Jack Goldman died this month. Mac? Windows? X11? You may think of visionaries who shaped technology as you know it. You might imagine that they were the original thinkers or visionary businessmen. You're wrong. The guy who laid the foundations started out trying to invent the electric car
at Ford, before being hired to Xerox creating the legendary PARC labs that invented computing as we know it; he lived to see
his prediction that "...any electric car produced in our lifetime will have to be a hybrid" come true.
posted by rodgerd
on Dec 24, 2011 -
17 comments
Who owns the term "app store"? Apple
wants to, but
Amazon and
Microsoft, among others, think it is generic. Will Steve Jobs's
own words come to haunt him? In any case, the first casualty of the fight between giants seems to be
Amahi, a small open-source media server.
[more inside]
posted by kmz
on Jun 22, 2011 -
98 comments
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in
no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (
previously).
Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw
on Jan 13, 2011 -
145 comments
The
National Labor Committee, a watchdog group that investigates working conditions at foreign factories producing goods for US corporations, has
released a report on the KYE Factory in Guangdong, China. KYE manufactures outsourced products for Microsoft (their biggest customer), HP, Best Buy, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech, and ASUS. The report
focuses heavily on the workers producing Microsoft products. In response, Microsoft says they will
investigate the allegations, as their
vendor code of conduct (pdf) bans much of the abuses uncovered by the report.
Photo Slideshow / NLC report summary [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Apr 15, 2010 -
55 comments
The
<video tag>, as defined by the HTML5 spec, is an element "used for playing videos or movies". Which
codec those videos or movies are in is currently undefined, with the two contenders being the free open source
Ogg Theora and the proprietary
H.264. With the unveiling of
Internet Explorer 9 both Microsoft and Apple are supporting H.264 in their browsers, and
comparisons of the standards seem to bear out H.264 as the better of the two. However Mozilla have taken a stance against incorporating H264 into Firefox on the grounds that it is
patented and has to be licensed. Arguments are now being made
for and
against Mozilla sticking to its ideals.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball points out that Firefox already supports proprietary formats such as GIF.
Um, perhaps not the best example.
posted by Artw
on Mar 21, 2010 -
140 comments
The Day the Music Died The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) [...] has also been warning anyone who would listen that they should not “purchase” encrypted music from these services, since if these services go under then all that “purchased” music will no longer… what’s the word… “play”. But mostly people ignored them (and me), because, you know, Microsoft was at the center of it all, and nobody ever got fired for “buying” from Microsoft.
posted by desjardins
on May 7, 2008 -
67 comments
Dual Boot, Officially. Now that the
contest is over, it could be time for
both sides of the
Cola OS War to put aside their differences and shake hands ... though not without a little good-natured snark:
"Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries." Oooooh ... burn.
posted by grabbingsand
on Apr 5, 2006 -
102 comments
The announcement that Apple was moving to Intel hardware was the first move in Intel's take-over of Apple, according to
Robert Cringely, giving Intel a platform to compete head-to-head with Microsoft.
"This scenario works well for everyone except Microsoft. If Intel was able to own the Mac OS and make it available to all the OEMs, it could break the back of Microsoft. And Apple/Intel could easily extend this to the consumer electronics world. How much would it cost Intel to buy Apple? Not much." More.
posted by bobbyelliott
on Jun 10, 2005 -
57 comments
The clueless reviews the Mac Mini His chief gripes are "The Mini boots up into a stripped-down operating system which Apple calls OS X, similar to the stripped-down WindowsCE OS found on many handhelds." and "No serial ports, no way to connect a printer, no PS/2 ports, no floppy drive, no 5.25" bays." Let the hate mail campaign begin!
posted by StormBear
on Feb 2, 2005 -
47 comments
Microsoft to discontinue development of IE for the Mac... Surprisingly this apparently isn't being done because of the low market share for Macintosh, but rather as a side effect of the increasing integration (whether real or alleged) between IE and the Operating System, which on the Mac is closed, so MS can cease development as support for their claims of mandatory integration between browser & OS. I await the next step, mandatory integration between email & OS? IM? Media tools? Net access?
posted by jonson
on Jun 13, 2003 -
68 comments
Celebrate, Windows users, you too can use the world's best MP3 player, with
the final release of
XPod
today, which gives
iPod compatiblity to
Windows.
And this is not the only option,
ephPod
does the same thing, but does require you to buy a copy of
MacOpener first.
Didn't Apple say they were coming out with their own Windows drivers for iPod
eventually?
posted by Mwongozi
on Jun 24, 2002 -
19 comments
MacOS X comes of age. Microsoft has just announced that Microsoft Office will be released for the new Apple OS in the fall. "Analysts had warned that without a version of Office, or similar productivity suite, running natively under Mac OS X, Apple would face problems getting businesses to switch to the new operating system. "
posted by Brilliantcrank
on Jan 10, 2001 -
0 comments
Macintouch is reporting that Microsoft has disbanded the IE for Mac team and is discontinuing development of IE for Mac. So much for a 5 year commitment....
posted by faisal
on May 12, 2000 -
19 comments
