Commentary
HP has announced that webOS will be donated to the open source community as a “pure open source project,” with HP as an “active participant and investor.” Back in August 19 2011, I suggested that HP should make webOS “a free, Linux distribution, such that the relationship between it (HP) and webOS would be akin [...]
HP has announced that it is considering the spin-off or sale of its PC business unit. The announcement was made yesterday, part of the company’s Q3 2011 Earnings results. HP’s PC unit includes the WebOS-based smartphone and tablet computer business. If you recall, HP inherited WebOS, a Linux distribution originally designed for smartphones, but that [...]
Spotify is a streaming music service spawned in Sweden, but headquartered in London, with offices in a few choice countries. But is the music service defective by design? The folks at DefectiveByDesign.org think so. Here’s their take on Spotify’s music service: The music streaming service Spotify uses Digital Restrictions Management (DRM); … to prevent things [...]
Sure you must have read about the British mobile phone hacking scandal. That’s the one where News of the World journalists reportedly hacked into the voicemail of about 40,000 mobile phone accounts. How do you think they managed to pull that of? I have no idea, but the folks at Lookout, a mobile security outfit, [...]
The latest social networking craze, Google Plus (Google+), is still in beta status, but I just managed to get an invite today. It looks and feels really cool. As a tester and registered user, I can invite others to join. Cool! Here are a few screenshots from my profile’s page. This is my Google Plus [...]
Mobile app development is hot, very hot, but only few mobile developments platforms are successful. So, what’s the best way to build and maintain a viable mobile development ecosystem? Gyanee Dewnarain thinks he has found the key. In “The Guide to Building Developer Communities,” he opines that: Before you set out on your quest, it [...]
Cloud computing, like it or not, is here to stay. But if you must use it, you should at least know how and where to thread. Here are top 6 gotchas to look out for: Standards: The cloud, while filling our life right now, is still relatively young with minimal standards. This one is particularly [...]
“Can police officers enter your home to search your laptop? Do you have to give law enforcement officials your encryption keys or passwords? If you are pulled over when driving, can the officer search your cell phone?” Those are very important questions that you need to be prepared for, if you own a computer or [...]
Can cross-platform development tools end OS wars? Jonas Lind doesn’t thinks so, but offers an interesting analysis. According to him: A popular view in the industry is that the market is inevitably moving towards an Apple-Google duopoly. Apple’s app store has more than 400,000 apps. Android is growing quickly from a base of more than [...]
Máirín Duffy has a long but informative article about redesigning Anaconda, the installation program for Fedora. Anaconda has more advanced features than any other Linux or BSD distribution, but a common complaint about it is it has too many steps. Here;s what Máirín said about a possible new Anaconda interface: The installer today is a [...]
Cloud computing is all the buzz, but if you use a public cloud provider, do you trust the outfit? According to anecdotal evidence, the trust percentage is not very high. Matthew Gardiner has a few suggestions that public cloud providers may take to improve their trustworthiness. The first step is to: Avoid being a black [...]
If you use a cloud-based service, you should be just as worried as some companies who “are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers.” But where there is a problem, there is always an opportunity for some bright minds to propose a [...]
Remember SPDY? Yep, it’s pronounced “SPeeDY.” In case you forgot, or have never heard about it, it’s a Google project designed “… to reduce the latency of web pages.” Well, it has gone into limited commercial production. Erica Naone of Technology Review has an article about it. She writes: Website optimization company Strangeloop has built [...]
Mageia is a new Linux distribution forked from Mandriva. The first stable release was at the end of May, 2011, and I am just about to publish a review on the main site. This blog post is just to show what happened when I tried to play a video DVD on the GNOME desktop. Inserting [...]
