Thom Holwerda Archive

"Kay says that some gadgets with superficial Dynabook-like qualities, such as the iPad, have not only failed to realize the Dynabook dream, but have in some senses betrayed it. That's one of the points he makes in this interview, conducted by computer historian David Greelish, proprietor of the Classic Computing Blog and organizer of this month's Vintage Computer Festival Southeast in Atlanta (the Festival will feature a pop-up Apple museum featuring Xerox's groundbreaking Alto workstation, which Kay worked on, as well as devices which deeply reflected his influence, including the Lisa, the original Macintosh and the Newton). Kay and Greelish also discuss Kay's experiences at some of the big outfits where he's worked, including Xerox's fabled PARC labs, Apple, Disney and HP. Today, Kay continues his research about children and technology at his own organization, the Viewpoints Research Institute." A great interview with this legendary man.

"Already a bit of a legend in China, the 40-year-old serial entrepreneur announced last April that he had formed Smartisan Co., Ltd. to work on a smartphone OS, and that it would shame all manufacturers with its revolutionary user experience. Having missed the December target that he promised, Luo eventually took the stage in Beijing last week to spend well over three - yes, three - hours going through the thought process behind his Smartisan OS, so bear with us here." The icons are nice, and there's certainly some nice touches in there, but calling this an 'operating system' is stretching the definition beyond its breaking point.

"The ReactOS project is rapidly developing. One of the developers participating in this project suggested that we re-analyzed the source code, as the code base is growing fast. We were glad to do that. We like this project, and we'll be happy if this article helps the developers to eliminate some bugs. Analysis was performed with the PVS-Studio 5.02 code analyzer."

A lot of interesting stuff on the internals of one of the greatest games of all time: Pac-Man. First, recreating Pac-Man in a day. Second, a very detailed look at the artificial intelligence of each of the game's ghosts. As it turns out, each ghost had its own 'character' and approached Pac-Man in its own unique way. Third, the Pac-Man Dossier, the most detailed study of the game ever.

"Last Friday, The Verge revealed the existence of a dead-simple URL-based hack that allowed anyone to reset your Apple ID password with just your email address and date of birth. Apple quickly shut down the site and closed the security hole before bringing it back online. The conventional wisdom is that this was a run-of-the-mill software security issue. It isn't. It's a troubling symptom that suggests Apple's self-admittedly bumpy transition from a maker of beautiful devices to a fully-fledged cloud services provider still isn't going smoothly. Meanwhile, your Apple ID password has come a long way from the short string of characters you tap to update apps on your iPhone. It now offers access to Apple's entire ecosystem of devices, stores, software, and services."

"Not only has China's Central TV been running regular follow ups to its March 15 expose on Apple's iPhone repair policies, but on Thursday People's Daily - the Communist Party's official propaganda organ - attacked the company for the fourth day in a row, devoting half a page to negative articles." This isn't rocket science. The west treats Chinese technology companies like crap, so they treat western companies like crap. How exactly does this surprise anyone? And why is it okay for our governments to engage in political games to smear foreign companies, but we throw a hissy fit when a foreign nation engages in the same political games to smear western companies? It sucks for Apple to be the target right now, but had this occurred a decade ago, it would have been Microsoft.

"Last Friday Oliver and I met up to discuss the state of things and how we intend to proceed. The run-time support for package management in Haiku (in the package management branch, of course) is in pretty good shape already. With the system itself and all the third-party software living in packages the system boots and is fully functional."

This. This is what we need. These are the kind of steps from which we all benefit. Google has just announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge: the company promises not to sue any users, distributors, or developers of open source products based on the patents it owns (unless first attacked).

"Today, we are excited to unlock this technology for high-performance games, by teaming up with Epic Games. By leveraging this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla has been able to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. With this port, developers will soon be able to explore limitless possibilities when it comes to porting their popular gaming titles to the Web."

"The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending 85Gbps of traffic. Since then, the attack got much worse. Here are some of the technical details of what we've seen."

"Microsoft has breathlessly announced several new game titles for Windows Phone 8. And once again, Redmond continues to disappoint." I'm lucky not to require too many applications, but this article still hits nails on heads.

"The GNOME Project has officially released GNOME 3.8 today. This latest version of GNOME 3 delivers major new features, a brand new application and a host of smaller bug fixes and enhancements."

The Swedish Language Council wanted to list 'ungoogleable' as a new word. Google didn't like it. "The word was to be used to describe something 'that you can't find on the web with the use of a search engine', according to the Language Council. However, Google was less than thrilled that a word based on its name had been highlighted by Sweden's 'official language cultivation body'. Google wanted the council to specify that the word's definition only covered searches performed using Google, and not searches involving other search engines." Sadly, the Council decided to scrap the word altogether. Google, get your filthy paws off our languages. It seems like large corporations love to exert pressure on language - Apple tried something similar a few years ago with the abbreviation 'app', something which I exposed for the idiocy that it was. I will use whatever words I damn well please, and so should everyone else. The Swedish Language Council shouldn't even have acknowledged Google's ridiculous request with a response.

Via Ars Technica: "After almost 10 years of testing, Quicksilver lays the beta tag to rest (if the lack of an eszett brings a tear to your eye, you can always reminisce by hitting option+S on your keyboard). What does this release mean? It means more than just a change in the version numbering system - it signifies a maturity of Quicksilver and a sign of what's to come." Quicksilver is fantastic for those of us for whom command+space and the dock combined is not enough. While I personally don't use Quicksilver (I use Spotlight through command+space to launch applications), I know of quite a few Mac users who swear by it.