Archive for the 'Other Software' Category
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
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/…
Posted in Other Software | No Comments
Monday, December 5th, 2011
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/…
Posted in Other Software, Phones, Tablet Computers | No Comments
Monday, November 14th, 2011
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)
Posted in Apple, Internet, Other Software | No Comments
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
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)
Posted in Apple, Internet, Other Software | No Comments
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
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/…
Posted in Other Hardware, Other Software, Technology, Television | No Comments
Monday, February 7th, 2011
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/…
Posted in Internet, Microsoft, Other Software, Phones | No Comments
Thursday, July 29th, 2010
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)
Posted in Apple, Other Software | No Comments
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
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.

Posted in Airplanes, Other Software, Phones | No Comments
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
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/…
Posted in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Other Software | No Comments
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
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)
Posted in Other Hardware, Other Software | No Comments
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
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)
Posted in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Other Software | No Comments
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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/…
Posted in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Other Software | 1 Comment