Apple maintained
a 12 percent lead over Dell, one of the largest gaps between first and second place for any industry. Dell's position remained the same, while Acer's Gateway brand rose 3 percent in consumer satisfaction. Hewlett-Packard inched up 1 percent and its Compaq division jumped 6 percent.
Scala looks like it is becoming the web 2.0 darling, popular with Twitter and LinkedIn developers but also heavily utilized in the corporate space. Martin Odersky speaks in detail about the language in
this interview. He talks about why it could become the language of choice for social networking platforms, particularly after doing well in the acid test of being used by sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.
"Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala," he said.
Even though Apple has been hyping up the 64bit nature of its ucpoming Snow Leopard operating system, stating it will be the first Mac OS X release to be 64bit top-to-bottom, reality turns out to be a little bit different so far. With the current Snow Leopard seed, only Xserve users get the 64bit kernel and drivers - all other Macs default to 32bit. By holding down the '6' and '4' keys during boot, you can to boot into full 64bit mode - that is, if your Mac supports it. As it turns out, some Macs with 64bit processors cannot use the 64bit kernel because the EFI is 32bit. Note: I should have included in the article that 64bit applications will run just fine (including benefits) on a 32bit kernel in Mac OS X. Since this was already possible in Leopard, I assumed people were well aware of that. Turns out some were not, so my apologies for that.
The beta for Moonlight 2.0 is now available. It's considered feature complete and is ready to test against Silverlight 2.0-minded websites. Microsoft has already gone and released Silverlight 3.0, but the Moonlight team is pretty confident that users will generally be able to access most if not all web content while Silverlight 3.0 is still young. Moonlight will ask to update itself to the beta automatically in Firefox, but new users can also
download the plugin.
Apple doesn't have a particularly healthy relationship with the press; it has
sued websites for publishing information it didn't like, and has
tried to keep information under wraps that a journalist tried to uncover via the Freedom of Information Act. Now, however, it has
tried to prevent The Times from publishing an article about Steve Jobs.
The F-Script project has announced the availability of
F-Script 2.0, a set of open source tools for dynamic introspection and scripting of Cocoa objects on Mac OS X. The package provides Mac OS X developers and power users with
graphical tools for exploration and interactive manipulation of objects. It also provides programmatic tools for scripting, in the form of a Smalltalk dialect directly hosted on top of the Objective-C runtime. This new version of F-Script introduces major new features including system-wide scripting, dynamic Cocoa class creation, 64-bit support and automatic garbage collection.
The legal bickering between Apple and Psystar is almost getting uglier and grittier by the day. In a filing made last week, the Cupertino giant accused Psystar of destroying evidence, but today the clone maker has vigorously denied ever having done such a thing.
Rumors had been circulating for months about the mysterious Dell smartphone, and
it seems that they've finally been realized-- at least for China. Little details about the smartphone have been released, but we do know that it'll be a 2G smartphone running Android, it's called the "Mini3i," and it "will offer a full complement of music, games and other downloadable content." The release date is still in the dark as is whether or not Dell will eventually spread its smartphone market outside of China. About Dell's Mini3i, an analyst said, "It makes sense for a company like Dell to enter the smartphone market, but what they need to do is find something that sets themselves apart." This is all too true as too many smartphones (and many other devices, for that matter) have the "Me Too" syndrome.
A fellow at CNET did
a review of a beta version of another Linux distribution built specifically for netbooks.
"One of those , called Jolicloud, is launching in beta in the next few months. Created by Tariq Krim, who founded and later left widget-based start page Netvibes, the alternate OS has been designed for Web workers, or people who do most of their work (or play) on Web applications and services.
I've been giving it a thorough run-though over the past few days and have come away impressed at what it's trying to do. Some bits and pieces are definitely still beta, but the underlying approach of making Web sites and software applications feel the same, as well as introducing users to new ones to use is really innovative."
We already
discussed David Finch, Dell's senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, last week. We missed, however,
some more interesting statements by Finch; Dell is looking into the
ARM-based netbook smartbook market, and close to a third of all of Dell's netbooks ship with Linux.
I had been following the mailing list for the Haiku project the past week with growing interest. The topic of discussion? Why, the alpha release, of course! What needs to be done, who needs to prepare what, and most importantly, what schedule are they going to settle on? Well, after numerous insightful back-and-forths, the community has settled on a schedule.
Finally, a week with a bit more news going on. We've talked about a lot of things this week, but there really weren't any overarching themes or whatever dominating the front page. This is the first Week in Review in a simpler format: a listing of the teasers of the more interesting stories (as opposed to a forced-colloquial recollection). They're in chronological order for your convenience.
Over the past couple of months, and especially over the past couple of weeks, I've been working very hard to write and complete my thesis. I performed all the work on Windows 7, but now that the thesis is finally done, submitted, and accepted, I installed Ubuntu - and immediately I was reminded of why I do not do any serious work on Linux: the train wreck that is X.org.
"
Opera 10 beta 3 was released Wednesday for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. With a strong European following, the preview version has been able to keep this popular alternative browser competitive by offering page rendering quality comparable to Google Chrome, while offering a robust list of features."
"As it invites the world to play in a mysterious sandbox it likes to call 'Caffeine',
Google is testing more than just a 'next-generation' search infrastructure. It's testing at least a portion of a revamped software architecture that will likely underpin all of its online applications for years to come. Speaking with The Reg, ueber-Googler Matt Cutts confirms that the company's new Caffeine search infrastructure is built atop a complete overhaul of the company's custom-built Google File System, a project two years in the making. At least informally, Google refers to this file system redux as GFS2."
We've got some intriguing news about the Apple vs. Psystar case. The depositions where Apple asked questions to Psystar are now over, and now it's time for Psystar to hold depositions of several people in the very highest echelons in Apple. Psystar's new lawyer team takes a more open approach to the lawsuit, and has now published the list of Apple people that will be testifying, and is also
asking for community input.
The browser wars have really been heating up again lately. Thanks to Mozila's Firefox, Internet Explorer is no longer the undisputed king, and browsers are popping up all over the place trying grab a piece of the pie. A new browser project called
RockMelt is in development - and
it's backed by Mosaic developer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.
It's the end of the world. Again. According to some Linux developers and security researchers,
a bug in the Linux kernel has just been uncovered that makes just about every distribution utilizing kernel 2.4 and 2.6 on just about all architectures since May of 2001 vulnerable to a certain kind of attack.
Microsoft has now more or less given out every possible detail of its next-generation portable media player, the Zune HD. The really interesting part of this device is not the software or its competitiveness with the iPod Touch - no, it's the hardware inside it. This is the first mass-market NVIDIA Tegra-based device.
Let's continue the browser talk for a while. Let's move from
the pinnacle of browsing, all the way down to the very drainage pit: Internet Explorer 6. To me, Internet Explorer 6 is that annoying zombie that just won't die that chops off 80 of your health in a grueling midnight Left 4 Dead expert session. Microsoft may not say so outright, but they seem to be implying they agree with me.
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