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  • WiMAX 4G Coming to New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2010
    The next-next generation U.S. wireless technology is preparing itself for primetime in major metropolitan areas. New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles will each have 4G WiMAX by the end of 2010.
  • Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie To Step Down As Chief Software Architect
    Microsoft has just?announced?that?Ray Ozzie, the company’s Chief Software Architect is stepping down from this position.
    Ozzie assumed the chief software architect’s role in June 2006. In his role, Ozzie was responsible for oversight of the company’s technical strategy and product architecture. Prior to this role, Ozzie was chief technical officer from April 2005 to June 2006. He assumed that position in April 2005 after Microsoft acquired Groove Networks, a next-generation collaboration software company he formed in 1997.
  • Driverless taxi gets called with an iPad
    This is just wild! A group of researchers in Berlin have been?working on “autonomous cars” for a while. The Berlin team has pushed the idea ahead by hooking the car up to an iPad. The iPad’s GPS location is sent out to the car, and then the user can even track the car’s movement and scanner information directly from the iPad.
  • Google Puts the Emphasis on Location in Search
    With a few tweaks and an interface change, Google has placed location and location-based search front-and-center in its search engine.
    The big change, announced earlier today?on Google Blogs, is thatGoogle has moved the user location setting to the left-hand panel of the search engine results page. This feature automatically detects your current location and tailors search results based on that.
    The change rolls out starting today and will be available to users in 40+ languages sometime soon.
  • Apple releases Q4 results: $20.34B revenue, $4.31B profits
    Apple reports earnings of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 a share, in the fiscal fourth quarter, versus $1.82 a share in the year-ago quarter.
    3.89 million Macs, 14.1m iPhones (almost 2x the previous year’s number), 4.19m iPads sold in Q4.
    ANdy Rubin's answer to Steve JobsDuring Apple’s earnings call yesterday, Jobs pointed out that open systems don’t always win.?
    But he also tried to reframe the debate. Open versus closed is a smokescreen,? he argues. Google likes to characterize Android as open and iOS as closed. We think this is disingenuous.? The real difference between the iPhone and Android is, he says, integrated versus fragmented.
    Android chief Andy Rubin responded with his first tweet. (See image)
  • IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011
    The Number Resource Organization, the coordinating mechanism for the five?Regional Internet Registries or?RIRs, this morning?announced that less than 5% of the world?IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) addresses remain unallocated. The IPv4 pool first dipped below 10% in January 2010, and in the next nine months some 200 million addresses have subsequently been allocated from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the RIRs.
    Follow @IPv4Countdown to keep up to date and meanwhile prepare your systems for IPv6 (it’s about time anyway).

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This is the first post of what I plan to make a recurring feature on this blog. Each day I will try to assemble a post with interesting news that pop up in my newsfeed.
So here it goes…

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I just received this email from Google and I must say I’m applauding to their decision!

Dear Google Apps admin

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,
The Google Apps team

In short Google Docs & Google Sites will only support the following browsers from March 1st, 2010 (with Google Mail & Google Calendar following later that year):

  • Internet Explorer 7.0 and above
  • Firefox 3.0 and above
  • Google Chrome 4.0 and above
  • Safari 3.0 and above

Let’s hope this move creates enough momentum to get people to stop using those shitty old browsers that always give me hours (or even days) of headache, whenever I have to make sure a site is cross-browser compatible. I might even predict that this dreaded term of “cross browser compatibility” may soon be only a distant memory from the past, as all the latest browsers pretty much agree on how to render HTML and treat the DOM (and therefore JavaScript) 🙂

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Google searchGoogle not only seems to have permanently activated their SearchWIKI functionality for me, but also something that could prove to be quite useful.

Each result which points to a forum- or comment-kind of conversation, now states the number of replies and the date of the last post in that thread.

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

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Adium participated in this year’s Google Summer of Code and took 6 students for a full time internship. The projects they worked on where quite successful as it sounds.

Of course the thing I’m mostly looking forward to is the Audio/Video integration. It wasn’t completely finished in this SoC but it seems like they now have a pretty solid base to build upon.

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