Good news by Ars' Peter Bright. "According to an internal Microsoft e-mail sent to all full-time employees working on the next Xbox, 'Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today's Internet.' It continues, 'There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should 'just work' regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.'" Conveniently 'leaked' of course.
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"In order to be an effective programmer, you need to possess a combination of traits that allow your skill, experience, and knowledge to produce working code. There are some technically skilled developers who will never be effective because they lack the other traits needed. Here are seven traits that are necessary to become a great programmer."
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That rare event where tried and true Debian releases a new version. "This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for 'Wheezy', will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically."
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"NeXT Computer (the original 68030 cube) was a high end workstation that was manufactured between 1988 - 1990. Back then it was a very expensive machine as a complete system would start at $6500 (in 1988 dollars). The machine is a 1 foot cube magnesium case that houses the computer. At the time, its performance was impressive, with a Motorola 68030 CPU running at a screaming 25Mhz, a dedicated floating point CPU, and a digital signal processor built into the system. NeXT cubes featured a magneto-optical drive that stored a whopping 256 Megabytes (by comparison, high end Mac systems at the time might have featured a 20 Megabyte hard drive.) In its day, this was the "Ferrari" of desktop systems!" No new information for the average OSNews reader, but lots of beautiful photos for a beautiful Saturday afternoon.
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"After reading all the reviews, and talking to people who actually wore Glass, I just see a product plagued by bugs, and of questionable use, that's generating a lot of buzz because people want so desperately to have some new gadget to latch onto, and fear being wrong about the next major technology trend." Nobody wants a computer in their home. Nobody wants a cell phone and always be connected. Nobody wants an iPhone. The current version of this line? Nobody wants Glass. "I haven't worn Glass." Oh right.
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"Internet giant Google has changed the tagline on the homepage of its Palestinian edition from 'Palestinian Territories' to 'Palestine'. The change, introduced on 1 May, means google.ps now displays 'Palestine' in Arabic and English under Google's logo. Using the word Palestine is controversial for some. Israeli policy is that the borders of a Palestinian state are yet to be agreed." Good but daring move.
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"We're almost exactly a year on from our first hands-on with the Nokia 808 PureView, hailed by me, somewhat tongue in cheek, as Nokia's custom design for me, from my own personal checklist. Insane camera, Xenon flash, replaceable battery, FM transmitter, large OLED screen, deafening speaker, and so on. All present and correct. One year on and, thanks to a brace of updates and third party additions, I find myself just as in love with the 808 now as when I first popped my microSIM card in." I'm back to my HTC 8X by now, since the Nokia E7's battery was terrible - 4-6 hours of mild use, tops, even with a brand new, official Nokia battery. My 8X gives me three days on the same usage pattern.
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"Do intellectual property rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, this paper estimates the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public effort. Across a range of empirical specifications, I find evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain." Research by Heidi L. Williams, of the Department of Economics at MIT. Forget what companies and their advocates (i.e., politicians) say, and trust science.
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"Microsoft's phone chief hates to call the new Nokia Lumia 521 cheap, but the lower-priced smartphone launching in the United States is the company's boldest move yet to win mass market share from leaders Apple and Samsung. The world's largest software company has so far focused on putting its Windows Phone software into expensive, high-end devices - chiefly from Nokia and HTC. But the new model will go on sale at Walmart later this month at an unsubsidized price under $150, relatively cheap for a new phone running up-to-date software without a long-term contract." Windows Phone is racing to the bottom just as fast as Android - with the difference being that expensive Android devices do not fail to sell.
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Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.
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"In the past few weeks, I've managed to find a bit more free time to work on Haiku. As per usual, the lion's share of this time was spent on improving our integrated debugger. As such, I thought I'd give a brief overview of what's been added, and how it can be useful."
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"BlackBerry 10 is completely different from previous BlackBerry operating systemsâ€"with good reason. Its core assets come from a company named QNX, which Research In Motion acquired in 2010. Blackberry 10 features include 'live tiles' that dynamically refresh with new information, as well as a revamped keyboard and security upgrades. But what really makes or breaks a phone is the quality (and quantity) of its third-party apps. So what we'll do here is look at the programming API. That will give us a good grip on what app developers can do with the platform."
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"The Q1 2013 numbers from IDC, a technology and telecommunications research firm who keeps track of this sort of thing, show that Android tablets now lead the market with a 56.5-percent share. The 27,800,000 units shipped in the quarter is a 247-percent improvement from this time last year, when just 8,000,000 units were shipped. It's important to note that this increase doesn't come at the expense of Apple, who shipped 65.3-percent more tablets in Q1 2013 than they did in Q1 2012 - it shows the market is growing, and the lions share of new purchases are Android." While Android's market share growth scares me, it's good that it's not really harming the competition. Also, maybe this will be the carrot for developers to improve Android tablet applications.
