Monthly Archive:: October 2011

The groundbreaking work he did with Ken Thompson led to the operating system behind everything from set-top boxes to the iPhone, but who sings the praises of the late Dennis Ritchie?

"The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week's LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed."

"Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the US copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails. The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, show the administration's cozy relationship with Hollywood and the music industry's lobbying arms, and its early support for the copyright-violation crackdown system publicly announced in July. One top official even used her personal e-mail account at least once during the negotiations with executives and lobbyists from companies ranging from AT&T to Universal Music." You don't say. Totally did not see this coming. Major surprise. Who'da thunk?

Last month we discussed how computers are portrayed in cultural icons like Lost in Space, Star Trek, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and -- of course! -- that lost gem, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. This article continues this essential exploration of American culture with more probing profiles of computers on TV and in the movies.

According to physorg.com (via popsci), the Cray Inc. XT5-HE supercomputer (Jaguar) is getting updated. The Department of Energy's Jaguar computer will be renamed Titan. This reported $97 million upgrade will be using AMD CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and is claimed to "be at least twice as fast and three times as energy efficient as today's fastest supercomputer, which is located in Japan." Good news for gamers.

Twitter is currently buzzing about the death of Dennis Ritchie, the visionary creator of UNIX and C, among other things. We hope it's just a false rumor. Story developing, we will be updating. Update: Unfortunately, it seems to be confirmed. Rob Pike, co-creator of the Plan 9 and Inferno OSes, who has worked with Ritchie in the past, and he's currently working for Google's GO language, posted this.

It's a busy day for Apple today. Not only has the company launched its iCloud service for everyone, they also released Mac OS X 10.7.2. To top it all off, as expected, the company launched iOS 5.0 today, bringing a host of much-needed and long-awaited new features to iOS.

This was an inevitability, right? Android applications were already running on the PlayBook operating system as well as on Maemo (and even some rumblings on iOS), and now BlueStacks is bringing Android applications to Windows. Today they released the alpha version of the BlueStacks App Player, which will allow you to run Android applications on Windows.

"BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin will be asked to offer customers the option to block adult content during subscription According to new measures to be announced by Prime Minister David Cameron, online pornography watchers will have to place a special request with their Internet Service providers (ISPs) to watch pornographic or sexualised content online. The prime minister is holding a summit at No.10 today with 30 media and retail executives, including broadcasters, magazine editors, trade bodies and advertisers, said the Daily Mail. Cameron is expected to announce the crackdown after Mothers Union charity chief executive Reg Bailey submitted a report on the matter after six months of study." The fact that this can happen in Great Britain just goes to show how brittle concepts like freedom of speech really are. Where people in the Arab world fight for the kinds of freedom we have, we in the west just hand them over to extremists. Un-frakking-believable. Any British folk in here? How on earth did you guys let this happen?

KDE has announced the release of Plasma Active One, which is a KDE 4.x style interface and API designed for touch devices. The Plasma Active Team states that "Plasma Active is innovative technology for an intelligent user experience. It is intended for all types of tablets, smartphones and touch computing devices such as set-top boxes, smart TVs, home automation, in-vehicle infotainment".

Within the last few days we read the news about Apple's Siri AI personal assistant, and about a brain implant that lets monkeys control virtual limps & feel virtual objects. I believe that if someone is to also combine a few more technologies (e.g. high-res eyeware, appropriate operating system changes), we will be looking at the next user interface revolution, after the inventions of the computer mouse and touch interfaces.

In the midst of the dual events Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne (overshadowed, of course, by the iPhone event) Oracle took a number of steps that show that they still care about making a go of Java on the desktop.

"Oracle has pulled the rug out from under Intel's Itanium processor by yanking support of its database, middleware, and application software on future Poulson and Kittson Itaniums. It looks as though Larry Ellison wants to take on IBM in microprocessors for data center systems, man to man, head to head. 'I remember when we first bought Sun, a lot of people said we were going to get out of the hardware business," Oracle's co-founder and CEO said opening up his keynote at the OpenWorld customer and partner and conference on Sunday night, when he also announced the new Exalytics in-memory BI appliance. 'I guess we didn't get that memo,' Ellison quipped, pointing out that Apple is doing a 'pretty good job' designing its own hardware and software and making it work well with its own services. And that Oracle is not only committed to making its server, storage, and networking business work, but having taken Sun's hardware as a means of getting its hands on Solaris and Java, Oracle is actually enthusiastic about creating its own stack."

JWM (Joe's Window Manager) was quietly update to Version 2.1.0 at the end of September, making it the first update in over 4 years. I honestly have no idea what's changed - do we have a JVM user in here? Don't fail me guys and girls!