David Adams Archive

The Apple/ARM rumor du jour is that Apple will transition its entire portable Mac line to ARM-based CPUs, dropping Intel altogether. Sources speaking to Semi Accurate claim this is a "done deal," and the move should happen by 2013, when a 64-bit ARM A15 core becomes available. While a future generation of Apple's A5 processor could make some sense for something akin to the MacBook Air, the claim that Apple will ditch Intel wholesale for ARM just doesn't add up.

Well-known game developer David Braben is a little bit fed up with the state of computer science education these days, which seems to have shifted away from learning programming to some sort of computer-oriented "life skills" class. As the father of eleven and nine year-old boys, I can attest that so far, despite a massive investment on the part of their school in computer equipment, their computer education has consisted mostly of "play this math game" and "don't be victimized by cyber-perverts." Braben's idea to stem this tide: a very, very cheap computer that students can learn to program on.

"Tablets are the culmination of what Steve Jobs wanted to create at Apple from the beginning", Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said. During a keynote session at Storage Networking World in Santa Clara, California, Wozniak was asked how tablets would change the computer industry. He compared them to TVs. "The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room," Wozniak told the audience of enterprise storage engineers. "It's for the normal people in the world."

There's a fascinating post at the StormDriver blog comparing the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1, with today's hot-selling portable computing device, the iPad 2. The Osborne was launched 30 years ago this week, and of course the comparison with the iPad is about as stark as you would expect. The iPad is literally thousands of times better in some measurable aspects, costing about one eighth as much in inflation-adjusted dollars.

The Register has posted a very unfavorable review of the new Ubuntu, focusing primarily on the new Unity Interface: "That's not to say there isn't much to love in Ubuntu 11.04 with the new Unity Interface being the primary news, but even for a beta this release is way too rough. Unity - regardless of what you think of it - isn't ready for prime time and it seems unlikely Canonical will iron out all its problems before the planned final release in April."

Rob Enderle wrote an intriguing editorial for Digital Trends entitled "You can't call 'time out' in Silicon Valley," which examines the current battle between Apple, Google and Microsoft over the future of computing. In it, he draws some interesting parallels from the history of warfare, and notes that Microsoft and Google have made some of the classic blunders that have caused great armies to fail dramatically.

a Windows Phone developer takes a look back at the past year, and looks at some of the numbers, to try to measure how the new mobile platform is coming along. Example: "1,200 - While the 36,000 registered developers are nice to talk about, the 1,200 newly registered developers we are adding every week is incredibly encouraging. Developers are pragmatists and they are going where there is ample opportunity."

Playtime is over in Android Land. Over the last couple of months Google has reached out to the major carriers and device makers backing its mobile operating system with a message: There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google's purview. From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google's most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans. And they will seek that approval from Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android group.

Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the "GM1" release . . . That would still mean an early Summer release - and potentially one before Summer technically even begins. After all, early June would line up nicely with the June 5 to 9 timeframe that Apple's WWDC event is likely to take place this year.

Techcrunch is reporting from the usual "reliable sources" that one reason why there was no discussion of iOS 5 at the iPad 2 unveiling was that iOS 5 is going to be delayed until the fall, even though previous iOS updates have been done in the spring, making it a tradition of sorts. Furthermore, the upcoming WWDC will be "software only" and will not include the unveiling of any new hardware, in particular the iPhone 5, which will presumably be released concurrently with the iOS update.

The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo TV working group ,the goal of which is to "help drive the evolution of MeeGo within the television ecosystem and provide an open framework for industry creativity and innovation".

The company revealed Thursday that it will delay publication of the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) source code for the foreseeable future - possibly for months. It's not clear when (or if) the source code will be made available. The decision puts Android on a path towards a "draconian future" of its own, in which it is controlled by a single vendor - Google. The Ars link linked above is a pretty inflammatory editorial, so see also: Businessweek, GigaOM, The Register.

The community-created Nouveau driver that's open-source and is written by clean-room reverse-engineering the NVIDIA binary display driver, has reached a serious milestone. For low-end NVIDIA GPUs, the Nouveau driver based upon the Mesa Gallium3D architecture is now as fast, or even faster, than NVIDIA's official proprietary driver.

The GNU Project has announced a new project called GNU Free Call, an open source Skype alternative that will offer anonymous VoIP and will use the GNU SIP Witch server as the back end. GNU SIP Witch requires a minimum of system resources so it can be used on cell phones too so it seems the goal is to provide a cross-platform application, the immediate target most probably being Android.