Monthly Archive:: December 2009

BetaNews writes: "Microsoft executives and product managers -- Chairman Bill Gates, above all of them -- showed great technology vision for the new millennium. The company was right about so many trends to come but, sadly, executed poorly in bringing too many of them to market. Microsoft's stiffness, perhaps a sign of its aging leadership, consistently proved its foible. Then there is arcane organizational structure, which has swelled with needless middle managers, and the system of group competition".

Just before Christmas Songbird 1.4.0 was released, and a new fix versions was released today as 1.4.3. Songbird now supports MSC storage devices and CD ripping, bringing the app one step closer to replacing iTunes for some users. What's particularly interesting is that Songbird now specifically pushes their product against users of Android, Nokia and Palm smartphones -- which is something I also suggested a few months too. Hopefully Google, Nokia, and Palm will get behind the small team in San Francisco to help out the cause, since it's also on their best interest too.

"Last November, Russinovich triumphantly introduced developers at the company's annual PDC conference in Los Angeles to a multitude of measures implemented in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 not only to improve reliability and harden security, but to overcome the deficiencies he openly admits characterized the brief era of Windows Vista. Collectively, just the introductions to these new features by Russinovich and his partners consumed 11 hours over the first two days, all of that time with a standing-room-only crowd."

Lots of news regarding Palm's webOS the past few days. Not only did Palm release webOS 1.3.5, the company has also laid out a number of hints on what's to come at CES coming January: OpenGL is here.

"Google's much-anticipated new phone, the HTC-designed Nexus One, could make its debut next week. Google has scheduled a press event for Tuesday, January 5 at its Mountain View, California, headquarters. Though the company hasn't mentioned Nexus One, the invitation mentions Android, Google's mobile operating system for phones, and the company is widely expected to show the device that has had smartphone industry watchers buzzing for weeks."

And here you were, thinking the legal tussle between Apple and Nokia couldn't get any uglier. Well, it turns out it can, as Nokia has filed another patent complaint, this time to the US International Trade Commission. This new case revolves around patents other than the ones in the first case.

Continuing with our slow-news-week theme, I'd bring your attention to Dave Barry's year-end column. People outside the US may not be familiar with Barry, a prominent nationally-syndicated satirist whose columns are full of hyberbolic nonsense. But in addition to national and international events, he covers some technology news to, excerpted after the jump.

Like I said in the below item, it's a slow news day. This was further evidenced today by a story about the Google Chrome OS Netbook specifications, which, according to IBTimes, were leaked - to them, obviously. Together with the iPhone/NYC thing, this story gripped the internet and blogosphere today.

Mozilla won't make a 2009 deadline for releasing Firefox 3.6 and is giving itself more time to complete a major update, version 4.0. The organization behind the open-source Web browser had predicted a final release of Firefox 3.6 in December 2009, but the Mozilla Web site now includes "ship Firefox 3.6" as a goal for the first quarter of 2010. In addition, Firefox 4.0, which had been due in 2010, now is "aimed at late 2010 or early 2011," with a beta due in the summer of 2010, according to Mozilla.

"Google is one of the biggest companies supporting OpenSource movement, they released more than 500 open source projects (most of them are samples showing how to use their API). In this article I will try to write about most interesting and free releases from Google, some of them might be abandoned." Via NewsYCombinator.

"Their arrival heralded a new age of communications and they played a major role in the explosion of the internet. We're talking, of course, about modems. Here we look back on the development of this remarkable device."

"Adobe's Open Screen Project, which puts Flash acceleration support on a variety of platforms, has killed Intel's 'full Internet' rationale for mobile x86. But the same project has also brought HD YouTube and Hulu to Intel's Pine Trail platform, which hurts the case for NVIDIA's Ion."

At the end of the year, mainly to shamelessly fill slow news around the holidays, OSNews usually asks the readers to share with all the other readers something about their computer setup. Since OSNews can be quite diverse when it comes to computing environments, these threads can often be quite interesting. This year, please chime in with the setup you use to read OSNews - computer, OS, software and maybe even provide screenshots or photos of your proud workspace. Has it changed a lot this year? Maybe switched browser, maybe switched OS even? Let everybody know!

Gizmodo has compiled a rogues' gallery of buggy, disappointing, and just plain pointless gadgets that all made their mark during the 2000s. If you've been following computing news over the past ten years, you probably remember lots of them, and may have been personally disappointed by some of them. Some highlights: Segway, wearable PC, n-Gage, Rokr.