Monthly Archive:: July 2009

We haven't discussed Psystar in a while, have we? In case you've been living under a rock for a while, Psystar is a Mac clone maker entrenched in a legal battle with Apple. Recently, Psystar changed lawyers, and today they posted a vigorous entry on their website about how ready they are for the fight with Apple.

As Microsoft had already confirmed, it's going to open a line of retail stores later this year. Last week, Gizmodo published a set of detailed slides supposedly detailing the shopping experience Microsoft is going to implement. Today, Microsoft has confirmed those leaked plans are real (but not finalised!), while also announcing the first two store locations.

"Google has opened the source code of several key components of Wave, the company's new collaborative messaging platform. The code, which is available under the Apache Software License, will allow third-party developers to start experimentally bringing Wave-compatible federated messaging to their own software."

It's obvious that physical album sales would decline ever since the rise of iTunes and other online music stores, and who wants to buy an entire album of filler songs online when you can purchase the three or four songs from the album that you want? Apple and its associated record companies have noticed the large decline in online sales of entire albums, which have higher profit than individual tracks, so they're working on a new perk to spark people's interest in buying albums again. What's more is that these doubtful rumors that have been going around about Apple's tablet actually seem to have some truth to them.

Following the Cupcake branch, the Android team is baking something new and deliciously named. The Donut branch will be developing many new features in order to compete with rival phones and OSs like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, and webOS. Despite what many others have said, Donut is not going to be Android 2.0, but much of the development going on in that branch will end up being rolled out in the next firmware update. The development from Donut will bring Android a slew of new features, among which are CMDA network compatibility (for Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless networks, purportedly), integrated universal search similar to that of iPhone 3.0's Spotlight, more text-to-speech, "automatic backup, and a home-screen widget to let users easily toggle functions like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth." Following the pastry theme, we may expect to see the next two Android branches to be named "Eclair" and "Flan." The only thing I'm wondering is if Android will evolve to a point beyond personal pastries where we'll begin to see "Lasagna," "Orange Chicken," and "Carl's Junior's Famous Star." I'll buy an Android phone just to get those updates that will remind me just how beautiful the world is.

The news just broke that Apple has rejected the official upcoming Google Voice application, and stopped distributing the third party "GV" application, an app that was previously authorized. Read on for a quick commentary, from the point of view of not an Apple or Google fangirl, but from someone who genuinely appreciates VoIP SIP (even if Google Voice itself is not VoIP, read on). For those who have read my blog over the years, would probably remember my VoIP-related rants since 2005. UPDATE: A more direct, more personal, reply from me to Apple and AT&T.

Adobe Flash. It's everywhere. Not all of us want it, but many are forced into submission simply because it's weaseled its way into a myriad of applied and common uses. This just makes all the worse the news that a vulnerability in Adobe Flash, Reader, and Acrobat applications is allowing malcontents to exploit computers with these products installed.

For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.

Last week, the European Commission announced that Microsoft is willing to implement a browser ballot screen in Windows so that users can select a browser to install when installing Windows or when setting up their OEM computer. While this makes Opera very happy, Opera would like to see Ubuntu and Apple offer such a ballot screen too.

We skipped a week with the Week in Review due to a lack of time, but we're back now - and yes, it was a really interesting week. It really focussed on two major themes: Microsoft's code contribution to the Linux kernel, and various stories around Apple - both positive as well as negative.

The port of the Amiga USB stack Poseidon, whose bounty was reached in May, to AROS is almost complete and today officially entered its beta-testing phase, which will last a week. If no show-stopping bugs appear during testing, Poseidon will be officially added to AROS and its sources will be opened under the terms of the AROS Public License, similar to the Mozilla one. The AROS team, however, needs volounteers to test the current version on a wider range of PC configurations.

Every few years we geeks have our own kind of popcorn show to watch: tech companies showing teeth to one another. This time around, it's Palm vs Apple. In all seriousness though, how ethical is the battle around iTunes?

In a recent speech Bill Gates gave to a group of government officials and tech specialists in New Delhi, he criticized US privacy and immigration laws, spoke of his outlook on future technologies, and explained why he got rid of his Facebook page. His criticisms of the US laws took the pretense that health care providers and doctors not being able to share medical information of an individual to other institutions was a stumbling block and that exceptions in strict immigration ought to be made for "smart people" to live and work in high-paying jobs in the US. Gates also mentioned his views of a future with cell phones recognizing people around them or testing for diseases and an Internet being utilized for a broader use than simply web pages and the like. He mentioned that he once had a Facebook page and that it became too much of a time-waster having to sort through ten thousand friend requests periodically.

The browser saga between Microsoft, the EU, and various browser makers just got a new chapter. We all know how the EU and Microsoft are in a legal tussle over the inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft surprised everyone in June by announcing that Windows 7 would ship without Internet Explorer in Europe, a move it had hoped would silence the EU. The EU and Opera, however, were not impressed, and now Microsoft has caved in to the pressure.