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OpenBSD 5.3 has been released. It's got improvements all over the place, and includes OpenSMTPD 53, the first version considered stable enough for production use. Y'all know where the downloads are.
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CEO of Blackberry Thorsten Heins said yesterday that he doesn't believe the tablet computer market is long for this world. "In five years I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore," he tells Bloomberg News, "Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model." If the dream of one device wirelessly interacting with all sorts of displays and peripherals comes to fruition, he may actually have a point.
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"OS X 10.9, which is internally codenamed 'Cabernet', will focus on various 'power-user' enhancements and take core features from iOS, according to our sources. Unlike operating system updates such as OS X Leopard and OS X Lion, OS X 10.9 will likely not be an overhauled approach to how the operating system feels and functions." Features for power users and features from iOS? Seems like an oxymoron. Still, if they manage to finally fix the Finder and Spaces, I'll be happy.
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Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.
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The Verge reviews the BlackBerry Q10: "Maybe you're here for the keyboard. As superb as the Q10's physical keyboard is, I keep thinking about the six-year evolution of the soft keyboard since the introduction of the original iPhone. They've gotten so good on every platform - iOS, Windows Phone, Android, even BlackBerry's own Z10. The argument used to be that physical keyboards were for serious users who needed to burn through email, and I just don't think that holds water anymore. Yes, this is the best of a dying breed, but for the life of me, I don't know why someone who's accustomed to a full-touch phone would come back to this." I disagree. Touchscreen keyboards have not improved considerably at all - in fact, I find them just as terrible and unpleasant to use as when they were first introduced on Palm OS and Windows Mobile. A properly designed hardware keyboard - preferably landscape (like on the E7), but portrait will do too - will always run circles around those frustrating software keyboards. Major respect to BlackBerry for sticking to their guns. To anyone making a quality phone with a landscape hardware keyboard (rebadge an E7 for all I care) running Android or Windows Phone: please, take my money. Please.
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"With an update to the Google Search application, Google Now is available on iOS. Compatible with both the iPhone and iPad, the update brings almost all of Google's information cards across from Android. The look and feel of the app is virtually identical on both platforms, a testament to Google's newfound ability to make well-designed apps on iOS. The main differences between Android and iOS are few, mainly in that iOS can display fewer different kinds of cards." Google's iOS applications look better than anything Apple itself has pushed out over the years.
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After ten weeks of development Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.9. The latest version of the kernel now has a device mapper target which allows a user to setup an SSD as a cache for hard disks to boost disk performance under load. There's also kernel support for multiple processes waiting for requests on the same port, a feature which will allow it to distribute server work better across multiple CPU cores. KVM virtualisation is now available on ARM processors and RAID 5 and 6 support has been added to Btrfs's existing RAID 0 and 1 handling. Linux 3.9 also has a number of new and improved drivers which means the kernel now supports the graphics cores in AMD's next generation of APUs and also works with the high-speed 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips which will likely appear in Intel's next mobile platform. Read more about new features in What's new in Linux 3.9.
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"As computer games became more and more complex in the late 1980s, the days of the individual developer seemed to be waning. For a young teenager sitting alone in his room, the dream of creating the next great game by himself was getting out of reach. Yet out of this dilemma these same kids invented a unique method of self-expression, something that would end up enduring longer than Commodore itself. In fact, it still exists today. This was the demo scene."
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Scoble on Glass. "This week I gave five speeches while wearing it. I passed through airports four times (two more in a couple of hours). I let hundreds of people try my Google Glass. I have barely taken it off since getting it other than to sleep." The basic takeaway? "I've been telling people that this reminds me of the Apple II, which I unboxed with my dad back in 1977. It was expensive. It didn't do much. But I knew my life had changed in a big way and would just get better and better. Already this week I've gotten a new RSS app, the New York Times App, and a Twitter app. With many more on the way. This is the most interesting new product since the iPhone and I don't say that lightly."
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"As everyone is trying to guess whether the next big Android update is going to be Key Lime Pie or not, and whether the release will be Android 5.X or 4.X, we have yet to hear anything concrete. After getting a tip from an eagle-eyed reader (thanks, deepayan!) and digging deeper, I can definitively tell you that Google is currently working on Android 4.3, and it is still Jelly Bean." Great detective work by Artem Russakovskii.
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"One of the things that will never fail to make me happy: seeing people stuck in time explain what modern day technology is. Kim Komando hosted an educational series about computer and explains the basics of its hardware, DOS, Microsoft Windows, Writeand more."
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Some cool new stuff about Google Glass. Jay Lee has confirmed it runs Android 4.0.4, and that it runs on an OMAP 4430 processor, with an unknown core configuration and speed. It's got 628MB RAM, but Lee thinks it's actually 1GB of which the remainder is reserved for something else. Also, and this is good news, Suarik has already jailbroken his Google Glass. He details what he had to do - and the limitations of his work so far -
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