Monthly Archive:: July 2015

The WSJ confirms the report.

I'm not so sure what to think of Uber. They are disrupting the horrible, horrible taxi market with a clearly superior product - I loved using Uber when I was in New York late last year - but at the same time, they are incredibly slimy. Not sure I would want to be associated with a company like this.

The Facebook application for Android isn't exactly, shall we say, best-in-class for a multitude of reasons, but at least Facebook is trying to improve it. This is their latest effort.

Might be useful for other Android developers as well.

Question time: which mail application of which operating system has a dialog that reads "bummer"? Your prize will be a firm handshake, to be administered by yourself or by whoever is standing closest to you.

Of all the alternative operating systems from the golden days (2000-2005 or so), Haiku is one of the very few - possibly the only one - still going strong. And by "going strong" I mean seeing a ton of development seemingly without seeing a sort of definitive release. They're trying to reach zero by endlessly dividing by 2, it seems, getting ever so much closer to zero without actually getting there.

With phones hitting 5.5-6.0" now, there's very little need for tablets.

Tom Warren's got a good piece up in which he interviews a number of people responsible for the development of Windows 10. Lots of interesting bits of information, but this one stood out to me.

What he calls "practice runs", I call the most expensive failure in Microsoft's - and possibly all of technology's - history. When you add up all the years of development, marketing, the endless amount of bribes cash injections to keep Nokia from dumping Windows Phone, the actual acquisition of Nokia's mobile assets, the subsequent wholesale dumping of all those assets - it adds up to billions and billions of dollars down the drain, wasted, for naught. And the poison icing on this horrible cake?

They're continuing to scale down the phone part of Windows even further.

The practice run quote made me look back upon the past few years of reporting about Windows Phone and Nokia, about how many of us - myself at the forefront here on OSNews - realised years ago what a colossal failure Windows Phone was, and that small number of people insisting all was well with Windows Phone, how its market share was growing rapidly, how Nokia was doing great financially (*), and so on, and so forth. There were no tanks in Baghdad.

In this case, it sucks to be right, because these "practice runs" cost thousands and thousands of people their jobs.

You done got Scroogled.

With Windows 10 being released in a few hours, bookmark the knowledge base article or download the update blocker tool mentioned in the article right away. While one can debate the merits - or lack thereof - of forced automatic updates, there's one huge, giant misstep Microsoft has taken with this: they will also force graphics drivers updates through Windows Update, and without this tool, there's no way to block them.

I have had such horrible experiences with graphics drivers updates over the course of my life - from back in the 3dfx days all the way up until my current Radeon 970X Special Overlocked Whatever Edition With Kittens - that I am very careful and deliberate about these updates. I generally schedule some time for these late on Friday, but only when I know I won't have any work over the weekend so I have a few days of performing possible fixes.

So, when I checked Windows Update last night and say that Microsoft secretly wanted to shove an AMD Radeon graphics driver update down my throat, I nearly panicked. To be clear: my machine is running the official AMD drivers from the AMD website, and not the AMD drivers Microsoft itself distributes through Windows Update. Had I not blocked this update, who knows what could've happend with possible conflicts or version mismatches or whatever.

Luckily, I found this tool and blocked the update - and as it turns out, that was probably the right thing to do. This past weekend, Microsoft forced a completely broken NVIDIA graphics driver update to its Windows 10 users, causing a whole slew of problems.

My view might be horribly jaded, but I have the suspicion that graphics driver updates are a huge source of issues with Windows. As such, who in their right mind at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to force these update upon users?

Google is getting rid of its horrible social network and all the means with which it tried to shove it down our throats. Great move, but long, long overdue.

This phone's got some standout features I really like - aside from its price - such as a hardware switch on the side to cycle between the three default notification settings in Android Lollipop (all, priority, and none), similar to the hardware switch every iPhone has had since day one. I've always wondered why Android phones never included this incredibly useful feature. The software is very close to stock, so it's got that going for it as well. There's downsides too - it's still not truly stock, so yeah, expect update problems. It'll only be sold - again - through a silly invite system, and it lacks NFC and an SD card slot.

This is very close to what the Nexus 6 should have been, or what the next Nexus should be.

BoingBoing posted a short movie by The MIT Media Lab's Knotty Objects group and noted hardware hacker Bunny Huang ask the question, "What if phones were designed to please their owners, rather than corporations?" In Southern China, where the majority of the world's mobile phones are made, there's a vibrant market for phones designed for all conceivable niches, where carrier subsidies, marketing campaigns, patents, trademarks, and other corporate-serving restrictions are ignored. If there's a possible market demand for a particular design, then someone makes a phone to meet that demand. It's a brief video, but worth a watch.

Dave Winer, like Linus Torvalds, noticed something strange was happening to his e-mail, which led him to figure out what was going on.

Creepy.

Bww bitwise works has announced the fitfh beta of its Firefox port to OS/2 and eComStation. Bww bitwise works also announced that they are makking progress porting SWT/Eclipse, and that they are starting to work on porting a newer version of VirtualBox to OS/2.

The Verge obviously isn't alone in this. There's a reason I use an ad blocker.