Steve Wozniak about the movie Jobs (crappy Google+ still doesn't have comment links, so scroll down a bit):
Actually, the movie was largely a lie about me.
This is what happens when a businessman is hyped up into the stratosphere and turned into a messiah - other people get marginalised to further deify the supposed hero.
But at least they're trying, right? Absolutely. I'm glad they are. But it would be awesome if the brilliant minds at Google worked on something everyone reading this would actually want to buy. Not something we probably won't see for years, maybe even decades.
Yeah! I mean, who wants Gmail, Google Search, Chrome, Android, YouTube, AdWords, Google Apps, Maps, and so on, and so forth. All useless stuff nobody wants!
How dare Google focus on more than immediate financial gain, and instead focus on trying to make the roads safer, or helping diabetics, or trying to explore the potential applications of wearable computing! All activities of every company ever should always and exclusively be focussed on immediate financial gain and shareholder returns, or else they'll get brilliant bloggers who contribute so much to the world complaining they can't spend their money right now, right away, now, now!
Google's 'moonshots', or the stuff Microsoft does at Microsoft Research, might not immediately satisfy the grubby little hands of entitled consumers, but thank god they're doing it.
To be sure, it's no magic solution to the gargantuan task of moving the entire Android ecosystem forward. And the update situation for non-flagship devices remains something of a crapshoot. But it's a start, and a big step in the right direction. And as we move from Jelly Bean into the KitKat era, it's enough to give us some hope for the future of Android updates.
Read on to find out why.
Still Android's biggest weakness. Baby steps are made, but a solution there is not.
NTT DoCoMo has shelved plans for a March launch of a smartphone featuring a new operating system called Tizen, dealing a blow to one of the platform's key backers - Samsung
Japan's largest mobile carrier said Friday that the Japanese smartphone market wasn't growing fast enough for it to support a third mobile operating system, a reference to Apple's iOS operating system and Google's Android, which powers the majority of Samsung's devices. In explaining its decision, DoCoMo cited research by IDC Japan showing the country's smartphone market in the April-to-September period grew only 2.2% from a year earlier.
"The market is not big enough to support three operating systems at this time," DoCoMo spokesman So Hiroki said Friday.
The victims of war.
President Obama announced on Friday that he will place new limits on intelligence agencies' bulk collection of phone call records. But he rejected some other recommendations to rein in surveillance made by a panel of outside advisers.
The NYT lists the changes. It's insubstantial.
We're now testing a smart contact lens that's built to measure glucose levels in tears using a tiny wireless chip and miniaturized glucose sensor that are embedded between two layers of soft contact lens material. We're testing prototypes that can generate a reading once per second. We're also investigating the potential for this to serve as an early warning for the wearer, so we're exploring integrating tiny LED lights that could light up to indicate that glucose levels have crossed above or below certain thresholds. It's still early days for this technology, but we've completed multiple clinical research studies which are helping to refine our prototype. We hope this could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease.
I have no idea if these kinds of wearable technology - like Glass, and now this - are the future or not, but if they are, then Google is clearly quite, quite ahead of the curve.
See the email thread on the misc list for more details.
In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs.
But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on.
If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not sustainable.
The OpenBSD project is the incubator for a number of other projects including OpenSSH and OpenSMTPD. If you use these or just want the project to survive, consider making a donation.
Tantos took over working with the disk. He rewrote the recovery tools, plus a simulator for the software and supporting equipment like printers, monitors, keyboards and more. For the greater part of the last year, he arduously reverse engineered the OS from the image. Despite a few remaining bugs, the Cray OS now works.
This is quite, quite an amazing journey.
Valve has been listening to the feedback they've been getting, including the complaints people have had about the lack of a proper digital, 4-way pad, and now they are set to replace the touchscreen on the controller with a set of 8 individual buttons. (source: Gamespot).
In other news, Valve's Anna Sweet tried to alleviate the concerns various parties have expressed and confirmed that their plan is to bring music, TV and movies on the platform in a streaming form, making it suitable for more than just gaming.
ACM Queue posted an article titled "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System", written by the main developers of MirageOS. The article is a good overview of the motivation and design of Mirage, which is a specialized lightweight hypervisor guest operating system for Xen. It's developed in OCaml and benefits from its features like memory safety, module system and compiler optimisations. It's comparable to OSv on many fronts.
More here.
Elop's decision to focus solely on Windows Phone had one very important side-effect: the Maemo/MeeGo team was suddenly free from all the internal politics, and this meant that they could finally focus on building the best smartphone they possibly could. This phone would be end-of-life even before it appeared on the shelves, and it would have no future. It would be a last big hurrah, a last-ditch, all-in effort - and it resulted in a device that I think is one of the most beautiful pieces of technology ever conceived.
This seems like a good moment to highlight this unique masterpiece - because I'm finally getting one (my brother's parting with his). The white version is the most beautiful piece of technology ever created.
The operating system will be optimized for Java applications "by exposing OS internals and direct access for page tables, scheduling decisions and the raw IO layer". It will not be restricted to only Java applications though and will run JavaScript, Scala, Clojure, JRuby, Jython and more on JVM. Surprisingly, C is also supported.
