Monthly Archive:: October 2011

The news already hit HackerNews late last night, but at that time there was no confirmation so I decided to wait until we knew for sure. Well, after Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs, the technology world lost another great mind yesterday. Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, the creator of LISP and the father of artificial intelligence, has passed away, age 84.

"Looking past the Metro hype, the Build conference also revealed promising road maps for C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net platform as a whole. Perhaps the most exciting demo of the conference for .Net developers, however, was Project Roslyn, a new technology that Microsoft made available yesterday as a Community Technology Preview. Roslyn aims to bring powerful new features to C#, Visual Basic, and Visual Studio, but it's really much more than that. If it succeeds, it will reinvent how we view compilers and compiled languages altogether."

Considering the polarising topic of software patents and related IP litigation is coming up a lot lately, I felt the need to write a few words on this thing called 'bias'. This word is being thrown around a lot, but I get the feeling many people are unclear as to what, exactly, it means. Because contrary to popular opinion, there's nothing wrong with being being biased. In fact, there's no such thing as unbiased blogging (or even unbiased journalism).

Appleinsider writes: "An anticipated Apple high-definition television set, complete with iOS features including Siri voice commands, FaceTime video chat and access to the App Store, would be a strong product in a massive $100 billion market, according to a new analysis." Last year I explained my vision of a smart TV too (read the comment), and my ideas were pretty much the same thing AppleInsider discusses about today. Back then I was almost laughed at by most OSNews residents for these ideas. I have the feeling that the people who then found my ideas ridiculous, they'll now find a possible Apple smart TV "natural" and "revolutionary".

I'll just link to this. Microsoft chest-thumping about being a patent troll.

"The first RC build for the FreeBSD-9.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the architectures amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites. One of the many new features in 9.0 we would like to be tested is the new installer, so we encourage our users to do fresh installation on test systems. Alternatively, users upgrading existing systems may now do so using the freebsd-update(8) utility."

Remember back when Nokia jumped to Windows Phone 7, abandoning all other platforms and future directions? Remember Elop's infamous 'burning platform' memo was coveniently 'leaked' to the web? Remember how Elop claimed Windows Phone 7 was the only way forward, since nothing else inside the company would be ready for prime time soon enough? Remember how I thought this was a very good and sane decision? Well, the first reviews of what will be the only MeeGo handset from Nokia (the N9) are in, and well... To whoever decided to go WP7 and ditch MeeGo: I don't like you. To myself: I'm an idiot for arguing this was a good idea.

Antonio Ospite explores Gnome 3 in fall-back mode and tries to make it look and behave more like Gnome 2.32 again. This summer Linus Torvalds made it to the news for complaining about the gnome-shell design; Gnome fall-back mode is the solution for those like Linus who can't - or better, do not want to - use gnome-shell just yet.

So, how serious is the legal battle between Apple and the various Android phone makers, really? Surely, it's just logical business sense that's behind it, right? Calculated, well-planned precision strikes designed to hurt Android where simply making better, more innovative products isn't enough? Well, no, not really. We already knew Steve Jobs took this personal - now we know just how personal.

"XDA member vari9 points us to an app developed by a few devs over at dexetra that basically does the same exact thing as Siri. Total development time? 8 hours, according to the devs. Needless to say, this little amount of time put in the app almost guarantees that it is in alpha stage and as such you are likely to receive weird answers or no answers at all, but as with everything in the world of Android, this is a work in progress, which will flourish rather soon due to the large interest that was generated on this technology thanks to Apple's marketing efforts." It's quite clearly not on the same level as Siri, but the fact these developers managed to get this far this quickly is pretty impressive. Then again, as long as Iris keeps interpreting 'Fiona Apple' as 'Fianna Apple', 'owner Apple' or 'George Bush' (?!), it's completely pointless to me. In any case, it's free on the Android Market.

"The Free Software Foundation released a statement open for public signing, titled 'Stand up for your freedom to install free software'. The statement is a response to Microsoft's announcement that if computer makers wish to distribute machines with the Windows 8 compatibility logo, they must implement a system called 'Secure Boot'. The FSF statement warns against the danger that, if done wrong, this system would have to be called Restricted Boot, because it could make computers incapable of running anything but Windows." Signed.

What many of us wondered the moment Research In Motion announced the PlayBook's QNX-based operating system has now transpired: the Canadian smartphone and tablet company has announced BBX, their QNX-based operating system for both smartphones and tablets - in other words, the expansion of the PlayBook operating system into smartphones.

Just-in-time compilers, browser wars, and developer enthusiasm are just a few of the trends separating today's hot scripting languages from the pack. InfoWorld's Peter Wayner surveys programmers, commit logs, search engine traffic, and book sales data to provide a barometer of scripting languages -- JavaScript, ActionScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, R, and PHP -- providing a best-guess forecast of which languages are rising and falling in scripting hipness.

Well, its not official yet, but Microsoft's Windows 7 has now become the most widely used operating system. . . Windows 7 now has a strong 40.21% share of all desktop operating systems around the world whereas, the usage share of Windows XP has slipped to 38.64%. All this happened a couple of days back (in October). The rise in usage of Windows 7 and the drop in usage of Windows XP has been consistent since the time Windows 7 was first launched.