David Adams Archive

2011 will go down in the history books as a great year for tablets mostly for Apple's iPad however, not all tablet vendors fared as well as Apple. It's not for lack of products that prevented Android tablets from taking any market share away from Apple this year. By our calculation, over 100 tablets were introduced since the iPad however, we defy even the most tech-savvy of you to name more than a few of them. What was so wrong with the competition that it failed to make any inroads in the tablet market, at least until the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook came along?

PHP's popularity and simplicity made it easy for the company's developers to quickly build new features. But PHP's (lack of) performance makes scaling Facebook's site to handle hundreds of billions of page views a month problematic, so Facebook has made big investments in making it leaner and faster. The latest product of those efforts is the HipHop VM (HHVM), a PHP virtual machine that significantly boosts performance of dynamic pages . And Facebook is sharing it with the world as open-source.

I was reading today about how Linux Mint developers altered the Banshee music player source code to redirect affiliate revenue from Amazon music orders to them instead of Banshee. They've reportedly made less than $4, which has caused a kerfluffle among those paying attention to that corner of the world. But it raises a larger point that has been swirling around for a couple of decades: an OS vendor has a lot of power to influence, and even monetize their user base. Where should they draw the line?

It's starting to look like the end of an era for Ubuntu users as Canonical mull the creation of an ISO that won't fit onto a CDR. The question is, does it matter? Canonical owes at least part of its success with Ubuntu Linux to the unique way that it has been distributed. From the start it has been available as a downloadable ISO image and a free CD, posted at no cost to the user. This was great news for people who wanted to install Linux but did not have the luxury of a decent Internet connection. In a sense, installing via a CDR image has always been like a kind of cache, in that you're moving part of the content that you need onto permanent storage rather than pulling it through the network connection

Apple is prepping new sixth-generation iPhone and third-generation iPad models with embedded 4G LTE connectivity that will launch next year according to a recent report. Japanese news organization Nikkei Business on Wednesday stated that an iPad 3 with LTE is currently slated to launch on NTT DoCoMo some time during the summer next year, and an LTE-enabled iPhone 5 will launch later in the fall. Apple CEO Tim Cook is said to have met with NTT DoCoMo president Kiyoyuki Tsujimura and VP Takashi Yamada earlier this month to work out the details of the arrangement, and the companies have reportedly reached agreeable terms. NTT DoCoMo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.