technique used in Android differs from the iOS solution, argued Bas Berghuis van Woortman, one of Samsung's lawyers. Because the Android based method is more hierarchical the system is more complex and therefore harder for developers to use, he said. Apple disagrees. 'They suggest that they have a lesser solution, but that is simply not true', said Apple's lawyer Theo Blomme to judge Peter Blok, who presided over a team of three judges, in a response to Samsung's claim." I just wish these companies and their lawyers could see and hear themselves. If only for a few seconds. Not even Monty Python could write this. By the way, all these patents were already thrown out last year by the Dutch courts, but Apple started a 'bottom procedure', a more thorough handling of the case. Three expert IP judges preside, and due to the earlier ruling, Apple is fighting an uphill battle.
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A Firefox smartphone for the developing world

  Submitted by MOS6510 Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments
"The smartphones going into the world's next two billion pairs of hands may not belong to either Google or Apple, but to Mozilla. The Mozilla Foundation, which oversees open source software projects like the Firefox Web browser, expects to release a mobile operating system for smartphones early next year. Its target market is Latin America, then the rest of the developing world, where smartphones from Apple and Google are still too expensive for most people." Let's hope so, because at the rate things are currently going, we'll end up with like 90% Android, 9% iOS, and 1% other stuff. Who wants that?
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The Linux graphics stack

  Submitted by Hiev Wayland 29 Comments
"This is an introductory overview post for the Linux Graphics Stack, and how it currently all fits together. I initially wrote it for myself after having conversations with people like Owen Taylor, Ray Strode and Adam Jackson about this stack. I had to go back to them every month or so and learn the stuff from the ground up all over again, as I had forgotten every single piece. I asked them for a good high-level overview document so I could stop bothering them. They didn't know of any. I started this one. It has been reviewed by Adam Jackson and David Airlie, both of whom work on this exact stack." Introductory or no, still pretty detailed.
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Real world comparison: GC vs. manual memory management

  Submitted by MOS6510 Benchmarks 49 Comments
"During the 4th Semester of my studies I wrote a small 3d spaceship deathmatch shooter with the D-Programming language. It was created within 3 Months time and allows multiple players to play deathmatch over local area network. All of the code was written with a garbage collector in mind and made wide usage of the D standard library phobos. After the project was finished I noticed how much time is spend every frame for garbage collection, so I decided to create a version of the game which does not use a GC, to improve performance."
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Thinking functionally with Haskell

  Submitted by MOS6510 General Development 9 Comments
"Imagine an approach to programming where you write down some description of what your code should do, then before running your code you run some automatic tool to see if the code matches the description. That's Test-driven development, you say! Actually, this is what you are doing when you use static types in most languages too. Types are a description of the code's inputs and outputs, and the check ensures that inputs and outputs match up and are used consistently. Modern type systems - such as in Haskell or above - are very flexible, and allow these descriptions to be quite detailed; plus they are not too obtrusive in use and often very helpful."
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First look: Windows Server 2012 brings the cloud down to earth

Windows 17 Comments
"Windows Server 2012 probably won't have the adoption lag in the enterprise that Windows 8 is bound to face. That's because, aside from the Metro GUI, Server 2012's biggest changes are in substance rather than style, building upon what the company delivered with Windows Server 2008 Release 2 three years ago. In particular, Server 2012 takes two management features Server 2008 R2 admins will be familiar with - Server Manager and PowerShell - and expands on them considerably."
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