Monthly Archive:: April 2013

"Apple just posted its hotly-anticipated Q2 2013 earnings, and the company posted a profit of $9.5b on revenues of $43.6b, compared to $11.6b in profit on $39.2b in revenue this quarter last year and $13.1b in profit on $54.5b in revenue last quarter. That's right in line with the company's guidance from last quarter. Most importantly, iPhone sales are fairly flat year-over-year. Apple sold 37.04 million in Q2 2013 versus last year's 35.1 million, a modest growth of seven percent. iPad sales for the quarter were 19.5 million, up a massive 65 percent from last year's 11.8 million, but the average selling price (ASP) dropped fairly steeply year-over-year, likely due to the introduction of the cheaper iPad mini."

When I got my Nokia E7, Nokia's own updating software bricked the device - incredibly frustrating, since Nokia doesn't care about The Netherlands anymore and has closed all Nokia Care Points in the country. This meant I had to send it in for repairs, which, as experience with companies has taught me, usually takes weeks. Luckily, Nokia made it possible to download firmware straight from their servers using third party tools, and thanks to a technique called dead phone flashing, it was incredibly easy to bring bricked (Symbian) Nokia phones back to life. Now that Nokia ships Windows Phone, however, such public access is no longer welcome, and as such, it has blocked third party access to its servers. Understandable, but major suckage for enthousiasts. On a related note, Accenture (the company managing Symbian development) has released an update for Nokia Belle FP1/2 devices. Yep.

"Why has the SimCity story gone away? It's a good question. And the answer for it reveals much about how both the games industry, and the games journalism industry, work." Telling - not just for the game journalism, but all of it. As a sidenote, you can always rely on Rock Paper Shotgun to bring the best gaming news. Under-appreciated gem of online news reporting.

"What is great about this panel (except its resolution) is that it has an eDisplayPort interface (which is supposed to replace LVDS in the near future), and as this hack proves it is compatible with traditional DisplayPort outputs found on all modern video cards. The panel is also surprisingly cheap - I got mine on ebay for $55, shipped from China. Hoping that eDisplayPort is compatible with regular DisplayPort (I couldn't find conclusive proof of this), I went on to interface the panel with a DP cable." Cool.

Geeksphone will be launching the first Firefox OS devices tomorrow. "With the startup shipping worldwide and pricing the devices reasonably low, you can bet that many developers who've been eager to start building apps for Firefox OS will be tempted by Geeksphone's offering and not interested in waiting for the majors to come to market. Geeksphone can theoretically manufacture up to roughly 5000 devices per day, but that all depends on if there's enough demand down the line. Either way, we've confirmed that Geeksphone will start shipping the first ordered phones by the end of this week."

The Verge confirms an earlier story by Mary Jo Foley. "Microsoft is preparing to revive the traditional Start button it killed with Windows 8. Sources familiar with Microsoft's plans have revealed to The Verge that Windows 8.1 will include the return of the Start button. We understand that the button will act as a method to simply access the Start Screen, and will not include the traditional Start Menu. The button is said to look near-identical to the existing Windows flag used in the Charm bar."

"You'll remember the 'scroll and select' days of S60, hopefully. Smartphones driven by a navigational d-pad with central 'OK' button. Now look in your hand to see Symbian in Belle Refresh or Belle FP2 form and there's very little similarity. How did we get from one to the other and could things have happened differently? I say yes."

"Starting with hrev45522, address space layout randomization (ASLR) and data execution prevention (DEP) are available in Haiku. These two features, which have actually become a standard in any modern OS, make it much harder to exploit any vulnerability that may be present in an application running on Haiku, thus generally improving system security."

I never really realised this, but it wasn't actually known what operating system powered Glass. "We suspected it from the outset, but up until now, we haven't actually heard it confirmed from the mouth of a Google honcho: Google Glass runs on Android. The tidbit was dropped on today's earnings call, with CEO Larry Page uttering: 'Obviously, Glass runs on Android, so has been pretty transportable across devices, and I think that will continue.' The response was given to a question regarding engagement increment, but Page stopped short of divulging details about version type."

"As promised, this version leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers. In return it is smaller, faster, and can be used in JavaScript environments where the code needed for old-IE compatibility often causes problems of its own. But don't worry, the jQuery team still supports the 1.x branch which does run on IE 6/7/8. You can (and should) continue to use jQuery 1.9 (and the upcoming 1.10) on web sites that need to accommodate older browsers."

"Microsoft today announced quarterly revenue of $20.49 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2013. Operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $7.61 billion, $6.06 billion, and $0.72 per share."

Nokia has posted its quarterly results for the first quarter of 2013, and just like the quarters that came before, there's not a whole lot of good news in there. The rise in Lumia sales still can't even dream of making up for the sales drop in Symbian phones, and when broken down in versions, the sales figures for Windows Phone 8 Lumias in particular are very disappointing. In North America, Nokia is getting slaughtered.

"One company - Taiwan's Foxconn - makes a staggering 40 percent of the world's consumer electronic devices. Starting now, Microsoft will be getting paid a toll on many of those devices. The company's long patent-licensing campaign has landed its biggest client yet in licensing Foxconn, formally named Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Foxconn has agreed to take a license for any product it produces that runs Google's Android or Chrome operating systems." More protection money for the Microsoft patent mafia.

"You often hear about how important it is to write 'readable code'. Developers have pretty strong opinions about what makes code more readable. The more senior the developer, the stronger the opinion. But, have you ever stopped to think about what really makes code readable?"