The author of this blog, James Robertson, passed away in April 2014. This blog is being maintained by David Buck (david@simberon.com).
Barry's back, kids! The CEO of Commodore USA just informed us that, in addition to slapping Commodore stickers on various all-in-one PCs, he has acquired the rights to the Amiga name (we only hope that the process went a little smoother this time around). The plan is to sell machines that fully support AROS -- an open source variant of AmigaOS 3.1 that the kids seem to go crazy for.
There's a lot more at Engadget.
Technorati Tags: amiga
Now I really wish my corporate email ran through Google, instead of Exchange - their new priority email thing sounds pretty cool:
Important and Unread emails will include correspondence with people you always respond to right away, as well as emails that include keywords that usually grab your attention. Email sent specifically to you, and not to others as well, will receive preferential placement.
Right now, I manage that same chore via an (ever growing) set of mail rules - mail gets tossed into various folders based on who sent it, or what mailing list it's from, and so on. I'd love to just let someone else do that for me :)
Oracle's suit against Google has had one huge side effect: Google is pulling out of Java One:
Citing concerns about Oracle's lawsuit against it, Google said Friday it cannot participate in the upcoming JavaOne conference. The Oracle-sponsored JavaOne conference, formerly a Sun Microsystems event, is being held in San Francisco the week of September 19.
This whole think could lead to exactly the sort of fragmentation in Java that Oracle claims it doesn't want to see. It should be interesting to watch from the outside.
The H.264 codec that makes a good deal of digital video possible has actually been free to use (under certain conditions) for many years, but following recent controversies over the future of web video, rightholders have agreed to extend that freedom in perpetuity. Whereas originally standards organization MPEG-LA had said it wouldn't collect royalties from those freely distributing AVC/H.264 video until 2016, the limitless new timeframe may mean that content providers banking on WebM and HTML5 video won't have an expensive surprise in the years to come.
That's great news - it means that anyone (like me!) who uploads H.264 video that they (or the company they work for) owns, there's no problem. There's a huge monkey off the back of HTML5.
Looks like the launch of Google Voice into GMail has worked out well:
It looks like Gmail users are already taking advantage of the cheap calling that Google launched yesterday. The company announced via Twitter that there were 1 million calls placed from Gmail in 24 hours.
Technorati Tags: google
Keeping track of time in software sounds simle until you actually start looking into it - to take a trivial example, does a Timestamp include a TimeZone? Then there are the harder issues:
Sparking a fresh round of debate over an ongoing issue in time-keeping circles, the International Telecommunications Union is considering eliminating leap seconds from the time scale used by most computer systems, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Since their introduction in 1971, leap seconds have proved problematic for at least a few software programs. The leap second added on to the end of 2008, for instance, caused Oracle cluster software to reboot unexpectedly in some cases.
I'd been wondering why my Twitter client has been showing an increasing number of errors lately (both on my Mac and on my iPhone). Now I know:
Twitter is helping to combat outages by restricting the number of times third-party apps such as TweetDeck and Echofon can access the service. The microblogging service reduced the maximum number of API calls to 175 an hour, compared to the 350 per hour it had been previously. This means many third-party apps are unable to update tweets as often as usual.
That makes perfect sense for Twitter, but it does mean problems for the existing deployed set of applications which had a different set of expectations.
Technorati Tags: twitter, social media
I hesitated before posting this, but it was too good to leave alone: Flash officially has no friends left:
It may seem that Steve Jobs is on a lonely crusade against Adobe’s Flash format with the rest of the industry simply waiting who this battle will turn out. While Adobe is rallying support for Flash, Apple receives support from a rather unexpected ally, the adult film industry. The founder of Digital Playground, one of the porn heavyweights in the U.S., told ConceivablyTech that it will abandon Flash as soon as the desktop browsers fully support HTML 5.
Of course, it might give Steve Jobs an aneurysm when he hears that...
Gosh forbid that a manager should look into something useful, like, say - are people in my group getting their jobs done. No, far simpler to use fear and intimidation - like this proud comment about the installation of monitoring software:
"Once you talk to five people in the organization, it's like a virus," he said. "People learn that 'These guys are serious, they really do look at what is going on.'"
A more cynical person might say "let no insufficient number of money laden lobbyists go unpunished". The Feds have decided that Apple is in need of a good spanking:
"The [Justice Dept.] is doing outreach," an anonymous Hollywood source told the Post. "You can't dictate terms to the industry. The Adobe thing is just inviting the wrath of everybody."
Someone should just ask this first - after all the yelling and legal maneuvering, exactly what did the Microsoft cases amount to? Lots of money for lawyers, and precious little else. The competition moved MS back, not the DOJ - although I suppose you could argue that the DOJ made MS skittish enough that they didn't engage well. I'm not sure I'd call that a win.
Now it's Apple's turn. And you know what? In the mobile space, there's plenty of competition. I don't think Google needs help, and it looks like HP is jumping in with WebOS. And Microsoft is trying (not well, but that goes back to being skittish, I think), with their planned Windows 7 phones. What exactly can the DOJ do that won't be done better by letting this play out?
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