‘Screenshots of despair’
Absolutely terrifying and very depressing screenshots from all kinds of software. "Screenshots of despair". Chilling stuff.
The Apple of today and the IBM of 1989
I'm currently reading Jerry Kaplan's excellent book "Startup: a Silicon Valley adventure". In this book, Kaplan, founder and CEO of GO Corp., details the founding, financing and eventual demise of his highly innovative company, including the development and workings of their product. What's so surprising about this book is just how timeless it really is - the names and products may have changed, but the business practices and company attitudes surely haven't.
Adobe Photoshop CS6 hands-on preview
"Adobe has been dropping preview links to its upcoming version of Photoshop CS6 for months now, even hyping it up with a Rainn Wilson cameo at MAX 2011. Photoshop CS6 marks one of the app's most drastic visual changes, with a darker visual redesign and streamlined toolbars, and it has all sorts of changes to cursors, filters, video editing, and more in tow. We got some quick hands on time with the app, so read on for our take on Adobe's next-gen installation of Photoshop."
Google defends Hotfile (and Megaupload) in court
"Google has filed a brief at a federal court in Florida defending the file-hosting site Hotfile in its case against the MPAA. The search giant accuses the movie companies of misleading the court and argues that Hotfile is protected under the DMCA's safe harbor. Indirectly, Google is also refuting claims being made by the US government in the criminal case against Megaupload." Obviously, Google isn't really defending Hotfile or MegaUpload here - they're defending themselves by proxy.
Android Ice Cream Sandwich alpha released for Nokia N9
Are you one of those lucky bastards who own a Nokia N9, yet are suffering from the mother of all first world problems - beautiful smartphone, but want a different operating system? Your prayers have been heard: an alpha release of Android 4.0.3 for the N9. Here's a video, and here's the instructions on how to get it working.
After outrage, BioWare considers changing Mass Effect 3 ending
As I made very clear in my thorough review of Mass Effect 2, I'm a huge BioWare fan. This relationship got very, very cloudy when BioWare released Dragon Age II, a rush job with no story and atrocious gameplay. Mass Effect 3 looked like redemption - until I hit the terrible, terrible ending. The criticism of the ending has been so immense and consistent, BioWare is contemplating changing it. Of course, this story is riddled with spoilers, so be warned.
Samsung releases Galaxy S II ICS source code
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"Good news, open source enthusiasts: as they've done with pretty much every one of the Android phones and updates, Samsung has posted the open source code for the Ice Cream Sandwich version of the Galaxy S II's operating system. While the update itself is only available in Europe and South Korea, any international version of the i9100 can apply it, and with the open source code ROM builders and other modders will be able to do more advanced ports and advanced ROMs."
Oracle’s final damage claim less than $100 million
Some people (you know who) predicted the Oracle-Google lawsuit would spell doom for Google and Android. Well, turns out this was all a huge fuss over nothing. Oracle's damages claim started at an idiotic $6 billion - but the final claim is less than $100 million. Oracle's patent trolling is turning into a huge failure of epic proportions.
Linus Torvalds: the king of geeks (and dad of 3)
"If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6000 square foot home just north of Portland's tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow - his favorite color - and so's the Mercedes. But he's not really like any of his neighbors. He drives his Mercedes fast, slamming the car into gear and flooring it. There's no coaxing, no hesitation. Either the hammer is down, or the car is at rest. And he has an abnormal number of stuffed penguins on his mantle." Yup, sounds like the to-the-point Fin we all know and love.
App ads suck battery; does that make it okay to block them?
Because I've been spending days browsing through XDA, reading CM changelogs, and flashing nightly builds, I'm still in an Android state of mind, so excuse me for more talk on the subject. An interesting study has been performed which found that advertisements in Android applications are a huge battery drain - they account for up to 75% of an application's battery usage.
Seagate breaks 1 terabit barrier, 60TB hard drives possible
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"In the world of hard drives storage, density is king and Seagate has just achieved a major breakthrough that guarantees major storage gains for the next decade. That breakthrough is managing to squeeze 1 terabit (1 trillion bits) of data into a square inch or space, effectively opening the way for larger hard drives over the coming years beyond the 3TB maximum we currently enjoy. How much of an improvement does this storage milestone offer? Current hard drives max out at around 620 gigabits per square inch, meaning Seagate has improved upon that by over 50%. However, that's just the beginning."
