Chad's News

The creation of Unix at Bell Labs was a revolutionary moment in the history of computing. It has shaped the future of the field, and set in place foundational elements of the modern open source movement. The linked article describes how the Unix revolution was dictated, in part, by a 1956 anti-trust consent decree between AT&T and the US government. Who would have thought that such a small footnote in history could have a significant impact today, over 50 years later?

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

NORAD is well known for its Christmas Eve tracking of Santa’s progress across the world, but this year is the first time you can use a smartphone/tablet app to track him. It’s named “NORAD Tracks Santa” and is available for the iPhone/iPad and Android devices.

Link: http://www.komando.com/…

Remember how Apple flat out refused to allow Adobe Flash on iPhones and iPads? Well it appears we are witnessing another legacy of Steve Jobs. Adobe Systems has decided to stop developing Flash for mobile devices. From their statement: “We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations…. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.” Adobe will instead focus on HTML5 technologies and Adobe AIR. The article doesn’t mention Adobe Edge, but I think that will probably play a part in this new strategy.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/…
(via Kim Komando)

Adobe Flash is used all over the worldwide web and will continue to be popular for years to come. That being said, however, Flash will eventually be replaced by HTML5 (and its successors). This process is being hastened, in part, because Apple refuses to allow Flash on the iPhone or iPad. Even Adobe has seen the future and is embracing it—they recently released the beta version of a animation development tool that uses HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s called Adobe Edge.

Link: http://www.zdnet.com/…
(via TechRepublic)

IBM’s “Watson” computer wiped out the human competition in the first match of Jeopardy (aired on Tuesday, Feb. 14th). Watson scored $35,734 compared to Ken Jennings at $4,800 and Brad Rutter at $10,400. Keep in mind that Jennings won the most consecutive games, staying in for 74 matches, and Rutter is the all-time money winner at more than $3 million. Long the stuff of science fiction, Watson is a significant step on the road to computers that can respond to natural speech.

Link: http://dailycaller.com/…

Microsoft appears to be abandoning its Silverlight technology in favor of HTML5. Silverlight was Redmond’s attempt to compete with Adobe Flash. All is not lost, however, as it still appears that Silverlight will remain a platform of choice for developing apps on Windows Phone 7 devices.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Apple has donated the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. As with so many other components of the original Macintosh, MacPaint was an innovative and groundbreaking piece of software. The source code has even been studied by software engineers as an example of how to properly write code. I also find it interesting is that it’s so small—a mere 5822 lines of Pascal and 3583 lines of assembler. For modern programmers, that’s just a drop in the bucket.

Link: http://www.businessweek.com/…
(via TechRepublic)

Airlines have had e-tickets for some time now, but it’s still necessary to get a printed boarding pass. Well, even that is on the way out. My friend Josh sent this screen print of his iPhone. It’s a “mobile boarding pass,” and the airline accepts it from the phone display.

Lifehacker performed some non-scientific speed tests on the latest versions of popular browsers. As expected, Google Chrome completely destroyed the others in the JavaScript category. This is why I use Chrome for Facebook—Firefox just can’t handle it on my underpowered machine. The only reason I stay with Firefox is because of its wide variety of extensions. Note that I was a bit surprised to see that Apple’s Safari also had very fast JavaScript processing.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Boy this takes me back. The title for the linked article is a bit inaccurate, since some of the products did actually die. And for several of them, only the naming rights have survived.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/…
(via digg)

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has dropped to a 68% market share, while Mozilla’s Firefox is at 21% and Apple’s Safari is at 8%. In this case, at least, competition leads to innovation, which is good for the user.

Link: http://www.tgdaily.com/…
(via digg)

The linked article performs various speed tests on four different browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. There wasn’t really a clear winner, but Internet Explorer was definitely the loser.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…