Monthly Archive:: February 2012

I'm swamped with real-world work at the moment, so you'll have to settle for this quickie: the consumer preview for Windows 8 has been released. Go get it and report in what you find!

This morning, I experienced the nerd equivalent of a Black Friday $50 iPad sale. At 07:00 CET, the first batch of the much-anticipated Raspberry Pi went on sale, and while Raspberry Pi itself was very properly prepared, the two large international retailers actually selling the device weren't - despite warnings from Raspberry Pi about the enormous amount of traffic that would come their way, the two sites crumbled to dust within seconds. There's good news too - the cheaper model A has seen its RAM doubled at no additional cost.

Linus Torvalds on requiring the root password for mundane tasks. "So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace 'my kids' with 'sales people on the road' if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place." Yes, it's harsh (deal with it, Finns don't beat around the bush), but he's completely and utterly right. While there's cases where it makes sense to disable certain settings (public terminals, for instance), it is utterly idiotic that regular home users have to type in their root password for such mundane tasks.

"Dell launched a new line of servers for enterprise customers, boosting its corporate business unit and shifting its focus further away from consumers, who are increasingly choosing such devices as Apple's iPad. Chief Executive Michael Dell said his namesake company is no longer a personal computer company and has transformed itself into a business that sells services and products to corporations, a lucrative market that he said is worth $3 trillion." PC has become a dirty word. All part of the war on general purpose computing.

The just released version 12.02 of the Genode OS Framework takes the first steps to carry out the plan to turn the framework into a general-purpose OS for the daily use by its developers until the end of the year. It features a new ACPI driver, the first bits of a device-driver manager, support for using the fork syscall in GNU programs, and a PDF rendering engine. The most significant point of this release, however, is the way it was conducted. It represents the first version carried out using a completely open development process.

"Each and every day, we are humbled by the trajectory of Android and our partners. With a year-on-year growth rate of more than 250%, 850000 new Android devices are activated each day, jetting the total number of Android devices around the world past 300 million. These numbers are a testament to the break-neck speed of innovation that defines the Android ecosystem." Andy Rubin clarified the numbers - activations are only counted once per device ID, and devices without Google services, such as the Kindle Fire, are not counted. Of these 300 million devices, 12 million are tablets - in other words, Apple has very little to fear at this point. Then again, Android on smartphones started out that way as well.

There's a lot of news coming out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, but since we can't compete with the well-funded gadget blogs, I suggest you read up on the details at The Verge (or Engadget). One thing stood out to me, though. While the entire industry is moving towards more cores, more megapixels, more gigahertz, more display inches - Microsoft is doing the exact opposite. Windows Phone has been updated and optimised to run on slower hardware.

"Don't expect RIM to open source its entire operating system, or its radio stack. But the original smartphone company is gambling its future success on open source, and it has an expert on board to help. Mary Branscombe asked Senior Technical Director for Open Software, Eduardo Pelegri Llopart, where open source fits in at RIM."

"Microsoft appears to be killing off two of its key user-facing brands with the upcoming Consumer Preview release of Windows 8. Windows Live applications have been rolled into preinstalled apps that work as the core 'Windows Communications' applications for Windows 8, and this lack of Windows Live branding is only the tip of the iceberg. 'Microsoft Account' will replace Windows Live ID in Windows 8, and the software giant has also removed traces of Zune from its Windows Store, Music, and Video applications, although Zune Pass functionality remains." They're actually getting it. Amazing.

An interesting anecdote at MinimalMac about television being broken. The author's young daughter, who is growing up in a Netflix/Hulu/iTunes/etc. household, was confronted with actual TV for the first time, and wonders why she can't pick what to watch, why the shows are being interrupted all the time, and so on. Clearly - TV is broken.

"In this blog post (and the one that will follow) we'd like to introduce a few of the broad reaching experience improvements that we've delivered in Visual Studio 11. We've worked hard on them over the last two years and believe that they will significantly improve the experience that you will have with Visual Studio."

"Jobs called Android a 'stolen product', but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. The iPhone didn't emerge fully formed from Jobs's head. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades - much of which occurred outside of Cupertino." Nothing particularly new in there for regular OSNews readers, but still handy to have it in one place.

Lukas Mathis touts many webOS features that he wants other vendors to steal. All this stuff just makes me more sad I never got to try webOS on anything because nobody gives a rat's bum about The Netherlands. WebOS never came to market here. Especially its multitasking with cards looks so much more elegant than the horrible "multi"tasking implementations on Android and iOS. Hopeful note: Matias Duarte now heads the UX team for Android.

"Nightline has aired its report from Foxconn's factories on ABC. In the report, host Bill Weir speaks directly to factory workers as well as their managers. You would think that this unprecedented' look inside Apple factories would reveal much we didn't know, but the show was relatively light on information. Weir did extensively survey the places where iPads and iPhones are constructed, spent time interviewing both employees and their families, and talked to FLA president Auret van Heerden, though he uncovered mostly familiar information." Mind you, ABC is owned by Disney, which has close ties to Apple. Make of that what you will.