Monthly Archive:: November 2011

A reader asks: "Can someone comment on the legality of using my brother's old Snow Leopard DVD to install OS X? My brother has Lion, so why can't he choose to give it to me? It doesn't violate Apple's 1 license per 1 computer policy."

Apple is prepping new sixth-generation iPhone and third-generation iPad models with embedded 4G LTE connectivity that will launch next year according to a recent report. Japanese news organization Nikkei Business on Wednesday stated that an iPad 3 with LTE is currently slated to launch on NTT DoCoMo some time during the summer next year, and an LTE-enabled iPhone 5 will launch later in the fall. Apple CEO Tim Cook is said to have met with NTT DoCoMo president Kiyoyuki Tsujimura and VP Takashi Yamada earlier this month to work out the details of the arrangement, and the companies have reportedly reached agreeable terms. NTT DoCoMo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With WebOS out of the picture and the Blackberry Playbook as good as gone as well, we really only have iOS and Android left until Windows 8 comes out. I’ve finally gotten around to getting an Android device myself and spent the last week trying to see if my theoretical knowledge of the system and what I remember from the last Android device I had (which ran 1.6, viewed as ancient in Android land) fits reality. Read on for a full tear down and comparison on the two OSes.

The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other--and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

"After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered 'all Internet search engines' and 'all social media websites' - explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google - to 'de-index' the domain names and to remove them from any search results."

"The social networking service Facebook has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public. The proposed settlement requires Facebook to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future, including giving consumers clear and prominent notice and obtaining consumers' express consent before their information is shared beyond the privacy settings they have established."

"This morning, ARM is taking a significant step toward ironing out Android's multiple versioning issues that Linus Torvalds himself called a 'hodgepodge' earlier this year. It's releasing suites of developers' tools, including a free community edition, of its ARM Developers Studio (DS-5), this time including a graphical debugger that it says will eliminate the need for devs to use a clunky, command-line debugger for tuning native code."

So, it's no secret that the Linux desktop - at least, the GNOME-side of things - is a bit in a state of disarray. Unity hasn't exactly gone down well with a lot of people, and GNOME 3, too, hasn't been met with universal praise. So, what to do? Linux Mint, currently one of the most popular Linux distributions out there, thinks they are on to the solution with their latest release, Linux Mint 12.

"Ceylon is a programming language for writing large programs in a team environment. The language is elegant, highly readable, extremely typesafe, and makes it easy to get things done. And it's easy to learn for programmers who are familiar with mainstream languages used in business computing. Ceylon has a full-featured Eclipse-based development environment, allowing developers to take best advantage of the powerful static type system. Programs written in Ceylon execute on any JVM."

"A little over one year after the 1.0 release, I'm happy to announce the 1.6 release of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime. This provides a superset of the functionality of Apple's Mac OS X 10.7/iOS 5 runtimes and provides a solid foundation for Objective-C and Objective-C++ development on Free Software platforms."

My previous article described how you can use your tech knowledge to profit from the stock market -- if you combine it with financial analysis and careful research. This article analyzes several tech stocks. The goal is to start a useful discussion. What is your opinion of these companies? Even if you don't invest, this matters if you are in employed in IT. You're betting your career on the companies in whose products you specialize! You don't want to pick losers.

It's a somewhat uneasy subject among websites such as OSNews - advertisements, the site's readability, and how to get a little more income without compromising the pleasure of using the site. Brent Simmons published a blog post about the topic which has been making its rounds across the web. The gist: websites, save for a precious few, seem to be getting progressively worse.

The Register lifts the lid on the creation of the smartphone platform that was Hildon (later to become Series 90) that Nokia had developed in the early 00's by a team originally at Psion.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister gets into the holiday spirit with a post that gives thanks to technical advances for developers, including open source tools, modern IDEs, and distributed version control. 'I'm old enough to remember when performance-critical routines meant hand-coded assembly language and sometimes even keying in machine code as hexadecimal digits. We've come a long way since those bad old days, and not surprisingly we owe a lot of our progress to technology. So for this Thanksgiving, here are just a few of the modern advances for which I, as a developer, give thanks.' What are you giving thanks to?