Research, no motion: How the BlackBerry CEOs lost an empire
Last week Jesse Hicks at The Verge produced an incredible look at the fall of RIM.
It's possible RIM can be turned around. After all the currently most valuable company in the world was just 90 days from bankruptcy back in the late 90s. If RIM does pull out of this free fall, though, it's not going to be because it stuck to its guns. The company needs to see some massive internal change.
Extremely in-depth study of what the distribution of in-use Android versions looks like. Some truly excellent graphs and plenty of text describing what the graphs indicate.
Highlight:
It’s clear that Gingerbread has disseminated into the market much more slowly than either of Froyo or Eclair. In fact, it took Gingerbread about 17 weeks longer to reach a version distribution milestone (10%, 20%, 30%) than its two predecessors. While it is too early to fairly judge ICS’s trajectory, it certainly appears to have started at a slower pace than did Gingerbread (more on that later). A seemingly endless string of devices entering the market with Honeycomb and few older devices being upgraded to ICS makes it unlikely that we will see the Android version distribution improve in the near term.
RIAA (sort of) responds to SOPA critics, says copyright "offers little real protection"
Ars Technica's Nate Anderson with a great summary and response of the RIAA's response to SOPA criticism. Anderson doesn't stoop to ignoring valid concerns of the opposition, instead discussing the entirety of the RIAA's position.
Good journalism.
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The Spark is a new tablet based on the open source Mer and KDE's Plasma project. As someone who always did prefer KDE to Gnome (especially back in my linux-as-primary-OS days), I've been fascinated by the Plasma project so it's nice to see an interesting project making use of it.
The tablet has modest hardware:
- 7 Inch multi-touch capacitive screen
- 1 GHz ARM Cortex A9 processor with Mali 400 GPU
- 512 MB DDR2 RAM
- 4 GB Nand Flash Disk
- Wireless Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g (3G via USB Extenal)
- 1.3 MP built-in front facing camera
- HDMI 1080P Output
- 2 USB ports
- MicroSD slot
- 3.5 mm audio jack
- Hardware volume and power buttons
- 4 dimensional Gsensor
- Battery: 3000mAH @ 7.4v
- Weight: 355 grams
John Gruber was one of just a few Apple watchers brought in for 1-on-1 meetings with Phil Schiller (Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing) last week to discuss the next release of OS X and receive a preview build of the OS.
Gruber addresses the potential implications of such an odd non-event event well, but this part struck me:
And then the reveal: Mac OS X — sorry, OS X — is going on an iOS-esque one-major-update-per-year development schedule.
Gruber addresses the issue of Apple finally having the resources to give both iOS and OS X this kind of attention now (OS X 10.5 was delayed because the original iPhone's development strained Apple's resources).
The thing he doesn't mention is how this rapid release cycle for the core computing OS will be something we haven't seen in proprietary desktop OSes before. It's akin to first Chrome and now Firefox being on 6 week development cycles. Many will probably complain that each major release isn't as significant as prior ones, but this rapid release cycle will allow quicker release and polishing of new releases as well as easier course correction of a development is seen as a misstep. Previously we'd only really seen this on the desktop OS side in Linux distributions (Ubuntu famously releases two version bumps a year), but in the Linux world the distribution vendors are often restricted by development of tens or hundreds of external open source products which make up the whole.
It's an interesting time in the world of operating systems, that's for sure.