David Adams Archive

Anandtech published a detailed look into OSX 10.10 and iOS 8.1 and how they interoperate. Online ad network Chitika compares Yosemite post-release adoption to Mavericks and Mountain Lion and finds that free upgrades matter a lot. Cult of Mac says that Yosemite's new Mail version is a memory hog. The San Jose Mercury News contrasts Apple's conservatism in gradually changing OSX and iOS with Microsoft's recent penchant for making overly bold changes then backpedaling.

A perennial question that revolves around Nokia is: why didn't it choose to go with Android to replace Symbian when it decided to kill that as its smartphone operating system in late 2010?

OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."

I need everybody's help. I was selected as a finalist for the local science museum's contest to identify the innovation that I would most like to see invented and create a small exhibit about it. I put in a huge amount of effort to make a very well researched and prepared presentation, and even built a kid-friendly museum exhibit and presentation to illustrate my idea. The winner gets a trip to Italy. But get this: it turns out the winner is going to be determined by an easy-to-game online poll. So I feel like an idiot for spending so much effort, because the person with the most Facebook friends is going to win. Please help me fight for justice for voting for my project. (It's project #1). Update: Somebody was stuffing the ballot box, so they enabled some fig-leaf anti-cheating protections and reset the vote.

Financial analyst Charles Sizemore predicts that over time, a persistent Microsoft will come to not only thrive but dominate in the mobile computing space, because Apple has no "moats" to prevent customer attrition and its insistence at heavily controlling the ecosystem will drive customers away, while Google's offerings are too "shoddy." It's a bold prediction, but I suppose betting on Microsoft to be persistent and build on its strengths is a safe bet. But will persistence and flexibility be enough?

I had the chance to attend the bike industry’s annual DealerCamp in my hometown of Park City, Utah last week. It’s an event where dealers and manufacturers can meet up, and everyone can try the latest bicycle technology on the roads and trails. While there, I took a particular interest in electric bicycles, which were represented by several vendors. Electric bicycle tech has made some major strides in the past few years, but still has a long way to go, in particular on the software side.

The BBC reports on a Turing scholar's recent claims that by today's standard of evidence, there's reason to doubt the commonly-held belief that the famed computing pioneer committed suicide in response to government persecution over his homosexuality. To be clear, he does not claim to have disproved the suicide theory -- only that the cyanide poisoning that killed Turing could well have been an accident caused by his careless at-home experimentation with dangerous chemicals.

OSNews' server had a RAID controller go kaput earlier today. It's fixed and we're back up. Thanks to Jon Jensen and the guys at Endpoint for taking care of us.

OSNews sponsor Tradepub has a special offer for our readers: Normally $9.95, the "Scrappy Information Security Kit", containing: "Scrappy Information Security", "Best Practices and Applications of TLS/SSL," "A Window into Mobile Device Security", and "The Cloud: Promises and Realities" (registration required).

"When I started working on a no-DRM, open-standards-based solution for distributing high-definition video on fixed media ('Lib-Ray'), I naturally thought of Theora, because it was developed as a free software project. Several people have suggested, though, that the VP8 codec would be a better fit for my application. This month, I've finally gotten the necessary vpxtools and mkvtoolnix packages installed on my Debian system, and so I'm having a first-look at VP8. The results are very promising, though the tools are somewhat finicky."

"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."

"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."

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.

The Cortex -M0+ architecture is designed to provide chip-makers with the means to build microcontrollers that require "ultra low power" but are capable of 32-bit processing. Arm says it went back to the drawing board to create the new processor cores which measure 1mm by 1mm in size. It says the microcontrollers should draw around a third less energy than their predecessors, which only offered 8 and 16-bit capabilities.