David Adams Archive

A detailed comparison of two novel approaches to developing web apps : Node.js and Opa. Both technologies are open source, allow writing "Hello world" web app in just a few lines and both focus on the Web rather than on generic programming. However, Opa seems to be much more concise, is strongly typed and by design makes most popular security threats void.

It looks like a new "locally integrated menu" will make it into Unity, starting with version 5.6.0. There's basically no information about the new locally integrated menubar, except for two bug reports which link to some custom Unity, Compiz, Metacity and Light Themes branches so to see "LIM" in action, I've compiled all these branches and here's the result. The "locally integrated menubar" can be displayed on the panel (for maximized windows) as well as in the window decoration (unmaximized windows). But it's not displayed on both in the same time.

This weekend at FOSDEM 2012 what Kristian Hogsberg is expected to say in Brussels will surprise many of you: Wayland 1.0 is gearing up for release as their first stable release. Wayland is supposed to be ready to take on the Linux desktop world.

When the Raspberry Pi ships later this year, it will be delivered to your door as a finished unit. The more adventurous tinkerers among you, as well as adept system builders, have asked the Raspberry Pi Foundation why they can’t get them in kit form instead. The reason why that wasn’t considered is demonstrated in an image released by Broadcom . . . they are tiny. And unlike a typical system build using an x86 chip that just slots into place, installing these chips requires a very steady hand and just the right amount of solder.

The first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed is to be named "Spark". It sports an open Linux stack on unlocked hardware and comes with an open content and services market. The user experience is, of course, Plasma Active and it will be available to the general public. The hardware is modest but compelling: 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor, Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal storage plus SD card slot, a 7" capacitive multi-touch screen and wifi connectivity. The retail price will be €200.

An article at The Next Web points out that the latest marketshare numbers put Apple at the top of "PC" makers, and that some PC makers that don't have any tablet momentum are calling foul. It's "controversial" to count tablets as PCs, they say. The article points out various justifications for not categorizing tablets as personal computers, and then shoots them down. I must say, I find the argument compelling.

Jon Rubinstein, once a prominent voice in the mobile community as he sought to reinvent Palm, has left HP. The move isn't a surprise considering how many management shuffles HP has gone through as of late, and Rubinstein has all but disappeared from the webOS landscape in its recent transition to an open source platform.

Microsoft is giving an unusually long advanced look at their next edition of Windows 8, both for client and server, and Tom Henderson (who has been writing about networking and security for decades) takes a look at the implications of the features in the "pre-beta" tuned for businesses and network admins. The client version of the operating systems is known to have support concerns, for instance, as long-time APIs are retired and new ones introduced, as he writes in Windows 8 Client Pre-Beta: Five Important Implications. And the Windows 8 Server Editions promise more radical changes than the operating system has seen in a decade: It’s a re-thinking of how server roles are accomplished for Microsoft. He discusses the impact on your Windows Server deployment in Windows 8 Server Pre-Beta: 5 Important Implications.

An OS Enthusiast created a page displaying the modal restart prompts from many of the top OSes/versions from the last 20 years. It brought back a flood of memories. The best part is when you click on the "ok" button. It "restarts" the web site for you. Gizmodo's instincts were to make it a game, by asking: how many can you identify?

On Tuesday 10th January, Donald Ervin Knuth, the American computing pioneer and author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming, celebrates his 74th birthday. Four years ago, Knuth set aside a couple of days to record, in great depth, the story of his life and work for posterity. You can watch the recording here.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Web site, Google acquired 188 patents and another 29 patents pending from IBM in a deal recorded December 30.The newest batch of patents from IBM have only a handful of mobile telephony applications. Instead, they are rich in database intellectual property.

Microsoft is preparing to launch a new persistent virtual machine feature on its Azure cloud platform, enabling customers to host Linux, SharePoint and SQL Server there . . . To date, Microsoft has been balking at customer requests to add persistent VMs to Azure, hoping to get customers to develop Azure apps from scratch instead. But the lack of the ability to host apps like SharePoint and other third-party business applications with persistence was a deal breaker for a number of business users who were unwilling to consider Azure until Microsoft added this support, one of my contacts said.

Boxee released version 1.5 of its free multimedia streaming software for Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops today, but simultaneously announced that it will cease offering the Boxee desktop software after January 2012. Thereafter, the company will limit its focus to devices such as the D-Link Boxee Box.

2011 will go down in the history books as a great year for tablets mostly for Apple's iPad however, not all tablet vendors fared as well as Apple. It's not for lack of products that prevented Android tablets from taking any market share away from Apple this year. By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad however, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them. What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along?