Monthly Archive:: March 2013

"Not only has China's Central TV been running regular follow ups to its March 15 expose on Apple's iPhone repair policies, but on Thursday People's Daily - the Communist Party's official propaganda organ - attacked the company for the fourth day in a row, devoting half a page to negative articles." This isn't rocket science. The west treats Chinese technology companies like crap, so they treat western companies like crap. How exactly does this surprise anyone? And why is it okay for our governments to engage in political games to smear foreign companies, but we throw a hissy fit when a foreign nation engages in the same political games to smear western companies? It sucks for Apple to be the target right now, but had this occurred a decade ago, it would have been Microsoft.

"Today the ZFS on Linux project reached an important milestone with the official 0.6.1 release! Over two years of use by real users has convinced us ZoL is ready for wide scale deployment on everything from desktops to super computers."

This. This is what we need. These are the kind of steps from which we all benefit. Google has just announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge: the company promises not to sue any users, distributors, or developers of open source products based on the patents it owns (unless first attacked).

Like many OSNews readers, I use Ubuntu. I also use several less popular distros. What is it like to use these lesser-known distros compared to the dominant systems? How does running, say, VectorLinux or Puppy or PC-BSD, differ from using Ubuntu or Fedora? This article offers a few ideas. Obviously, it broadly generalizes about distros for the purpose of discussion.

"Today, we are excited to unlock this technology for high-performance games, by teaming up with Epic Games. By leveraging this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla has been able to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. With this port, developers will soon be able to explore limitless possibilities when it comes to porting their popular gaming titles to the Web."

"The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending 85Gbps of traffic. Since then, the attack got much worse. Here are some of the technical details of what we've seen."

"Microsoft has breathlessly announced several new game titles for Windows Phone 8. And once again, Redmond continues to disappoint." I'm lucky not to require too many applications, but this article still hits nails on heads.

Via The Verge: "iCloud, perhaps more than any Apple software product, is meant to 'just work'. When Apple introduced iCloud, it made clear its hopes to eradicate settings menus and file systems in favor of automation. Steve Jobs pledged to do a better job than he did on MobileMe, Apple's notoriously horrible stab at web services a few years ago. With iCloud, changes you make to documents on your computer show up instantly on your iPhone and vice versa. 'It just works,' Jobs exclaimed when he first demoed the service in 2011, 'Everything happens automatically'." Except, it doesn't. Not for non-trivial data requirements where you want to use Core Data.

"Programming is hard. Don't ever feel bad because you aren't as good at 'just googling it' as the person next to you. Don't ever let hackathon snobs talk you out of creating the next Twitter for cats or Yelp for public washrooms. Even the dumbest ideas (like trying to make animated polygons disappear and reappear) will help you improve as a programmer. Learning to program is largely about learning to learn - and the best way to learn is to do." For some reason, I love this short story.

The Swedish Language Council wanted to list 'ungoogleable' as a new word. Google didn't like it. "The word was to be used to describe something 'that you can't find on the web with the use of a search engine', according to the Language Council. However, Google was less than thrilled that a word based on its name had been highlighted by Sweden's 'official language cultivation body'. Google wanted the council to specify that the word's definition only covered searches performed using Google, and not searches involving other search engines." Sadly, the Council decided to scrap the word altogether. Google, get your filthy paws off our languages. It seems like large corporations love to exert pressure on language - Apple tried something similar a few years ago with the abbreviation 'app', something which I exposed for the idiocy that it was. I will use whatever words I damn well please, and so should everyone else. The Swedish Language Council shouldn't even have acknowledged Google's ridiculous request with a response.

Late last week, Nokia dropped what many consider to be a bomb on the WebM project: a list of patents that VP8 supposedly infringes in the form of an IETF IPR declaration. The list has made the rounds around the web, often reported as proof that VP8 infringes upon Nokia's patents. All this stuff rang a bell. Haven't we been here before? Yup, we have, with another open source codec called Opus. Qualcomm and Huawei made the same claims as Nokia did, but they turned out to be complete bogus. As it turns out, this is standard practice in the dirty business of the patent licensing industry.

Tom Warren at The Verge details that, yes, we're getting a major update to the communication applications in Windows 8 tonight or tomorrow, and there's some definitively good stuff in there, such as much-needed performance improvements, lots of new functionality for the currently abysmal Mail application, and more. Sadly, the update does not include support for CalDAV and CardDAV, and it actually removes Google sync support for Calendar. Google is already moving to its Google Calendar API, though, so maybe Microsoft will just skip CalDAV altogether. Seems like a solid set of updates, to hit your Windows 8 machine any moment now.

eComStation 2.2 Beta has been released for eComStation software subscribers. The OS2World community is discussing the first impressions of the update on their forum.

"Android and iPhone users will also experience BlackBerry's ad content in the form of mobile takeovers starting the week of March 25. Those mobile takeovers will fill your screen with what looks like a BlackBerry 10's, demoing a specific feature like its photo 'Time Shift' capability that allows you to scroll through several captured options for each face in a picture." Yes. BlackBerry is going to run ads that hijack your entire smartphone's display. Sigh.