Interview: Richard Stallman
It's been a while since we caught up with Stallman. But a couple months ago we took a look around at what's happening with law, politics and technology and realized that he maybe perhaps his extremism and paranoia were warranted all along. So when we were contacted by an Iranian Linux publication and asked if we would like to publish an English translation of a recent interview they had done with Stallman, I thought that it was a particularly rich opportunity.
‘Microsoft to finish Windows 8 in summer, with October debut’
"Microsoft will finish work on Windows 8 this summer, setting the stage for personal computers and tablets with the operating system to go on sale around October, according to people with knowledge of the schedule." Judging by the community preview, they've got a lot of work yet to do, like, you know, actually making it usable on non-touch devices. What I'm tying to say - pretty aggressive release schedule.
Linux 3.3 released
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Linux 3.3 has been released. The changes include the merge of kernel code from the Android project. There is also support for a new architecture (TI C6X), much improved balancing and the ability to restripe between different RAID profiles in Btrfs, and several network improvements: a virtual switch implementation (Open vSwitch) designed for virtualization scenarios, a faster and more scalable alternative to the "bonding" driver, a configurable limit to the transmission queue of the network devices to fight bufferbloat, a network priority control group and per-cgroup TCP buffer limits. There are also many small features and new drivers and fixes are also available. Here's the full changelog.
Despite This American Life retraction, all’s still not well in China
Rob Schmitz, the Marketplace reporter who uncovered Daisey's lies, stated: "What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about seeing are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by Hexane. Apple's own audits show that the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple." It's what I'm already seeing in the Apple-verse (and beyond): the actual issues that have truly and honestly happened are being shuffled under the carpet because some no-name dude I'd never heard of lied, as yet another way to soothe people's conscience. The west is exploiting workers in the east for a few percentages of profit margins. This is a reality, whether some dude lied about it or not.
Microsoft asks EU to look into Motorola’s patent licence behavior
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Notorious competition law offender Microsoft has asked the EU's competition department to look into Motorola's behavior regarding patent licences vital for h.264 video. Microsoft complains that Motorola doesn't play by the usual rules and wants to decide by itself how much they want to charge for patents it owns. According to Microsoft, acceptable behavior for patent owners is to licence patens vital for industry standards at rates of single-digits-cents per device and ask for double-digits-cent amounts only for patents not necessary for implementing such standards. Since according to Microsoft's complaints at least some of the patents abused that way are related to h.264 video encoding/decoding, one has to wonder how much MPEG LA's ensurance of patent safety is now worth.
Apple to announce plans for its $100 billion cash reserve
"Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, and Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, will host a conference call to announce the outcome of the company's discussions concerning its cash balance." Interesting. They have $100 billion on the bank - any guesses? Dividend payout? A large acquisition?
CyanogenMod 9 alpha puts Samsung to shame
This past week and this weekend I've finally found the time to enter into the colorful world of custom Android ROMs. After figuring out just how insanely great and awesome ClockWorkMod Recovery is, I set about to figure out what the best Ice Cream Sandwich ROM is for the Galaxy SII. While the answer to that question became clear quite quickly, this answer also gave rise to a whole bunch of other questions.
UEFI: more ways for firmware to screw you
"Some of my recent time has been devoted to making our boot media more Mac friendly, which has entailed rather a lot of rebooting. This would have been fine, if tedious, except that some number of boots would fall over with either a clearly impossible kernel panic or userspace segfaulting in places that made no sense. Something was clearly wrong. Crashes that shouldn't happen are generally an indication of memory corruption. The question is how that corruption is being triggered. Hunting that down wasn't terribly easy." Very interesting - and, unlike what the title suggest, not particularly related to the secure boot stuff.
CM9 to have root disabled by default, can easily be re-enabled
Due to their very nature, custom Android ROMs have root enabled by default. Up until relatively recently, installing custom Android ROMs was a thing geeks did, and as such, this wasn't much of a problem. However, over the past few days, I've found out just how easy installing custom ROMs and modifying them really is (I'm running this one until CyanogenMod 9 is ready for the SII), and it seems like more and more regular users are engaging in the practice as well. Suddenly, having root enabled becomes a security liability.