Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I'm loving Konqueror (and KDE) 4.2

Just the other day I was thinking to myself how much I love Konqueror, its performance and its feature fullness, but how I was turned off by its lack of inline search and inline spell check!
Well, no more! Konqueror 4.2 is out, and it is my new default browser. KDE 4.2 is also turning out to be quite a leap over 4.1 and 4.0, I think I'll be switching from GNOME to it, once my favorite distro starts including it in its next release.



Thanks to the KDE team for a great release.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Opera 10 Alpha scores 100/100 on Acid 3, faster browsing...

Adds inline spell check (finally!) but still no inline search. The second feature is as important as the first, I hate having to deal with popup dialogs, and nearly all other browsers have them implemented, why not Opera?

Make no mistake, Opera 10 is an excellent browser, and it would have become my default brwoser if it wasn't for the omission of inline search. Unless there is a way to activate it, that I don't know about.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Zune is all but officially dead!


According to Microsoft's quarterly statements, Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million, or 54 percent compared to the same quarter last year, due to falling device sales.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000119312509009386/d10q.htm

Friday, January 16, 2009

Another bad month for Sony!


Dec 2007* | 2008*

Wii 1350k | 2150k
DS 2470k | 3040k
X360 1260k | 1440k
PS3 0797k | 0726k
PSP 1060k | 1020k

* courtesy of NPD.

Now you know why no console should have a launch price of $599!

Monday, January 12, 2009

Zune no more?!

Valuable insight from Steve Ballmer:
"Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who once laughed off the iPhone, has now conceded to Apple's edge in the market while hinting at a very different future for his company's Zune players.

Ballmer told the Financial Times that the iPhone and BlackBerry have "clear market momentum" in the smartphone business.

As for the Zune, Ballmer said this week that consumers "should not anticipate" a Zune phone. Instead of persisting as a Microsoft-built hardware product, the device's core could eventually be integrated into other Windows-powered mobile devices, he explained."

Does this signal the death of Zune? or is it something else entirely?
We all know the true reason behind the Zune... DRM! Microsoft feared that iTunes' dominance in the online music market, would lock them out. But now that iTunes has gone DRM-free, Microsoft lost its incentive to compete with Apple in the portable media players segment.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Google Chrome inching towards 2.0

... already?

Most interesting bit, which should be of importance to Non-Windows-users is the little tidbit about HTTP.

New network code. Google Chrome now has its own implementation of the HTTP network protocol (we were using the WinHTTP library on Windows, but need common code for Mac and Linux). We fixed a few bugs in HTTP authentication and made Google Chrome more compatible with servers that reply with invalid HTTP responses. We need feedback on anything that's currently broken, particularly with proxy servers, secure (https) sites, and sites that require log in.

If anything this should allow Google Chrome to run using Wine without encountering issues with https sites.

Chromium Developer Documentation Release Notes 2.0.156.1