Open Handset Alliance adds 14 big members, and the winds of change are blowing
The Open Handset Alliance, which promotes the use of Google’s Android mobile operating system as an alterative to current systems, added 14 new members this week, including Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile operator. This is a pretty huge event in the open source camp, to be sure.
In addition to Vodafone, new members of the alliance include ASUSTek Computer, Garmin International, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba. Apple probably isn’t too scared, but it really does mean that (more than likely) Android and the open source phone OS movement are here to stay.
Members in the alliance are expected to either/or “deploy compatible Android devices, contribute significant code to the Android Open Source Project, or support the ecosystem through products and services that will accelerate the availability of Android-based devices,” quoting the press release regarding this news.
Google started this movement when it officially released Android, the open source operating system it created. The Android software is mainly designed to provide an open platform to develop new apps for smartphones and the like, and it’s gained some pretty big players in its corner.
EA licenses PhysX technology, brings full-motion physics to a new level
Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive Software are going to be using Nvidia’s PhysX technology, bringing more realistic motion to gaming on the PC. Nvidia is announcing today that Electronic Arts and Take-Two have licensed its PhysX technology as a development platform for future games, presumbly including the Madden franchise.
“PhysX is a great physics solution for the most popular platforms, and we’re happy to make it available for EA’s development teams worldwide,” Tim Wilson, tech bigwig of EA’s Redwood Studio said in a statement.
Nvidia got its physics technology when it grabbed up Aegia in February 2008. PhysX runs on the graphics processing unit, or GPU, which eases demands on the CPU for graphics intensive functions, and it is supposed to make motion and physics more realistic looking. It’s presumed it will find its way into numerous action and sports titles for both companies.
More suitably nerdy details here.
Censorship? British ISP’s blocking anonymous access to Wikipedia
Internet service providers in the U.K. have begun filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to the Internet Watch Foundation’s blacklist. Why this happens is anyone’s guess, but Wikis rarely have anything that controversial on them really.
The following notice appears on Wikipedia when many UK users attempted to edit content:
Wikipedia has been added to a Internet Watch Foundation UK website blacklist, and your Internet service provider has decided to block part of your access. Unfortunately, this also makes it impossible for us to differentiate between different users, and block those abusing the site without blocking other innocent people as well.
According to rumors on the Wikipedia administrators boards, this is because a transparent proxy has been enabled for customers of Virgin Media, Be/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon and Opal.
This has two effects: users cannot see content filtered by the proxies, and all user traffic passing through the proxies is given a single IP address per proxy. As Wikipedia’s anti-vandalism system blocks users by IP address, one single case of vandalism by a single UK user prevents all users on that user’s ISP from editing. The effect is to block all editing from anonymous UK users on that list of ISPs. Registered users can still edit content.
It’s a strange thing indeed, but its yet another example of ISP’s controlling content, which should be against some type of creed. Japan has been doing this sort of thing for years now though, and we can add the UK to this somewhat shameful list.
Facebook Connect opens officially, and social networking may never be the same
Facebook is officially announcing that its new system, Facebook Connect, is officially open for business for non-Facebook sites, and it may change the way social sites interconnect forever.
The social network is making the implementation of Facebook Connect self-service, so anyone who has a site with even a smidgen of community features can hook into the Facebook social universe, which is a huge boon for the social universe in general.
This effort is noteworthy, not just because adding the capability to a site to let users “register” with their existing Facebook credentials will boost community involvement, but because what users do on these sites can get reflected back to their activity stream on Facebook. It’s free marketing, minus a lot of the effort required to maintain it.
Because Facebook Connect is not just a registration system, but also a marketing channel with a built-in audience of 130 million monthly active users, this program will crush competing registration systems, and in some ways it beats even MySpace.
More info on this here.
The verdict is faster, but not fastest: Opera 10 Alpha now available
It’s available: Opera 10 has released their Alpha candidate for testing.
Testing the browser confirms that it can boast that it’s the second browser in development that is fully compliant with the Acid3 benchmarks. It’s also markedly faster than Opera 9.62 at processing JavaScript, but it’s still twice as slow as the fastest Web browser currently available, so it isn’t perfect.
This writer prefers Firefox both for speed and UI efficiency, but to each their own.
