In the News Archive

A fascinating difference in smartphone buying behaviour got highlighted today. In the US, Apple has double the market share of its nearest competitor, Samsung. However, in The Netherlands, the swamp I call home, the situation is completely reversed; Apple sits at 10% of the smartphone market, Samsung at 19.6%. Is this indicative of Europe as a whole? Could German, French, Polish, British, Spanish, Italian, etc. readers give local information from their own countries? I'm intrigued.

Andrew Binstock interviews Alan Kay, and there are just so many fantastic quotes and insights in there I have no idea what to pick as the OSNews item. This one? "Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future - it's living in the present," Kay argues, "I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where - and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." What about this gem? "I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages." Or, my personal favourite: "My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults." Read this. Now. That's an order.

"The failure of Minitel was not one of technology, It was the whole model that was doomed. Basically to set up a service on Minitel, you had to ask permission from France Telecom. You had to go to the old guys who ran the system, and who knew absolutely nothing about innovation. It meant that nothing new could ever happen. Basically, Minitel innovated from 1978 to 1982, and then it stopped." This is what the World Wide Web could one-day look like. Dearth of innovation for the want of permission.

The BBC reports on a Turing scholar's recent claims that by today's standard of evidence, there's reason to doubt the commonly-held belief that the famed computing pioneer committed suicide in response to government persecution over his homosexuality. To be clear, he does not claim to have disproved the suicide theory -- only that the cyanide poisoning that killed Turing could well have been an accident caused by his careless at-home experimentation with dangerous chemicals.

"Two robbers have paid a visit to a house in south-eastern Australia, hours after a teenager posted a photo on Facebook of a large sum of cash. The masked men, armed with a knife and a club, struck the home of the 17-year-old girl's mother in the country town of Bundanoon on Thursday, police say. Her mother told the men her daughter no longer lived there. It is not clear how the robbers found the family address. The Facebook image was at the grandmother's Sydney house. The men searched the house and took a small amount of cash and a small number of personal objects before leaving. No-one was injured." Should I be laughing or crying?

This topic comes up quite a lot on technology websites, but I generally try to steer clear from it as much as possible, since I'm not the one to talk about it (you know, with me being a man and all that), however, I feel it might be a good idea to just get my opinion out there and be done with it. The topic of women in IT is a hot-button issue, so let me just go out guns blazing: assuming women need special treatment, help, protection, and affirmative action is just as insulting and degrading as outright claiming women have no place in IT - maybe even more so.

"Over half of PC users worldwide have admitted to using pirate software last year, according to a study by the trade group Business Software Alliance. BSA's ninth annual Global Software Piracy Study has shown a sharp increase in software piracy, especially among emerging economies. In the UK, more than one in four programs users installed in 2011 were unlicensed." If people decide en masse not to adhere to a law, said law is worth about as much as the paper it's written on. Laws become functional not because of the Queen's signature, but because the people decide to adhere to it. It's becoming ever clearer that as far as digital goods go, the law is not functional - for better or worse.

"The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned. The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly." I no longer know what to say. You will be monitored by The State. If you oppose such monitoring, you're a terrorist.

"Sir Jonathan Ive has been crowned British Visionary Innovator in a competition, run by the Intellectual Property Office. Ive won by a large margin with almost fifty per cent of the vote (46.6%). In second place was Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) with 18.8 per cent of the vote. James Goodfellow OBE (the inventor of PIN technology and the cash machine) was in third place with 15.2 per cent of the vote." Alan Turing was also nominated. If you ever needed an illustration of everything that's wrong with the technology industry today, it's this. Guy who designs the exterior of mass-market gadgets wins over guys who actually really contributed to technology. Telling.

"A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers - including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page - is set to announce plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water." Amazingly cool. Even if it never makes a dime of money, at least these people are contributing to space exploration now that the US has pretty much cut NASA to death. Come to think of it, it's pretty sad we've been relying on a single government for much of our space exploration.

"Florian Mueller has confessed - in the interests of being 'transparent', he says - that Oracle has hired him, for his analysis of FRAND issues. I know. You are shocked, shocked. Who'd have ever guessed? We did. Groklaw did. We get suspicious when someone's 'analysis' is uniformly that Google is doomed. It's my Spidey sense. And it's usually on the money, as they say." We've had a no-link policy in place for Mueller from back when everybody else was still citing him as a trustworthy, independent analyst. My own senses told me otherwise, and I was right. Paint me red, girl scout, etc. etc.

"The pitch is as simple as it is universal: you only need one account (with us!) and you'll have all your digital needs taken care of. That's the goal Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Sony - to varying degrees and using strikingly divergent strategies - are all trying to accomplish. As a group, they're just a selection of the vast hordes of service providers looking to expand their ecosystems and monopolize your time (see the efforts of Evernote, Spotify, and Zynga), but they're also the only ones big and influential enough to actually fulfill that aspiration. My aim today will be to compare, in terms of features and approach, the 'access-everything' accounts on offer from those six biggest companies. Does Google+ let you do more than Facebook? Can the Sony Entertainment Network match wits with Microsoft's Live services? Let's find out."

"Modern science relies upon researchers sharing their work so that their peers can check and verify success or failure. But most scientists still don't share one crucial piece of information - the source codes of the computer programs driving much of today's scientific progress." Pretty crazy this isn't the norm yet.

Six-month-old web site Codecademy claims you can learn programming through its online tutorials. The free modules on JavaScript are now available. The site also allows anyone to post their own programming courses. The site has good funding, but question is: can you really learn programming this way? One blogger enthuses that Codecademy's approach "looks like the future of learning to me," while another slams it saying "Seriously? Wow, bull**** badging and sh**ty pedagogy wins the day in ed-tech investing." What do you think?