// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
VMware Fusion 3 was released last week into the anxiously trembling hands of desktop virtualization junkies, and we’ve run the release through a gamut of heavy tests to see if it’s able to meet the hype. At first glance, 3.0 doesn’t look to be teeming with new features, but the changes that are there are significant:
// November 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Each year, human beings put vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere through processes like the combustion of fossil fuels or the clearing land for agriculture. Thankfully, the majority of it doesn’t stay there, as there are a number of significant carbon sinks that pull somewhere around 60 percent of human emissions back out of the air, dissolving it into the oceans and sequestering it in growing forests. One of the worries about our continued carbon emissions is that these sinks could eventually start to fill, increasing the challenge involved in limiting the levels of atmospheric carbon. Two new studies have looked at the issue, and they come to what appear to be very different conclusions. Any process that removes carbon from the atmosphere can act as a carbon sink. These include basic processes like having the gas dissolve into the ocean, to more complex ones, like the sequestration that appears to take place in mature forests. The cumulative impact, however, is huge; carbon sinks are estimated to remove about 60 percent of the CO 2 that human activity puts in the atmosphere annually. (The remaining 40 percent is termed the airborne fraction.)
// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Verizon and AT&T are playing out their 3G coverage spat in court, with Verizon asserting that “the truth hurts” when it comes to AT&T’s 3G coverage. Verizon’s statement is just the latest in the legal battle that started earlier this month when AT&T filed a lawsuit over Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” ad campaign—the gloves are off, and it’s clear that both companies are willing to go to great lengths to push their own marketing agendas. If these two companies were five-year-olds, AT&T would be screaming “VERIZON STARTED IT!” The network began running ads in October—meant to directly target Apple’s and AT&T’s ” There’s an App for That ” ads—that showed a Verizon coverage map next to AT&T’s. Verizon’s map showed significantly more 3G coverage, and the ad stated ” There’s a Map for That ” with the implication that AT&T’s devices are no good if you can’t get any coverage out in the middle of Podunk City, Iowa. The ads even stated flat out that AT&T’s customers were “out of touch” where 3G coverage wasn’t available. Oh snap, Verizon!
// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Red Hat announced today the official release of Fedora 12, the latest version of the popular open source Linux distribution. This release brings some impressive new features and a lot of much-needed bugfixes. It’s a strong update that puts the distro on the right track forward and addresses the serious installation problems that we encountered when we tested Fedora 11. Fedora 12, codenamed Constantine, brings improved power management, performance optimizations, new virtualization enhancements, and a lot of other great stuff. A lot of the improvements will boost Fedora’s suitability for netbooks. A new Moblin spin is available that allows users to easily test Moblin’s specialized user interface on top of Fedora 12.
// November 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
The Japanese games industry is in trouble. At least, that seems to be the consensus of a number of high-profile developers from that region, especially after this year’s Tokyo Game Show. But Square-Enix—the developer best known for role-playing series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest —isn’t taking the news lying down. Instead, the company has done everything it can to appeal to a more global audience, from publishing and development deals to new acquisitions. Ars sat down with president and CEO Yoichi Wada at the Montreal International Game Summit to discuss the apparent turmoil in the Japanese game industry and what Square-Enix hopes to do about it.
// November 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
We gave you the lowdown on how well Apple’s new Magic Mouse works, told you about a Dutch teen that used port scanning to find vulnerable jailbroken iPhones, showed how less-than-honest iPhone developers claim to have developed others’ apps, and how Apple may or may not be dropping support for Atom processors. If you missed any of that, here’s a look at top Apple-related stories this week.
// November 4th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
If you are Paul Haddad of TapBots, LLC , it isn’t unusual to get requests for contract work. When your applications are as eye-catching and functional as his, you garner attention. So when he received an e-mail earlier this month with a subject line of “I’m interested in Tapbots,” it didn’t really come as much of a surprise. What was surprising was the message content. This prospective client wasn’t looking to hire TapBots for any development work, they were looking for confirmation that a development firm out of India did the coding on ConvertBot, a popular TapBots application. The client had found Trucid , the supposed coders of ConvertBot, on the Rentacoder.com website, a virtual cork board where companies can hang their business cards. Trucid quoted a sum of $2,400 for an application similar to ConvertBot. The only problem? TapBots designs and writes all of its applications entirely in house.
// October 31st, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Boo! This week’s top Apple news recapped the drama over ZFS on the Mac, what’s wrong with Psystar’s latest EFI tool, the new Apple TV software, and more. If you need to catch up, you’ve found the right place. Apple abandons ZFS on Mac OS X project over licensing issues : If there was any remaining doubt about ZFS support in OS X, Apple officially killed it last Friday. Licensing concerns ultimately may have doomed the project, but open source developers still hope to keep the dream of ZFS on Mac OS X alive. Meanwhile, Apple is hiring filesystem engineers of its own. Psystar’s $50 hackintosh tool not all it’s cracked up to be : Giving Psystar $50 buys you repackaged open source software but doesn’t guarantee a fully-functional hackintosh. Rebel EFI appears to be just another attempt to profit from others’ work.
// October 26th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Sun’s ZFS filesystem, which the company has referred to as “the last word in filesystems,” was widely expected to be adopted by Apple for use in Mac OS X. However, support never materialized, and the open source project to port the filesystem was unceremoniously shut down last Friday. The (un)stated reasons at heart seem to be licensing issues, though there are also technological reasons why Apple may want to create its own advanced filesystem. The ZFS filesystem is perhaps one of the first truly “modern” filesystems based on the concept of “copy on write.” This means that a fresh copy of all the data in a file is written to disk when saved, and the older copy is retained for some amount of time in case of write errors or other problems. The filesystem is meant to address the needs of ever-growing storage , with features like data integrity, integrated device management, instant snapshots, and facilities to deal with increasing concurrency.
// October 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Tech News
Last week we decided to do something that we’ve joked about, thought seriously about, and just wanted to try. We announced in advance that we would live blog the Apple earnings call , and as we expected the comments were mostly shock and horror at the idea of doing such a ridiculous thing. There is no harm in experimenting, however, so we pressed on to see what the results would be. We were pleasantly surprised. In terms of traffic, it is our top page view generating “article” in the last 30 days. Suffice it to say, that’s a tremendous amount of traffic for one hour of (seriously grueling) reporting . It’s safe to say that we will definitely do this again, with different companies, and perhaps in different styles. I have to thank Jacqui for pulling it off. Why do we think it was a success, aside from the obvious traffic results? Earnings calls are typically not very exciting and events, but with some of the major technology companies, the calls are a bit like calling a horse race. While the race may not be finishing, plenty of people want to know who’s in the lead at any given moment. Typical earnings call reporting puts a layer of editorial between the call itself and the reader. Live blogging, at least in the way that we do it, brings the reader closer to the source, but in a convenient format. Those of you with any interest in these earnings calls, please let us know what you’d like to see more of in terms of company coverage and even presentation.
