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Monthly Archive:: February 2013

Hey, Microsoft: it’s time to pull phone into Windows

"Imagine a phone that could run real Remote Desktop. Real PowerShell. Anything that can run on your desktop PC. Imagine 'phablet' form factors, similar to today's Samsung Galaxy Note 2, which could dock to a desktop setup and utilize an external display, keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals. Imagine a single set of APIs that work everywhere. Imagine that Phone isn't a whole separate platform, but an app. An app that runs on Windows. Real Windows. The Windows Phone team could never make that happen. But the Windows client team? You betcha. Make it happen, Microsoft. It's time to take the phone seriously." I have never agreed with Thurrot as much as I do right now.

The road to uncovering a wartime Colossus

"The story of how the Colossus computer at Bletchley Park aided the allied code-cracking effort during World War II is becoming well known. Its claim to be a forerunner of modern-day computers is also well established. What is much less well known is the tale of how Colossus's story came to be told in the first place. It is a tale of how one man's dogged efforts overcame official secrets and official indifference to rewrite computer history. Computer scientist Brian Randell was the man who started uncovering the history of Colossus."

The promise of Firefox OS

"'But how is it going to beat Android or iOS?' That's the reaction many people have when I tell them that I am working on Firefox OS, the new mobile operating system from Mozilla. It is a logical reaction. After all, we live in times where every major software company and its mother is releasing a mobile platform, struggling to lure developers into their new proprietary environment, APIs, libraries, etc. And indeed, many of these companies barely make it or don’t make it at all. But Firefox OS will not be directly battling against other mobile platforms. Its main objective is to change the way the world develops mobile apps, and even in the unlikely event that Firefox OS itself disappears in the process, if web-apps become mainstream, it will have succeeded."

Samsung laptop UEFI bricking bug is not Linux-specific

" bricked a Samsung laptop today. Unlike most of the reported cases of Samsung laptops refusing to boot, I never booted Linux on it - all experimentation was performed under Windows. It seems that the bug we've been seeing is simultaneously simpler in some ways and more complicated in others than we'd previously realised." On a related note, the Linux Foundation's UEFI secure boot system has been released.

Android tablets: it’s the BROWSER

"No, there's only one area where Android falls really, horribly, undeniably short when it comes to the tablet form factor: The web browser. It's the most fundamental tablet app, IMHO, and yet the web experience on Android could not possibly be worse." This, right here, is it. On my Nexus 7 - there's not a single decent web browser. Not one. The stock browser? Crashes a lot. Chrome? Slow, touch-unfriendly UI, laggy, and locks up all the time. Everything else uses non-standard UIs are, are plain buggy, are also slow, or any combination of the three - and yes, this includes your favourite browser. I've been through them all. Just yesterday I loaded up my iPhone 3GS, and Safari was like a dream. Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8? Buttery smooth and excellent UI. How Google - a web company - can let this situation persist is beyond me.

Windows 3.0 contained three kernels

"The 16-bit Windows kernel was actually three kernels. One if you were using an 8086 processor, another if you were using an 80286 processor, and a third if you were using an 80386 processor. The 8086 kernel was a completely separate beast, but the 80286 and 80386 kernels shared a lot of code in common." As always, Raymond Chen delivers. If you don't yet follow his blog, you should. Right now. Click that bookmark or RSS button.

AF_BUS, D-Bus, and the Linux kernel

"Both of these articles allude to the fact that I'm working on putting the D-Bus protocol into the kernel, in order to help achieve these larger goals of proper IPC for applications. And I'd like to confirm that yes, this is true, but it's not going to be D-Bus like you know it today. Our goal (and I use 'goal' in a very rough term, I have 8 pages of scribbled notes describing what we want to try to implement here), is to provide a reliable multicast and point-to-point messaging system for the kernel, that will work quickly and securely. On top of this kernel feature, we will try to provide a 'libdbus' interface that allows existing D-Bus users to work without ever knowing the D-Bus daemon was replaced on their system."

Seven million jailbroken iOS devices in four days

"Over the last half a week, Apple has been hit with the largest mass-hacking incident in its history. And the perpetrators were the company's own users. Nearly seven million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners have cracked Apple's restrictions on their devices using the jailbreaking tool Evasi0n since the tool was released Monday morning, according to the latest count from Jay Freeman, the administrator of the app store for jailbroken devices known as Cydia. That makes the iOS-hacking app the fastest-adopted jailbreak software of all time, Freeman says." Because, of course, only nerds and geeks jailbreak. There's also a technical analysis of the jailbreak.

