Monthly Archive:: August 2011

Xbox celebrates its tenth birthday this year, having launched in the US on November 15, 2001. In this four-part special, Patrick Garratt talks to members of the console’s original team and tells its release story.

A new Trojan horse app has emerged to target Android devices, and this one's particularly creepy. The app records a user's phone calls and then uploads them to a remote server. The app was revealed Tuesday by security researcher Dinesh Venkatesan on the Security Advisor Research Blog, published by CA Technologies, now known as Total Defense. While this particular Trojan doesn't appear to be a threat in the wild--at least not for North American users--it's a good reminder of the growing threat of mobile malware.

Your computer is an important energy consumer in your home. Can you save energy when using it? This article offers a few tips.

Now that these kind of issues are starting to be mentioned by The Economist, NPR, The Guardian, and Forbes, are we at last at the point where the myth that patents universally encourage innovation finally being dispelled?

Yesterday, the web was ablaze about how the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 wouldn't be sold in Australia due the patent dispute between Apple and Samsung. Turns out the story was blown out of proportion. Official statement from Samsung explains it all: "Apple Inc. filed a complaint with the Federal Court of Australia involving a Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 variant that Samsung Electronics had no plans of selling in Australia. No injunction was issued by the court and the parties in the case reached a mutual agreement which stipulates that the variant in question will not be sold in Australia. A Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1 for the Australian market will be released in the near future. This undertaking does not affect any other Samsung smartphone or tablet available in the Australian market or other countries. Samsung will continue to actively defend and protect our intellectual property to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communication business."

Mozilla has already done a lot to clean up the user interface of its successful web browser, but it would seem they're not yet done. As someone who finds the current interface a little... Chaotic and distracting, I'm quite happy with the changes they're currently proposing. They basically pointed at Chrome and said "pretty much that".

Kim Woelders just announced the release of e16-1.0.9. As always with recent e16 releases, we're looking at a number of bug fixes and minor changes, which keeps Enlightenment DR16 chugging along just fine.

"Apple won an agreement from Samsung that the South Korean company won't sell the newest version of its tablet computer in Australia until a patent lawsuit in the country is resolved. sought an Australian injunction and also wants to stop Samsung from selling the tablet in other countries, Burley said without specifying where. Samsung agreed to stop advertising the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia and not to sell the device until it wins court approval or the lawsuit is resolved, according to an accord reached by lawyers during a break in the hearing. Should Apple lose its patent infringement lawsuit, it agreed to pay Samsung damages, which weren't specified." Free market and competition at work, my friends!

"Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps. We didn't use one of these 'Cross Platform!' tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android So, we rolled up our sleeves, downloaded the Android SDK, and got to work."

MySQL toolmaker Daniel Nichter provides a look at 10 must-have free and open source tools for MySQL. 'MySQL has attracted a vibrant community of developers who are putting out high-quality open source tools to help with the complexity, performance, and health of MySQL systems, most of which are available for free,' writes Nichter, who was named 2010 MySQL Community Member of the Year for his work on maatkit. From mydumper, to mk-query-digest, to stalk and collect, the list compiles tools to help back up MySQL data, increase performance, guard against data drift, and log pertinent troubleshooting data when problems arise, each of which is a valuable resource for anyone using MySQL, from a stand-alone instance to a multiple-node environment.