Monthly Archive:: April 2012

Well, this has been a very, very long time in the making. Google has finally unveiled its big Dropbox competitor: Google Drive. You start with 5GB for free, and you can go all the way to 1TB for $50 per month. This is a big deal for many (if you were to use rumouring as a gauge), but all I can think of is this: why on earth would you entrust your files to a company - any company - whose sole interest is extracting money from you, and who, to boot, is subject to crazy American laws?

Google is taking a new stab at selling devices directly: the Galaxy Nexus is now available in the Google Play devices section. That is, if you happen to live in the appropriate country - I can't see the page (as usual), so for all I know, they're selling fake Rolex watches in there.

So, we'll be getting our hands on the Windows 8 Release Preview in the first week of June. I'm interested in what they've done to improve the Metro experience for boring old mouse and keyboard users, and if they've managed to include applications that work (as opposed to buggy preview applications).

The SOPA and PIPA laws were defeated in the U.S. just months ago, and already the forces for internet control are back. Up for vote this week, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) would override all privacy laws so that private companies (like ISPs) can share all information with the U.S. government. No warrants or other authorization required. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) points out the problems with this law. Like SOPA and PIPA, the privacy issues and monitoring could reach far beyond U.S. borders.

"The increase is a sign that the search engine can no longer afford to operate in a Silicon Valley vacuum. For years, Google had a reputation for indifference inside the Beltway. It took Google until May 2005 to set up a presence in Washington and even then, its headquarters consisted of a one-man lobbying shop in suburban Maryland." Do the Americans among you just accept this? Is this normal? Why aren't you guys turning to the streets when your country is quite clearly being bought left and right? I mean, I'm sure this happens everywhere, but on this scale? Gives me the creeps.

AnandTech puts Intel's new Ivy Bridge through its paces. "While it's not enough to tempt existing Sandy Bridge owners, if you missed the upgrade last year then Ivy Bridge is solid ground to walk on. It's still the best performing client x86 architecture on the planet and a little to a lot better than its predecessor depending on how much you use the on-die GPU."

Adam Fields and Perry Metzger have been investigating the serious performance issues people are experiencing with Lion. "Frequent beachballs, general overall slowness and poor UI responsivness, specific and drastic slowdowns on every Time Machine run, high memory utilization in Safari Web Content, mds, and kernel_task processes, large numbers of page outs even with a good deal of available RAM, and high amounts of RAM marked as inactive which is not readily freed back to other applications, with page outs favored." Apparently the issue is that the "virtual memory manager is bad at managing which pages should be freed from the inactive state and which ones should be paged out to disk". I won't make myself popular with a certain part of our readership, but really, is this considered a new problem? Mac OS X has always had terrible memory management, and where Windows has continuously become better at it, Mac OS X seems to have been stagnant and even getting worse. This is what happens when the company earns 2/3s of its revenue somewhere else.

This is kind of a big deal for me. No, this shouldn't be on OSNews, and no, at this particular moment, I really don't care that you're right about that. All our silly stupid pointless discussions about Windows iPhone Galaxies and patents and whatnot - no matter how angry it sometimes makes me, how much energy I spend on it - it all becomes so trivial and meaningless the moment I realise this beautiful world still produces things like this. I'm going to enjoy the sunshine for a moment. And I'm leaving my phone on vibrate in the kitchen.

"Reports are coming in from around the Internet that the Gmail redesign, which we were previously able to stave off with 'revert to the old look temporarily', is now forcing itself upon us. I too have succumbed to the new design, and have been forced to find ways to cope. Here's what I did to make it semi-bearable." The Gmail redesign has been the biggest whine-a-thon in the history of the web ('cope'? Bearable'?). For what it's worth, the Gmail redesign has been a godsend for me - the new Gmail is beautiful, understated, and elegant. I love it. I guess the old adage still goes: the satisfied people don't take to the web.

"A new analysis of licensing data shows that not only is use of the GPL and other copyleft licenses continuing to decline, but the rate of disuse is actually accelerating." This shouldn't be surprising. The GPL is complex, and I honestly don't blame both individuals and companies opting for simpler, more straightforward licenses like BSD or MIT-like licenses.

This is getting repetitive, but girl scout, red, etc. etc. "Apple CEO Tim Cook and Valve head Gabe Newell did not actually meet last week as rumored, according to a new podcast interview with Newell." You don't say. Pattern recognition, folks.

Liuns Torvalds is a finalist for this year's Millenium Technology Prize, prompting Scott Merrill with TechCrunch to do an e-mail interview. Interesting how Torvalds ignores the existence of ultrabooks - the Air is the exact same Intel-designed machine. Curious.

Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin, an interface designer at Spotify, is a big believer in skeuomorphism. Whereas Apple is a strong advocate of this design concept, Microsoft is clearly moving in the exact opposite direction, while Android is in the process of moving away from skeuomorphism entirely, to a more digital experience. As a passionate hater of skeuomorphism in UIs, I found Ahlin's examples to be a bit weak.

I recently delved into the world of hand-drawn comics-style animation, after a lifetime of just sketching on paper. While I have a long experience with video editing, I had no experience with video animation of that kind. When I first got the idea to do the video it felt like a mountain to me, excessively complex. But the steep learning curve got easier with time. This is my top-5 cheat list to get you up and running.