Category — History

Daniel Eran Dilger

Despite Apple’s investments in developing its own custom ARM microchips in place of using Intel’s Atom mobile processors, the company has reached out to Intel as a partner to drive the adoption of the new Light Peak specification for optical cabling. A look at Apple’s historical use of ports explains why it is doing this.

Why Apple is betting on Light Peak with Intel: a love story
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Daniel Eran Dilger

After having proven itself unable to compete in web search and advertising, Microsoft has acquired technology from a company with management problems and has launched a wildly hailed attempt to catch up to Google using a dishonest campaign targeting the government. Of course, this isn’t anything new, simply a repeat performance of the historical development of Windows NT. The only difference this time around is that Microsoft’s monopoly is no longer able to exert much leverage against legitimate competitors in the market, providing little hope for Bing. Here’s why.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Responding to “The Palm Pre/iPhone Multitasking Myth,” which described the history of multitasking in operating systems, reader Marc Dufresne offered some additional insight into how Microsoft obtained the basis of Windows NT from DEC.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Vendors in the smartphone market desperately need to offer unique strengths that can offer a credible alternatives to Apple’s blockbuster iPhone and its App Store. A primary strategy of Palm’s new Pre is to advertise the potential of “multitasking apps” as a key differentiator. The problem is that Palm and its boosters don’t seem to understand what multitasking is.
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Daniel Eran Dilger
After posting a spectacular 17% revenue drop, the company’s first ever year over year decline, Microsoft and its satellite pundits have assembled a seemingly plausible distraction/solution going forward: Windows 7 will boost sales of generic PCs back into orbit and erase the crater caused by Vista and the recession. They’re wrong, here’s why.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

When Microsoft released Windows Vista after 6 years and $6 billion of development, the company was so proud of its new product that it hiked the price dramatically over the existing Windows XP. Two and a half embarrassing years later, Microsoft is showing its pride in the revamped Windows 7 by unprecedentedly giving it away for a year, just to get people to try it.
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Prince McLean, AppleInsider

OQO, a company formed by two members of Apple’s Titanium PowerBook G4 team who left the company to deliver the micro-sized laptops that Steve Jobs refused to build at Apple, is shutting down after nearly a decade of trying.

Former Apple engineers at OQO call it quits
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Prince McLean, AppleInsider

Apple has hired Ivan Krstic, the developer of the security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child project’s XO system and subsequently a vocal critic of the failed OLPC program. Krstic is a prodigy security guru with anti-malware credentials.

Apple hires One Laptop Per Child security expert and noted critic
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Daniel Eran Dilger

The next version of Apple’s Boot Camp utility, shipping with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, will enable a natively-installed Windows partition to read HFS+ Mac partitions, sources say. [Read more →]

Daniel Eran Dilger

Every once and a while I get the opportunity to appear brilliantly prescient by pointing out something that is blatantly obvious but which has been so obscured by valiant marketing efforts that it makes me look like a grand wizard at detecting emperor nakedness just to say it. In this case, it’s that Windows 7 is becoming the next Zune.
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Daniel Eran Dilger
In referencing the history of Mac viruses that occurred long before anyone ever began using Windows, I referred to “boot sector viruses” that occasionally bit users of Macs, particularly those in school environments where floppies were being passed around. I forgot to note this earlier, but an anti-virus authority corrected me earlier to point out these never actually existed. Boot sector viruses were (and are) exclusive to the PC.
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Daniel Eran Dilger
According to proponents of the Mac Malware Myth, Mac users should be afraid of a series of reports about a “rising tide” of malicious software and in panicked response, install anti-virus software from the vendors who propagate those dire warnings. They’re wrong, here’s why.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Bloggers jumped on comments from Apple COO Tim Cook to suggest that the company is planning legal action to shut down Palm’s webOS Pre phone before the device can even make it to the market. They’re wrong, here’s why.
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Daniel Eran Dilger

Sometimes it feels odd to have to explain why a company such as Apple, which can generate tremendous waves of publicity by simply sending out “event” post cards as a press release at any point throughout the year, might want to bail out of Macworld Expo, an event it does not control, does not really benefit from, is poorly positioned within the year for new product announcements, and has limped along on life support for years just like every other trade show in the terminally ill industry, even before the economic crisis really hit.

Who exactly could be surprised by Apple’s move, apart from the pseudo-journalistic tech punditry circle that has for so long confused the role of reporting events in the tech industry with trying to mold public opinion through its tiresome cacophony of forcefully stated, but poorly thought out opinions?
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Daniel Eran Dilger

The software business is going mobile. That shift will present new challenges but also new opportunities for developers. Here’s how the mobile market has evolved into being today’s promising next frontier for new software models.
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