Monthly Archive:: July 2009

This is one sad story to report on. Sun Danyong, 25-year-old employee at Chinese manufacturing company Foxconn, has committed suicide after being subjected to apparently rather rigorous interrogation methods by Foxconn's Central Security Division. Danyong handled a shipment of 16 iPhone prototypes, and one of them went missing. Update: Apple responds: "We are saddened by the tragic loss of this young employee, and we are awaiting results of the investigations into his death. We require our suppliers to treat all workers with dignity and respect."

In a world where applications are everything, it's nice to see new ways of obtaining said applications. When they're free, open source, and quality, that just tops the ice cream with your favorite chocolate or caramel sauce. Allmyapps.com, a fairly new alternative online catalog launched earlier this month providing simple installation of a growing variety of apps on Ubuntu. It was designed with new and unknowledgable users in mind so as to provide an easier way to find and install applications. Allmyapps has been collaborating with Intel to create a new app store for the forthcoming Moblin platform as Moblin had none beforehand, and what they've got brewing looks pretty promising. The Moblin app store will be debuted in September.

"When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, many saw it as the real coming of age of Linux. While there is little doubt that IPO was a big event for Red Hat and Linux, perhaps an even more important one from a milestone point of view will officially occur this Friday. As of Friday, July 24, Red Hat will join the S&P 500 index."

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Determined to simply dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple -- the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'

Whenever there is a new company popping up, offering to install OSX on "Hackintoshes", everyone questions: Is this company for real? Do they think they can really take on Apple's Legal Team? What are their motivations? They're probably just in it for a quick buck or looking to be bought out once they achieve minor success. Here, I outline what I learned about Quo Computer on July 10th, 2009 and some of the things people can expect.

The Linux desktop has come a long way. It's a fully usable, stable, and secure operating system that can be used quite easily by the masses. Not too long ago, Sun figured they could do the same by starting Project Indiana, which is supposed to deliver a complete distribution of OpenSolaris in a manner similar to GNU/Linux. After using the latest version for a while, I'm wondering: why?

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released today. This midcycle free update is designed to improve speed, stability and compatibility. SP2 delivers highly requested features throughout the suite as well as a new tool, Document Connection for Mac, that helps improve access and browsing to documents on SharePoint Products and Technologies and Microsoft Office Live Workspace.

It all started with some free lunch four years ago, and then it morphed into a free patch. Along came Moonlight and some other developments, and now Microsoft has donated 20,000 lines of driver code to be included in the Linux tree. Yes-- Microsoft contributed drivers to the Linux community.

A new Linux App Store apperi.com has been launched allowing one-click installation of over 100,000 packages across recent Debian and Ubuntu versions. "Apperi provides a simple way to search and install applications on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux computer. By using the official repository package lists and apt-url it allows for one-click installation of every official package in its supported distributions. Apperi was developed by Ryan Quinn who is also the founder and lead developer of the currently dormant GNU/Linux distro SymphonyOS."

KVM acts as the host for the guest operating systems that build the target software for the user. By switching from VMware build guests to Linux KVM guests, build times for each guest are reduced by as much as 50 percent. Learn how to set up the build server and create guests, customize build requests, and organize and access build results.

How does the Alpha Geek establish dominance over the other techies in the herd? With a self-consciously old fashioned, expensive, and fussy computer accessory, of course! We take a look at the Das keyboard and see if it's that much better than the mushy crap keyboard that came bundled with your Dell.

Every now and then, these news items cross your path that simply don't need any words or imagery in order to make an impact. This is definitely one of those. You all know Amazon's Kindle, right? It's Amazon's successful e-book reader which allows you to buy a subset of Amazon's book catalogue in electronic form. Well, the term "buy" doesn't really apply here. Update: In a rare case of company mea culpa, Amazon has explained that deleting the books was a bad idea, and they assured us it won't happen again. The issue here was that the publisher behind the two Orwell books in the Kindle Store did not have the rights to sell these books, and after Amazon was informed by the rightsholder, they removed the books. Still, according to the NYT, more books were deleted from Kindles, even though Amazon doesn't have the right to do so according to its own TOS.

The news has been abuzz about Google's upcoming OS. Many people have been arguing reasons for and against the system, its viability in such a market, and, if the OS is successful, even the morality of the company who may be trusted with even more private information than it already has. Well, here's another reason for Chrome OS: it could bring more jobs in the area of Linux IT.

"I'm really excited to announce a new feature in Jetpack 0.4 -- Audio Recording. 'Jetpacks' can now access the microphone with just a few simple lines of Javascript The result is an audio file encoded in Ogg/Vorbis, which you can then playback, or if you choose to upload the file to a remote location". A while ago we discussed Jetpack (and Google's) HTML / JavaScript based browser extensions. Now the ante has been upped, with such creativity as URL-based voice memos!