Monthly Archive:: January 2013

And so, today, RIM announced its Hail Mary - a brand new mobile operating system (well, sort-of new), as well as two new devices. In addition, the Canadian company also officially changed its name from Research In Motion to Blackberry. The first few reviews of Blackberry 10 are already out, and it's not bad. The problem, however, is that in the case of Blackberry, 'not bad' could easily mean 'not good enough'.

Microsoft has released Office 365 Home Premium. Ars has a review up: "Just like Windows 8, this cloud-tethered version of Office may have a hard time convincing home users it's time to upgrade. There are many useful new features in some of the most heavily used applications of Office, and the new add-in apps provide a useful way to pull external content into documents and presentations. The real question is whether customers - especially consumers - will buy into the service format." You're looking at EUR 100 per year for Office 365 Home Premium. Sure, it's for five PCs - but one, who has that many PCs these days other than families, two, even among those families, how many need Office for five PCs, three, who doesn't buy Office once and just installs it on all PCs in the house, and four, you can't use it for commercial stuff. In other words, virtually everyone is better off buying regular, non-subscription Office 2013 Home & Student. You pay EUR 139 once (instead of EUR 100 every year), and it's yours forever. I really don't understand who the subscription service is for - it's screaming for a single-license, EUR 25 per year option. Also, lose that ridiculous non-commercial bullshit.

"The arithmetic-logic unit is a fundamental part of any computer, performing addition, subtraction, and logic operations, but how it works is a mystery to many people. I've reverse-engineered the ALU circuit from the 8085 microprocessor and explain how it works. The 8085's ALU is a surprisingly complex circuit that at first looks like a mysterious jumble of gates, but it can be understood if you don't mind diving into some Boolean logic."

"Acer, the Taiwanese computer maker that's suffered two consecutive annual losses, posted strong sales of notebooks using Google's Chrome platform after the release of Microsoft's Windows 8 failed to ignite the market. Chrome-based models accounted for 5 percent to 10 percent of Acer's U.S. shipments since being released there in November, President Jim Wong said in an interview at the Taipei-based company's headquarters. That ratio is expected to be sustainable in the long term and the company is considering offering Chrome models in other developed markets, he said." HP is also planning a Chrome OS laptop, and it's been at the top of Amazon's charts (whatever that means) for a while now. In case you haven't noticed - the desktop world, too, is changing. Nobody wants Windows 8 (touch or no), so OEMs are finally looking elsewhere. We're finally getting what we wanted 13 years ago.

After about a year of work, the ArchLinux distribution now offers a variant running on the FreeBSD kernel. Says the developer, "Why would I do this? If like me, you enjoy FreeBSD and love it, but also like the philosophy behind Arch Linux, which is a fast, lightweight, optimized distro, I figured why not combine the both. Even though you could just do it on FreeBSD using the ports, not everyone wants to compile." This now puts Arch in the same category as Debian with Debian GNU/KFreeBSD, which offers a Debian userland on top of a FreeBSD kernel.

"Apple Inc reported quarterly revenue that slightly missed Wall Street expectations as sales of its flagship iPhone came in below target, sending its shares down more than 4 percent. The world's largest technology company shipped 47.8 million iPhones, lower than the roughly 50 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted. Sales of the iPad came in at 22.9 million in the fiscal first quarter, about in line with forecasts." I'll leave the financials to the experts, but one thing that stood out to me: Apple sold 4.2 million Macs, almost a million below expectations. How much of a future does desktop computing have at Apple? Update: The NYT/Reuters changed the title during the night. Fixed it.