Monthly Archive:: August 2012

Where can I order? "Nokia's new flagship Windows Phone 8 device has been leaked today, revealed as the Lumia 920. Posted to Twitter by Evleaks, the Lumia 920 appears to include a PureView camera that the company has been hinting at in recent weeks. Codenamed the Phi, Nokia's Lumia 920 is said to include a 4.5-inch display and will likely be available in a number of colors judging by the leaked image." Yes miss, the red one please. No, no need to wrap it, don't need bag - I'll have ripped open the box before I go through the door.

"In my not-so-spare time I work on a new technology called Hyperaudio. A question I'm frequently asked is 'What exactly is Hyperaudio?'. Well, it can be a lot of things but I often find it useful to distill it into a sentence. I got it down to this: 'Hyperaudio is to audio as Hypertext is to text.' I usually pause at this point because that statement is loaded with implications."

After more than a decade, Lazarus has reached version 1.0. For those that don't know Lazarus - it's a Delphi-like IDE for the Free Pascal Compiler and has widget sets for win32/64 GTK2, Qt, and others. It's very very much like Delphi and instead of the VCL it has the LCL which is cross platform. Syntax is almost exactly the same as Delphi. You can create stand-alone win32/64 executables that require no .NET runtime or even an installer.

We all know about Apple's look-and-feel lawsuit against Microsoft over Windows 2.0, but this wasn't the only look-and-feel lawsuit Apple filed during those years. Digital Research, Inc., the company behind GEM, also found itself on the pointy end of Apple's needle. Unlike the lawsuit against Microsoft, though, Apple managed to 'win' the one against DRI.

Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.

Can Hewlett-Packard bounce back? Third quarter results are in and they don't look good. Total revenue is down 5% year over year, and profits tanked on a $9.2 billion noncash write-down on the 2008 EDS acquisition. What's HP's strategy? Meg Whitman has now been CEO of the struggling giant for a year. She compares HP's turnaround to that of Starbucks, saying "Usually these kinds of turnarounds take anywhere between four or five years... There's nothing fancy about these turnarounds. This is not advanced business, this is 101." I question if refocusing on core competencies is enough. Maybe HP needs to get into the smartphone and tablet markets. Maybe it needs to expand its services business. Think I'm wrong? Then bet your money on HP stock and get rich. HPQ trades at its lowest point in a decade and sells for an rock bottom forward P/E of 4.2.

"Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touch in 1984, the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee. In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that 'new' technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the 'great invention' story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call 'the long-nose of innovation'." If we lived in a just and science-based world, this detailed history alone would be enough for judges the world over to throw all of a certain company's patent aggression out the window. Sadly, we live in an unjust and money-based world.

"n the fall of 1977, I experimented with a newfangled PC, a Radio Shack TRS-80. For data storage it used - I kid you not - a cassette tape player. Tape had a long history with computing; I had used the IBM 2420 9-track tape system on IBM 360/370 mainframes to load software and to back-up data. Magnetic tape was common for storage in pre-personal computing days, but it had two main annoyances: it held tiny amounts of data, and it was slower than a slug on a cold spring morning. There had to be something better, for those of us excited about technology. And there was: the floppy disk."

"For years now, Linux has been a black sheep standing in the shadow of Apple and Microsoft. Despite having a fervent and enthusiastic following, the operating system hasn't been able to grab a sizable share of the computing market and has instead been content to subsist on the customers that come away dissatisfied with the mainstream competition. But that may be about to change. With the release of Microsoft Windows 8 on the horizon, some are saying Linux may have a great opportunity to steal a significant share of the market away from Microsoft, allowing it to finally take the helm as a major operating system service provider." This has to stop, and the only reason I'm linking to this nonsense is to make this very clear: Linux will not magically conquer the desktop or even make any significant gains because of Windows 8. People who don't like Windows 8 (Vista) will continue to use Windows 7 (Windows XP). This is getting so tiring. And does it even matter? Linux is winning big time in the mobile space, server space, and countless other spaces. The desktop is and always has been irrelevant to Linux.

"Coming from a background in higher-level languages like Ruby, Scheme, or Haskell, learning C can be challenging. In addition to having to wrestle with C's lower-level features like manual memory management and pointers, you have to make do without a REPL. Once you get used to exploratory programming in a REPL, having to deal with the write-compile-run loop is a bit of a bummer. It occurred to me recently that I could use gdb as a pseudo-REPL for C. I've been experimenting with using gdb as a tool for learning C, rather than merely debugging C, and it's a lot of fun. My goal in this post is to show you that gdb is a great tool for learning C. I'll introduce you to a few of my favorite gdb commands, and then I'll demonstrate how you can use gdb to understand a notoriously tricky part of C: the difference between arrays and pointers."

The dream of inexpensive computing for everyone has been with us since the first computers. Along the way it has taken some unexpected turns. This article summarizes key trends and a few of the surprises.

One company's response to the jury verdict in Apple vs. Samsung was still missing: Google's. The company has now responded to The Verge, and there's almost a certain bitterness in their language. Not, as you would expect, directed at Apple; no, the bitterness is directed at Samsung. The message Google is sending to other Android OEMs? Stick to stock Android, and you'll have no problems.

"Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died Saturday, weeks after heart surgery and days after his 82nd birthday on Aug. 5. Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and he radioed back to Earth the historic news of 'one giant leap for mankind'. He spent nearly three hours walking on the moon with fellow astronaut Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin." Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Such a great man. The world lost a true legendary hero today. This man will be an inspiration for generations to come.

Well, that didn't take long. Groklaw notes several interesting inconsistencies and other issues with the jury verdict. "If it would take a lawyer three days to make sure he understood the terms in the form, how did the jury not need the time to do the same? There were 700 questions, remember, and one thing is plain, that the jury didn't take the time to avoid inconsistencies, one of which resulted in the jury casually throwing numbers around, like $2 million dollars for a nonfringement. Come on. This is farce." My favourite inconsistency: a Samsung phone with a keyboard, four buttons, and a large Samsung logo on top infringes the iPhone design patent. And yet, we were told (in the comments, on other sites) that the Samsung f700 was not prior art... Because it had a keyboard. I smell fish.