Monthly Archive:: November 2015

I've dropped the codename "Vienna" before on our weekly podcast and in the forums, but these renders are the first real look we've had at the design. Vienna ditches the Priv's slider in favor of the iconic BlackBerry layout, with a front-facing physical keyboard that is always present. The keyboard looks to be of the same size and design as that of the Priv's, but it's hard to tell simply based off of the renders alone.

If you look too closely, the old proof set artwork is pretty ugly, certainly nothing we could use if we wanted to build a larger museum exhibit, say 3x4 feet, or import the mask artwork into a PCB layout package to build a giant, working circuit board. The old artwork just wasn't going to cut it. So McNerney took a pair of high-resolution photomicrographs (kindly donated by reverse engineer extraordinaire, Christopher Tarnovski), and set out to trace every wire, transistor, resistor, and capacitor using Adobe Illustrator. Just hours before the 44th anniversary, he finished tracing the first, complete draft of the mask set artwork. The next step is to verify it against the schematics and try it out in simulation.

All that said, right now, it seems that choosing SteamOS over a Windows box means sacrificing a significant amount of performance on many (if not most) graphically intensive 3D games. That's a pretty big cost to bear, considering that Alienware sells its Windows-powered, console-style Alpha boxes at prices that are only $50 more expensive than identically outfitted SteamOS machines. That's not to mention the fact that Steam on Windows currently has thousands of games that aren't on SteamOS - including most AAA recent releases -while SteamOS has no similar exclusives to recommend it over Windows.

Hopefully, Valve and other Linux developers can continue improving SteamOS performance to the point where high-end games can be expected to at least run comparably between Linux and Windows. Until then, though, it's hard to recommend a SteamOS box to anyone who wants to get the best graphical performance out of their PC hardware.

The products, especially those built on iOS, Apple's operating system for mobile devices, no longer follow the well-known, well-established principles of design that Apple developed several decades ago. These principles, based on experimental science as well as common sense, opened up the power of computing to several generations, establishing Apple's well-deserved reputation for understandability and ease of use. Alas, Apple has abandoned many of these principles. True, Apple's design guidelines for developers for both iOS and the Mac OS X still pay token homage to the principles, but, inside Apple, many of the principles are no longer practiced at all. Apple has lost its way, driven by concern for style and appearance at the expense of understandability and usage.

Apple is destroying design. Worse, it is revitalizing the old belief that design is only about making things look pretty. No, not so! Design is a way of thinking, of determining people’s true, underlying needs, and then delivering products and services that help them. Design combines an understanding of people, technology, society, and business. The production of beautiful objects is only one small component of modern design: Designers today work on such problems as the design of cities, of transportation systems, of health care. Apple is reinforcing the old, discredited idea that the designer's sole job is to make things beautiful, even at the expense of providing the right functions, aiding understandability, and ensuring ease of use.

Today, the US Department of Energy announced that it had established a partnership with NVIDIA that would be enhancing the LLVM compiler collection. The goal will be to port an existing FORTRAN compiler that targets massively parallel GPUs. The results are expected to be released as open source in late 2016.

Cutting-edge research still universally involves Fortran; a trio of challengers wants in. While FORTRAN isn't a mainstream language, it's still heavily used in scientific computing, and there's lots of legacy code that relies on it. A lot of that code is maintained by people at the US National Labs, and the new project is being organized by staff at Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos.

Firefox for iOS lets you take your favorite browser with you wherever you go with the Firefox features you already love including smart and flexible search, intuitive tab management, syncing with Firefox Accounts and Private Browsing.

The Windows 10 November update is available now to everyone running Windows 10. This first major update has a handful of visible features, a variety of bug fixes, and even some enterprise features. Microsoft's message to businesses is that if they were following the traditional policy of waiting for the first Service Pack or major update to Windows before deploying it, this is it: time to take the plunge.

It's also the time for gamers to make the switch too - in parallel with this release, Microsoft is rolling out the new Xbox Experience, which is based on Windows 10, and gives the dashboard a big shake-up.

While the iPad Pro was in many ways inevitable, it also points to a crisis of original thought at Apple, which has been coasting on the iPhone’s coattails for perhaps too long. At Apple, the solution to every problem is another iPhone. And the iPad Pro, like the new Apple TV and the Apple Watch, is really just another attempt to duplicate that singular success in other markets.

Tag Heuer has teamed up with Google and Intel to launch the Connected Watch, its first Android Wear timepiece. The Connected isn't just any average Android Wear watch, however. It's a $1,500 luxury timepiece clad in titanium and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Tag Heuer's analog watches.

"Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones," Cook argues in his distinctly Southern accent (he was born in Alabama). He highlights two other markets for his 12.9 inch devices, which go on sale online on Wednesday. The first are creatives: "if you sketch then it’s unbelievable..you don't want to use a pad anymore," Cook says.

This is absolutely one of the best phones to be released this year, and while BlackBerry still has to demonstrate it can keep its promises when it comes to software updates this is already an exceptional experience. It's only going to get better from here.

In truth, I wanted to tell him to do it. But I couldn't. There are enough software bugs and slowdowns that I had to tell him to hold off and see if BlackBerry could finish the job it started here. Take those good ideas and buff off their rough edges, make the software just a little more stable. Because as a first effort at an Android phone, the Priv is remarkable, and I couldn't wait to see what a second push would do for it (assuming, of course, that BlackBerry gets the chance).

Android registered a slight year-on-year increase in marketshare, while Apple gained traction, driven by strong demand for new iPhone models. Microsoft, BlackBerry and Firefox drifted down, while Tizen posted tangible growth and overtook BlackBerry being the fourth largest OS platform for the first time ever.

The partnership we are announcing today with Red Hat extends our commitment to offer unmatched choice and flexibility in an enterprise-grade cloud experience across the hybrid cloud. With more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 using Microsoft’s cloud, for us to team with the leader in enterprise Linux allows even more businesses to move to the cloud on their terms. By working with Red Hat, we will address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds, including the following.

Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.

OOSMOS, the Object Oriented State Machine Operating System, is an open source implementation of threadless concurrency for C/C++. The portable, single-source file implementation makes it easy to integrate into any environment - from bare boards to mainframes. Out of the box, it compiles and runs on many small processors and boards (including Arduino) as well as on Windows and Linux. It is our goal for developers of any skill level to be able to use OOSMOS effectively, whether building a science project on an Arduino or building an advanced medical device.