Monthly Archive:: October 2014

eComStation, OS/2 Warp and WarpStock

  Submitted by martini OS/2 7 Comments
The Warpstock annual conference was held on Oct 24 to 26 on St. Louis, Missouri. These conferences are related to the OS/2 and eComStation platform. Currently there are two reviews of the event online at OS2World and at WarpCity2 blog. Between the relevant news there is a new company called "Arca Noae" that will focus on software development for the platform. They are working on ACPI, USB, Network and other drivers for the platform. Additionally Mensys also gave some light why there haven't been activity on the last year. Arca Noae announced driver releases and software subscription products for the users of this platform.
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Microsoft Band: A wearable device with support for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone

Wireless 20 Comments
It's got a built-in GPS, so you can wear in around and don't have to take your phone. It's svelte and stylish. The display is small (keeping the device small) but it's high resolution and touchscreen. In addition to all the standard quantified self stuff, it supports mail, messaging, calendar, and alerts. It costs $199, and it's on sale now (for preorder). Most importantly, you can load it with Starbucks credit and use it to pay for lattes. Looks like a winner.
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Windows Update Bricking Counterfeit USB Dongles

  Submitted by Alfman Hardware 31 Comments
The FTDI FT232 chip is found in thousands of electronic baubles, from Arduinos to test equipment, and more than a few bits of consumer electronics. It’s a simple chip, converting USB to a serial port, but very useful and probably one of the most cloned pieces of silicon on Earth. Thanks to a recent Windows update, all those fake FTDI chips are at risk of being bricked. This isn’t a case where fake FTDI chips won’t work if plugged into a machine running the newest FTDI driver; the latest driver bricks the fake chips, rendering them inoperable with any computer.
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Visopsys 0.75 Released

  Submitted by andymc OS News 4 Comments
Visopsys is an alternative OS for PC-compatibles. Version 0.75 is the third update this year, and is particularly focused on hardware, adding USB 3.0 (XHCI) and APIC interrupt controller support, as well as improved USB 2.0 and hub support. Downloads are available from here, and details are available in the change log
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HTML 5 Finalized

  Submitted by Adurbe Internet 1 Comment
Ars tells us The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry group that oversees the development of the specs used on the Web, today announced that the fifth major version of the hypertext markup language specification, HTML5, was today given Recommendation status, W3C's terminology for a final, complete spec.
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What’s Up With Android and Chrome OS?

Google 21 Comments
Cnet interviews Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai, who's in charge of both Android and Chrome OS, and asks whether the two Google OSes will work more closely together or eventually merge. Merger is apparently not on the roadmap. The interview covers operational housekeeping among the Google OS teams, seriously moving into the "phablet" space, anti-theft mechanisms for mobiles,
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20 Tips to Use Yosemite Like a Pro

macOS 3 Comments
Macworld UK has the details on minor interface and usability tweaks that are new or expanded in OSX Yosemite. Did you know that RSS support in Safari is back? That you could see an overview of all images that a chat partner has sent? That you can un-flattify the UI somewhat? Or that the super-useful document annotation features in Preview are now even better? Now you do.
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How to Get Yosemite’s Handoff to Work

macOS No Comments
I guess today's the day that people finally got around to trying to make Handoff work, because both Time and Gizmodo published short articles outlining the finicky steps it takes to get your Mac and iOS device to recognize each other. The key step seems to be to log off and back on to iCloud in both devices, because as with everything dealing with iCloud, it's a bit of a crap shoot. But when it does work, it's pretty nifty. The best part of the read was one of the comments on the Gizmodo with a classic quote from Anchorman: "60% of the time, it works every time."
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Ars talks to Android execs about the upcoming OS

Android 15 Comments
In just a few weeks, Google will be pushing out one of its largest Android releases ever: Android 5.0, Lollipop. The update changes nearly every aspect of the OS - a new design for every app, a new runtime, lots of new features, and a focus on battery life. The company is also launching a pair of new Nexus flagships, the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 aiming for a more premium market, and the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player. Together with the release of Google Inbox and a new Wear update, we're in the middle of a very busy few weeks.
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Yosemite Post-release News Roundup

macOS 3 Comments
Anandtech published a detailed look into OSX 10.10 and iOS 8.1 and how they interoperate. Online ad network Chitika compares Yosemite post-release adoption to Mavericks and Mountain Lion and finds that free upgrades matter a lot. Cult of Mac says that Yosemite's new Mail version is a memory hog. The San Jose Mercury News contrasts Apple's conservatism in gradually changing OSX and iOS with Microsoft's recent penchant for making overly bold changes then backpedaling.
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Elon Musk Is Warning us of Rogue Artificial Intelligence

Geek stuff 37 Comments
We've highlighted the dire warnings of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk in recent months regarding the perils of artificial intelligence, but this week he actually managed to raise the bar in terms of making A.I. seem scary. More at Mashable. My take: I worked on AI 20 years ago (wow, time flies). I don't believe that we will ever create anything truly sentient. Intelligent and useful for our needs, yes. But truly sentient, no. For something to become evil, it must be sentient. Anything else, if it ever becomes problematic, it would just be software bugs, not evilness.
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