Monthly Archive:: May 2012

Google CEO Larry Page was interviewed on Charlie Rose recently, and there was certainly some interesting stuff in there. Sadly, the interview suffers from the curse of modern journalism in that it was all a bit timid and civil (no truly harsh and confronting questions), but despite that, it's still a good watch. Two quotes from Page really stood out to me.

"Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the Pwnium browser hacking competition. We had two fantastic submissions, and successfully blocked both exploits within 24 hours of their unveiling. Today, we'd like to offer an inside look into the exploit submitted by Pinkie Pie." A work of pure art, this. Also, this is not the same person as the other PinkiePie. Also also, you didn't think I'd let a story with a headline like this go by unnoticed, did you?

Google CEO Larry Page: "It's a well known fact that people tend to overestimate the impact technology will have in the short term, but underestimate its significance in the longer term. Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound - as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone. That's why it's a great time to be in the mobile business, and why I'm confident Dennis and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come." Strong hint that the Motorola purchase isn't so much about current devices and patents as it is about acquiring the hardware know-how for the device form factors of the future.

"When Tudor Brown stepped down as president of ARM Holdings earlier this month, he left behind one of Britain's and indeed the world's, most successful technology companies." Thanks for a fantastic architecture. The technology world would be poorer for it without ARM.

"He's one of 10 reverse-engineers working full time for a stealthy company funded by some of the biggest names in technology: Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion, Sony, and Ericsson. Called the Rockstar Consortium, the 32-person outfit has a single-minded mission: It examines successful products, like routers and smartphones, and it tries to find proof that these products infringe on a portfolio of over 4,000 technology patents once owned by one of the world's largest telecommunications companies. When a Rockstar engineer uncovers evidence of infringement, the company documents it, contacts the manufacturer, and demands licensing fees for the patents in question. The demand is backed by the implicit threat of a patent lawsuit in federal court." And then people wonder why I call Apple and Microsoft patent trolls. These are the people destroying this industry, with Apple, Microsoft, RIM, etc. money. Sickeningly low.

According to StatCounter's figures (whatever they're worth) Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world, overtaking Internet Explorer for the first time. How times change. Let's hope Google, Firefox, and Opera have some good Metro stuff coming up, because IE on Windows 8 has a terrible UI.

For Microsoft, the traditional desktop is old news. It's on its way out, it's legacy, and the harder they claim the desktop has equal rights, the sillier it becomes. With companies, words are meaningless, it's actions that matter, and here Microsoft's actions tell the real story. The company has announced the product line-up for Visual Studio 11, and the free Express can no longer be used to create desktop applications. Message is clear.

Linux kernel 3.4 has been released. New features include several Btrfs updates: support of metadata blocks bigger than 4KB, much improved metadata performance, better error handling and better recovery tools; there is also a new X32 ABI which allows to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers; several updates to the GPU drivers: early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 'Kepler', support of AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and support of Intel Medfield graphics; support of x86 cpu driver autoprobing, two new device-mapper targets, several perf improvements such as GTK2 report GUI and a new 'Yama' security module. Here's the full list of changes.

Apple's and Samsung's CEOs are meeting tomorrow for patent lawsuit settlement talks, and cross-licensing appears to still be an option. Me, I'm hoping the talks fail utterly. Let this mess play out in the fullest. Let the world see the ridiculousness that is the patent system. Let's see what happens when iPhones and Galaxy devices get banned from the US and US senators suddenly don't get their hands on the latest shiny toy. Let's see how that impacts this mess.

EDE is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply put, a desktop should not get in your way. This is the final 2.0 release, a major rework. Summarizing previous alpha and beta releases, 2.0 is now fully FLTK powered (eFLTK is deprecated) and freedesktop.org friendly. Specificaly, this release adds a new notification daemon, replaces the old edewm with the pekwm window manager, fixes a lot of issues and memory leaks, and more. Grab the release and try it. You can also try ede netinstall, a single command that will download and compile EDE for you.

Smartphones have become the preferred computer of the masses. Sales surpassed those of personal computers in 2010, having grown over 50% per year for several years. Nearly 500 million smartphones shipped in 2011. This radically shifts the terrain in the consumer operating system competition that was, for years, firmly decided in favor of Windows. This article analyzes the New OS Wars.

"Just days after the Mandriva community started its own plans for the next release of the French Linux distribution, its commercial sponsor has formally announced that the community will take the lead on all Mandriva Linux development moving forward. In a blog post on the Mandriva SA site, CEO Jean-Manuel Croset ceded control of the Mandriva Linux distribution back to the community at large." Take 'r 'round the shed and put a bullet 'tween 'r eyes already.

A long - very long - blog post justifying all the ideas and choices behind Windows 8. We've all been here before, but it's nice to have it all summed up once again for easy reference in case we hit another yes/no debate on Windows 8 and keyboard and mouse. Anywho, the most interesting bit is that Microsoft has updated the theme of the traditional desktop, flattening it to achieve a very nice look.

"All eyes were on Microsoft's rather important launch of Windows Phone in China earlier this year. Nokia followed up with the Lumia 800c, released on China Telecom. According to Michel van der Bel, COO of Greater China Region at Microsoft, the company has achieved 7% marketshare in the country, overtaking the iPhone (sitting at just 6%)." I'm raising an eyebrow over these figures due to their source, but assuming they're true, we get a good glimpse of how well Windows Phone 7 would handle itself in a market where the competition had less of a head start.