Monthly Archive:: June 2011

"KDE has released a release candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases." Focuses of this release are Kwin support for OpenGL-ES 2.0 (oooh purty!), an interface refresh for Dolphin, and loads of other stuff.

Well, after 50 days of causing amok on the web, the guys and/or girls behind LulzSec have called it quits last night. After hacking into the systems of various Arizona law enforcement agencies and releasing countless internal documents, they published a statement on Pastebin yesterday, dumping yet another boatload of data on The Pirate Bay, and announcing their disbanding.

"Using a Mac may certainly be a safer choice for a lot of people as despite being vulnerable they are not targeted. However this is not the same as Macs being secure, something Eric Schmidt erroneously advised recently. I may be able to browse impervious to malware on a Mac at the moment, however I personally would not be comfortable using a platform so easily compromised if someone had the motivation to do so. In this article I address just why OS X is so insecure including the technical shortcomings of OS X as well as Apples policies as a company that contribute to the situation."

"I write a trivia column for a newspaper called The Austin Chronicle. Someone has asked me the origin of the word daemon as it applies to computing. Best I can tell based on my research, the word was first used by people on your team at Project MAC using the IBM 7094 in 1963. The first daemon (an abbreviation for Disk And Executive MONitor) was a program that automatically made tape backups of the file system. Does this sound about right? Any corrections or additions? Thank you for your time!"

As we reported earlier this week, Apple is busy sending out cease and desist letters to small, defenceless projects to defend its trademark application (it doesn't actually own the trademark yet) for 'app store'. This has prompted many a discussion over the trademarkability of such a generic term, and over the origins of the abbreviation 'app'. Who came up with it? How old is it? To my surprise - the abbreviation is much older than you'd think, and in a way, it illustrates quite well the demise of the programmer. What? Read on.

"Early milestone builds of Windows 8 have leaked onto the Internet, and considerable effort has been put into figuring out how they work. Though officially tight-lipped, snippets of information have escaped Redmond's walls. So far, it appears that Windows 8 development doesn't just look not bad - there are signs that it will actually resolve many long-standing annoyances with writing Windows software. If Microsoft can pull off everything it's hoping to achieve with the platform, Windows 8 will be as important and radical a release as Windows Longhorn was going to be." Fantastic article by Ars' Peter Bright. His stance on H264 and WebM may boil my blood at times, but this is a good piece of writing. Highly recommended.

"The House on Wednesday took up the most far-reaching overhaul of the patent system in 60 years, a bill that leaders in both parties said would make it easier for inventors to get their innovations to market and help put people back to work. The legislation, supported by the Obama administration and a broad range of business groups and high tech companies, aims to ease the lengthy backlog in patent applications, clean up some of the procedures that can lead to costly litigation and put the United States under the same filing system as the rest of the industrialized world." In other words, more protection for large companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, and an increasing number of nonsense patents due to faster application procedures.

So, while The Netherlands just adopted net neutrality, the US is now nearing a comprehensive agreement on a piracy crackdown system. It will include throttling internet speeds, limiting access to e.g. only the top 200 websites, and forced participation in an educational program on copyright. The system has been drafted by the White House, big content, and ISPs. I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for net neutrality in the land of the 'free'.

"So Apple got yet another patent granted today, and now there's yet another media firestorm over whether it means Cupertino will be able to sue every other phone manufacturer out of business, or at least out of the business of making multitouch devices. And, as usual, most of the hysteria is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of what the patent claims actually say, and what behaviors they actually cover in iOS. I don't know why we keep repeating this sad cycle, but I do know that it’s always, always better for us to read the claims and try to figure them out for ourselves - and in this case,they're actually pretty narrow."

After an epic vote fail in the lower house yesterday (labour accidentally voted against net neutrality lolfail), which was rectified today, The Netherlands has officially become the second country in the world, and the first in Europe, to turn net neutrality into law (okay, technically it needs to pass the senate, but that's more of a formality in our system). A big middle finger to Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama. Hey Chile, ./fistbump.sh. We're honoured to follow in your footsteps!

This make me a sad little facepalming unicorn. Apple has just slapped the open source home server project Amahi with a cease and desist letter about the project's use of the term 'app store' - stop using the term, or face Cupertino's army of lawyers. Note: Please help me find out what 'Mac App' is, a supposed Apple product from 1985 - the first citation of the term 'app' in the Oxford English Dictionary. Another note: Okay I should've guessed that publications from that time could still correct company's horrid camel case spelling without unleashing the wrath of fanboys - it's MacApp, not Mac App. Graçias, guys!

Nokia may have gone with Windows Phone 7 for its future smartphone operating system, but until then, we now have the Nokia N9 to look at. Yes, a beautiful, top-of-the-line Nokia smartphone which runs MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan - but isn't this thing kind of a dead end? Also announced: the even prettier Nokia N950 Meego 1.2 developer device - only available to a limited number of developers. Sure to become a collectors' item.

Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 5.0 to download webistes ahead of the official announcement of the release. Here some features that are newly available on Firefox 5.0: Improved HTML 5 and CSS3 support, Improved overall performance, Firefox 5.0 Web apps, A Do-Not-Track option.

Daily time spent in mobile apps has now surpassed web consumption. The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web.