More info here: Link
Vista SP2 to enter open testing soon
Microsoft said on Tuesday that it is ready for wider testing of Windows Vista Service Pack 2, the second bunch of fixes for the latest version of the operating system. In addition to bug fixes and performance improvements, Service Pack 2 adds support for Blu-ray, Bluetooth 2.1, and Windows Search 4.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s desktop search technology. All of it sounds good, but i’m taking a wait and see approach on this.
In a post, Microsoft VP Mike Nash said that while Microsoft is offering the customer preview program to all interested parties, not everyone should download SP2 in test form. General customers are best advised to wait for the full official release.
The release is on track for a mid-June 2009 release right now, but in this writer’s opinion, that’s much too late to save Vista as an OS. It’ll be a good thing, though, if this service pack makes it at least a solid, viable OS for the many computers out there that came with Vista.
Monday Tech Notebook
Here’s a few notes in the Tech world today:
- SCO was given a death warrant basically in their loss to Novell today, in a rather weak intellectual property suit they filed against Novell 5 years ago. They have to pay over $3.5 million in fines, and the company is effectively kaput. Read here for some more details.
- GiftCardRescue.com, a company that allows visitors to sell or exchange unused gift cards, announced Monday that it has instituted a new bankruptcy protection policy that will cover customers who purchase gift cards from the company’s site. Hey, a great idea, and these days, definite peace of mind.
- Micron Technology will bring out a 256GB solid-state drive early next year while it moves, along with Intel, to an all-new manufacturing process. A Micron spokesperson said Monday that it will start volume production of a 256GB solid-state drive for consumer use in March 2009. For a little tech info: Solid-state drives increase both speed and possibly capacity by a factor of 5-10 times a normal hard drive, with no moving parts to break, so it’s definitely the storage solution of the future.
Windows Live Search to become Kumo?
Microsoft is expected to rebrand and relaunch its Windows Live Search, according to various reports on the Web. It will undergo a slight revamping internally as well.
There have been tremors on the Web that Microsoft was considering a new brand name for Live Search, and now some sites are reporting that Microsoft has taken control of the domain name Kumo.com from its registrar and directing internal traffic to it as a test site for a possible permanent home.
The rebranded site is expected to launch early next year, according to a report that cited a secret source within the company. According to that report, very few people in the company are privy to name of the new brand and it could still change; Kumo is purely a test name for now. It also will be updated with better search results for various types of searches (a la Ask.com).
More details here: Link
The future of MS Studio and .NET programming languages?
In the wake of the recent PDC and TechEd developer events, Microsoft has decided to put some of its key executives out on the road to explain the innovations that Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 have in store. There are apparently will be big changes on the way.
Microsoft is promoting the next version of its Visual Studio tool set, which is currently code-named Rosario, as offering new levels of analysis of the application development process. The company is raising the stakes with a set of product enhancements it says will meet the software development needs arising from trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, and parallelism, and other terms you may or may not have heard of.
Attempting to shed light on the forthcoming tools with a visit to the U.K. were Redmond-based Jason Zander, general manager for Visual Studio, and Matt Carter, group product manager in the same division. Here’s a Q&A they did recently that outlines the new directions for the MS packages. It’s an interesting read.
IE 8 won’t be finished until next year: MS takes the cautious road
Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday. Testing has been going well overall, but MS wants to be sure, and I don’t blame them. Firefox has made inroads in eroding IE’s dominance, so it might be in their best interest to test the heck out of this thing.
The next test, “a release candidate” version will come in the first quarter of 2009, probably February. That means MS won’t achieve their goal of getting IE8 out this year.
Microsoft first showed off the new browser at the Mix conference in March. Among its improvements are better shielding against malware, better overall standards support, and the ability to carve off a piece of a Web page, known as a Web slice, built into the software itself. It also supports having private sessions that don’t get into your history (can mostly be used for no good, as far as I can tell, but it will be there).
Hachamovitch said that Web site developers should test their sites and report “any critical issues” to Microsoft, and also called on technical users to download the current beta 2 version and let Microsoft know about any issues.
I personally haven’t tried it, but reports i’ve heard are mostly positive. We’ll see if waiting and keeping this in oven a little longer makes a big difference.
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