In the News Archive

Levi Asher offers his free memoir of his rise and fall in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The autobiography covers Asher's twenty-five years in programming: his founding of the oldest ongoing literature website Literary Kicks in 1994, his success with the dot-com website iVillage in 1999 (and its subsequent collapse), and how all this insanity affected his personal life. It's a quick, entertaining read.

The Raspberry Pi has inspired a flock of competitors. Among them are the A13-OLinuXino, which you can purchase here for 45 euros. It comes with an A13 Cortex A8 processor at 1GHz, 3D Mali400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, and complete set of ports. Video is VGA. It ships Android 4.0 but also runs various Linux distros. You might also check out the $49US Cubieboard here and the UG802 for $89US here. And there's the MK802 micro-PC, a USB-sized device priced at $74US that runs Android 4.0, Ubuntu, Debian, and other distros. The tiny single-board computer has come of age.

"This election won't hinge on technology issues. Just look at prevailing discussions this year at the national level: major candidates have sparred over Iran's nuclear ambitions, the role of government, inane comments on the female body, and to nobody's surprise, the economy. Despite that fact, many decisions will be taken up by the next US president and those in Congress that will affect the world of tech, and by consequence, the real lives of citizens and human beings around the world - from alternative energy, to the use of killer drones, the regulation of wireless spectrum, and policies that aim to control content on the internet. Your chance to vote is just around the corner. Here's what's at stake in tech this election, and how the major candidates could influence our future." Happy voting, American readers. Whatever you pick, please take at least a few minutes to consider that the implications of your choice do not end at the US border.

"Ask adults from the industrialized world what number is halfway between 1 and 9, and most will say 5. But pose the same question to small children, or people living in some traditional societies, and they're likely to answer 3. Cognitive scientists theorize that that's because it's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically than linearly." Fascinating. The human brain is such a magical machine.

Pretty scummy stuff by Samsung, this. The company apologised, but what it shows is just how warped tech reporting and blogging really is. Websites are dependent on review items, early access, and press invites, and we really have no idea just how much this influences reporting. Do you really think that reviewers and bloggers who are too critical will get invited to the next product unveil in Cupertino or will get early access to the next Galaxy device? If so, I have a palace to sell you.

"Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, died Saturday, weeks after heart surgery and days after his 82nd birthday on Aug. 5. Armstrong commanded the Apollo 11 spacecraft that landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and he radioed back to Earth the historic news of 'one giant leap for mankind'. He spent nearly three hours walking on the moon with fellow astronaut Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin." Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Such a great man. The world lost a true legendary hero today. This man will be an inspiration for generations to come.

"Unsurprisingly, Gram is dropping any pretenses of producing consumer hardware. Instead the company is going to focus on software, user experience, the cloud, engineering, and partnering. If you're wondering exactly what that means, you're as in the dark as we are, though apparently webOS and Enyo, as well as the webOS group's own cloud services team (said to still be quite large with respect to the overall size of the unit), will play some sort of role." Uh.

Okay, so this is entirely new to me. Sparrow is was an email client for Mac OS X and iOS (and Windows), which brought a decent Gmail experience to these platforms - as opposed to Apple's own not-so-good Gmail support and Google's Gmail iOS application which, well, is just a webpage. Google has now acquired Sparrow, and basically all hell has broken loose, to the point of Rian van der Merwe writing that 'we' lost "faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens".

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.

Interesting charts by Horace Dediu: "As a result the Mac began to whittle down the advantage Windows had. The ratio of Windows to Mac units shipped fell to below 20, a level that was last reached before Windows 95 launched. It's as if the Mac reversed the Windows advantage. This was an amazing turnaround for the Mac. But the story does not end there." Too bad Dediu didn't include Android devices in his charts. The picture would change dramatically, and would downplay the important of either Windows or Mac/iOS. We're in a three-horse race - not the two-horse race Dediu paints.

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.

Alan Turing, 1936: "It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence." Ars Technica celebrates one of the greatest computer scientists of all time, who would've turned 100 years old this week.

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.

"Dozens of teachers specialising in computer science are to work in English schools thanks to a partnership between Google and the charity Teach First. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt said money would also be provided to buy 'teaching aids, such as Raspberry Pi's or Arduino starter kits'. He said that without investment in the subject, the UK risked 'losing a generation' of scientists." My Raspberry Pi should arrive via UPS today, assuming they don't mess up. I'll try and get a few photos and first impressions up if it does arrive.