EU court: ‘convictions for file sharing violate human rights’

"This means that people can no longer get convicted for violating the copyright monopoly alone. The court just declared it illegal for any court in Europe to convict somebody for breaking the copyright monopoly law when sharing culture, only on the merits of breaking the law. A court that tries somebody for violating the copyright monopoly must now also show that a conviction is necessary to defend democracy itself in order to convict. This is a considerably higher bar to meet." Well, that's progress, I guess.

Who’s being dishonest with storage space?

"Microsoft has been absolutely pummeled in the press and in reader comments this week by pundits and customers alike. They feel cheated by the amount of free storage space available to them on the new line of Surface Pro devices. But is that criticism fair or even valid?" Spoiler alert: turns out, it isn't. Both devices have about the same free space available, and by creating a USB restore drive for Windows on the Surface, you can actually get a little more on the Surface Pro. Interestingly enough, Microsoft confirmed on Reddit that their original numbers - which caused the ruckus - were wrong, because they were based on pre-production hardware, with debug code and other additional stuff on it. Oh Microsoft.

Creating beautiful and functional Android applications

"Stitcher Radio, one of the most popular news, radio and podcast apps on Android recently underwent a complete redesign. Lead Android developer at Stitcher, Tyler Pearson, was kind enough to take some time out of his day after the launch of the new app to talk to us. We had a chance to (virtually) sit down and talk to Tyler about their newly redesigned Android app, Google design guidelines and the state of the Android ecosystem." The rate at which Android applications improve thanks to Holo and Google's guidelines is astonishing. There's more and better Holo applications every day, and my self-professed credo to only install Holo applications - 'Holo or nono' - requires zero effort these days. That nonsense about Android applications being inferior to those of other platforms? A bunch of outdated nonsense.

LibreOffice 4.0 released

"The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem."

Microsoft’s ‘Blue’ wave is coming to more than just Windows

"As we've known for a few months, the Windows client team at Microsoft is working on its first 'feature-pack' update for Windows 8, supposedly due this summer/fall, which is codenamed 'Blue'. But it turns out Blue isn't a Windows thing only, according to one very accurate tipster of mine who doesn't want to be identified. Blue also is the way Microsoft is referring to the next substantial platform update for Windows Phone, the Windows Services (like SkyDrive, Hotmail, etc.), and Windows Server, according to my source. In other words, Blue is a wave of product refreshes which are not expected to arrive exactly all on the same day, but which are meant to be released more or less around the same time."

KDE Software Compilation 4.10 released

The KDE Community has announced the release of version 4.10 of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. The 4.10 release contains incremental improvements to a large number of applications, and offers several new technologies. Several components of Plasma Workspaces have been ported to the Qt Quick/QML framework, and stability and usability have been improved. There's also an imnproved print manager and Color Management support. KDE Applications gained feature enhancements to Kate, KMail and Konsole. This release also makes it easier to contribute to KDE with a Plasma SDK, the ability to write Plasma widgets and widget collections in QML, changes in the libKDEGames library, and new scripting capabilities in KWin. Time to update my laptop!

Samsung Galaxy Discover

"Experience mobile life without carrier or Samsung overlays. Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich lets you customize your screen for faster access to the widgets you use most. Multitasking is no longer a chore with quicker access to notifications and recently used apps. Blazing web browsing and voice-controlled search lets you find what you are looking for, faster." Yes, this is Samsung advertising against its own TouchWiz nonsense. No words.

Next Xbox to ban used games?

"Sources with first-hand experience of Microsoft's next generation console have told us that although the next Xbox will be absolutely committed to online functionality, games will still be made available to purchase in physical form. Next Xbox games will be manufactured on 50GB-capacity Blu-ray discs, Microsoft having conceded defeat to Sony following its ill-fated backing of the HD-DVD format. It is believed that games purchased on disc will ship with activation codes, and will have no value beyond the initial user." Crap like this should be illegal. If I can't buy second-hand games at my local favourite game store, Microsoft can shove this new Xbox where the sun don't shine. Which it obviously doesn't do in Redmond if they can come up with this kind of user-hostile bullshit. You can pretty much guarantee that they have made a silent agreement with Sony to implement similar anti-user feature on the next Playstation.

GNOME to get sandboxing for applications

"Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such "Linux apps" at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming." Right, because they haven't alienated enough of their users.

DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS

FreeDOS - the drop-in, open source replacement for MS-DOS - was started after Microsoft announced that starting from Windows 95, DOS would play a background role at best for users. Almost two decades later, FreeDOS has survived and, as its creator explains in the interview, is still being actively developed, despite achieving its initial aim of an MS-DOS compatible OS, which quite frankly is somewhat amazing.