OSv promises "Zero OS management" with "no need for administration, template management, configuration and tuning". Common Java framework integration consists of "frameworks such as Tomcat, JBoss, SpringSource . Common open source technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL are being optimized and integrated to run on top of OSv."
Mozilla plans to establish an automated process which would verify that binaries contain only the code found in the official source repositories, and not spyware secretly added during the build process at the behest of government intelligence agencies. In a blog post entitled Trust but Verify, CTO Brendan Eich and R&D VP Andreas Gal note that governments "may force service operators to enable surveillance (something that seems to have happened in the Lavabit case)" and pledge to develop systems which will make Firefox resistant to this form of tampering.
Stefano Mosconi (CTO of Jolla) gives a review of the past year, talking about decisions and developments in the company such as changing the SoC manufacturer for their first handset, switching to Wayland with Qt5 for Sailfish and opening their Web store and co-creation site.
The road was extremely tough and still we managed to deliver a product to the market in time. We focused on quality and stability rather than on number of features and we committed to our customers to listen to them and support the phone so it will remain valuable, relevant and well performing. We did this in about 100 guys and girls: we built an OS, an app store, a product, logistic and sales channels, online collaboration tool, SDK and developer intake.
Paul Thurrott on the next version of Windows and the future of the platform.
In some ways, the most interesting thing about Threshold is how it recasts Windows 8 as the next Vista. It's an acknowledgment that what came before didn't work, and didn't resonate with customers. And though Microsoft will always be able to claim that Windows 9 wouldn't have been possible without the important foundational work they had done first with Windows 8 - just as was the case with Windows 7 and Windows Vista - there's no way to sugarcoat this. Windows 8 has set back Microsoft, and Windows, by years, and possibly for good.
With even Paul Thurrott claiming Windows is in trouble, it becomes virtually impossible to deny it is so.
Although Apple and Google officially sit out the biggest tech trade show of the year, their platforms are well represented by the third parties that create thousands of products for them. This year it feels like Microsoft is simply being left out.
Windows has virtually no presence in the two biggest things to hit computing in a long time, and it's starting to show. Microsoft may not be in trouble - but Windows is.
You no longer need someone's email address to send them an email. At least, that will soon be the case if you want to email another Google+ user. A new Gmail "feature" will let you simply type in anyone's name into Gmail's "to" field and send them an email. Google announced the new Google+ integration on its Gmail blog today, but company representatives have clarified to The Verge that - by default - anyone on its social network will be able to send messages to your Gmail inbox.
It's opt-out; so it's enabled by default. I don't think Google has ever had a more stupid idea than this. This is just all-around bad - no ifs, no buts, nothing. You must be completely brain-dead to think that implementing this "feature" is in any way, shape, or form, a good idea.
I'll be turning this off right away - I don't want random internet people emailing me any more than they already do. Equally idiotic, when you start typing a name in Gmail's to/cc fields, it will autocomplete to Google+ usernames. I have no idea if you can turn this brain fart off.
I don't like Google+, I don't want Google+ - I just want it to go away. Please.
Nokia is once again extending and improving Windows Phone. While Microsoft has implemented Live Tiles across Windows Phone, Nokia is adding a new App Folder interface that allows Windows Phone users to stack apps and settings into a folder Tile on the Start Screen. The new feature is part of Nokia's Lumia Black software that is being rolled out to Lumia 1020 and and Lumia 925 devices today. Other Lumia models will be updated "in the coming weeks" according to Nokia.
I'm not sure what's more telling about the state of the Windows Phone platform; the fact that folders on the homescreen is a big thing, or that Nokia, and not Microsoft, implemented it.
Don't you just love proper leaks? Nokia's 'Normandy', its rumoured Android phone designed to replace the Asha series, has been leaked in most of its glory. It's a 4", 854x480 phone with a Snapdragon processor, dual-SIM support, and for the rest it's pretty standard, hardware-wise. Most interestingly, the skin Nokia is draping over its version of Android is looks quite restrained, although they did change the on-screen buttons to only show an Asha-like single back button.
There's really no telling what's going to happen with Normandy in the wake of Microsoft buying Nokia's devices division. In my view, Microsoft can only lose if it decides to sell this device; if the Normandy sucks and doesn't sell well, it'll reflect bad on the company. If it's good and sells very well, it will reflect bad on the company too (can you imagine the Normandy becoming the best-selling Microsoft phone? Hilarious!).
I would guess Microsoft would much rather have low-end Lumias like the 520 fulfilling the role of Asha. It's no coincidence that the 520 is the best-selling Windows Phone device by far; it's the best fit for Nokia's traditionally strong markets. With Android already being quite popular there, a Nokia Android device would be an even better fit.
And with Microsoft not being allowed to use the Nokia name at all - only Asha and Lumia - anything can happen.
About a year and a half ago, I engaged on an admittedly quixotic project to build my own laptop. By I, I mean we, namely Sean "xobs" Cross and me, bunnie. Building your own laptop makes about as much sense as retrofitting a Honda Civic with a 1000hp motor, but the lack of practicality never stopped the latter activity, nor ours.
Quite, quite amazing.
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