Category Software

Peer Reviewed School Textbooks.

Here's an idea. Ignore the part where Jobs rants on teacher job security and how this drives the quality of applicants down; What's truly interesting is the opinion also expressed by others in the past: the replacement of textbooks by electronic, online, peer-reviewed information sources, offering up-to-date, widely accepted material to students. Something like Wikipedia (perhaps limited in scope and moderated) replacing what are obsolete and often partial textbooks.

The 'Hackintosh' experience.

These past few years have been part of a period in which the computing industry, for the first time after many years, has been in flux. The importance of web applications is growing everyday. Alternatives to well-established platforms and application software, often powered by open source software, are challenging the status quo and there was […]

This might be a repeat of 2005

The next version of Mac OS X, Leopard (10.5) and the 'missing' January software updates (iLife and iWork) will probably be out by late March or April, according to ThinkSecret. Since iLife and iWork weren't released in January it's reasonable to expect that they'll be released alongside the new OS. That's good news for all of us waiting for Leopard to come out before shelling out for a Mac laptop. One with a proper display that is.

Usability and Eye Candy: The UI Impasse

Microsoft Windows Vista came out just a few days ago. This is a major update to the world’s most popular Operating System and comes with numerous ‘improvements’ in both its underlying frameworks and components and its appearance and user-oriented features. One of the hightlights of Windows Vista, according to Microsoft, has been its renewed æsthetics […]

Adium 1.0

AdiumX

After many months of development and many more β releases, Adium 1.0 was released today! It's got loads of fixes and improvements and it's based on libgaim 2.0. Yay.

I dare anybody to [hack into] once a month on the Windows machine.

Absolute BullErrr, right. Despite his --- numerous --- amazingly bad evaluations (e.g. the importance of the 'net in the mid-1990s), his volatile opinions on important matters (e.g. patents), lack of ethics and piss-poor software, Bill Gates has time and again proven to be an important thinker when it comes to technology and its importance in society. It's a shame to see he's lost it. In this latest interview in Newsweek it's actually surprising to see how he can be so off-base. While there's no doubt that Apple is king in catchy marketing and shameless exaggeration of its value and its products' {importance, features} in its marketing campaigns, Microsoft is no spring chicken either ('Get the Facts' campaign anyone?). Its funny how Gates tries to engage in the pompous reality skewing and typical polemic that his once-ideologically-charged-turned-loser-turned-mighty-tech-salesman rival, the mercurial Steve Jobs, is famous for. Unfortunately for him Gates lacks the 'Charisma +834' rating that Jobs seems to possess. :)

Flickr! Wants! Yahoo! IDs!

Today Flickr! started requiring Yahoo! accounts. Some of its users got pissed off. What if a couple of years down the road Flickr started asking for money? Many early internet services were inherently distributed services based on open protocols. I like that. It's a guarantee for independence. In the '90s the slow home connections and the rapid commercialisation of the net instituted the client-server model for 'net services' and consigned the distributed model that services such as email, dns and, indeed, the www to history. Suddenly everything was centralised. The trend continues today under the banner of 'net applications'. Flickr, Gmail, Youtube are just examples of this. In a time when always-on extremely fast broadband connections are (gradually) becoming the norm, perhaps it's time to decentralise once again.

Microsoft attempts to patent core-BlueJ functionality

...And the patent jokes never end. BlueJ, a free educational Java IDE primarily aimed at students, has contained some innovative debugging features for many years. Features that the largest software developer in the world, Microsoft, blatantly copied (without any attribution) a few years ago in its expensive commercial Visual Studio IDE. But copying was not enough for Microsoft; it would really like to patent them as its own, despite the fact that BlueJ has had them for about 10 years. Ah, let's all cry in unison: 'prior art'. Some of the comments on the linked page are very interesting. [Update: The Reg reports that the patent application has been withdrawn.]

Is (Un)FairPlay condemned?

If Norway's ruling is followed by EU members France and Germany [1] it might. On the other hand, Johanssen's work on reverse engineering FairPlay might push Apple towards licensing its technology to third parties anyway. But then again all this might just be wishful thinking.

Almost 14!

The Apple Newton may have been canned by Steve Jobs as part of his efforts to get Apple out of the red in the late 90s, just when the most powerful and promising models were coming out. It might also have been criticised early on for its quirks. Many have openly stated that it was […]