My beloved European XOOM finally is getting Android 3.1 support… Boy have I had to be patient…
Android™ 3.1 for Motorola XOOM™ will soon be available over the air to all Motorola XOOM users in Europe. We expect the over-the-air deployment to begin in early August, with the package being available for pull by August 9th.
Just finished reading “Zero Day” by Mark E. Russinovich. The author is a fellow at Microsoft and well know in the computer circles for also being the author of various tools from SysInternals a company he used to own.
The book is about cyber-terrorist and without giving too much away its quite a interesting read.
Anyway… here is what is said about the book from the author himself:
An airliner’s controls abruptly fail mid-flight over the Atlantic. An oil tanker runs aground in Japan when its navigational system suddenly stops dead. Hospitals everywhere have to abandon their computerdatabases when patients die after being administered incorrect dosages of their medicine. In the Midwest, a nuclear power plant nearly becomes the next Chernobyl when its cooling systems malfunction.
At first, these random computer failures seem like unrelated events. But Jeff Aiken, a former government analyst who quit in disgust after witnessing the gross errors that led up to 9/11, thinks otherwise. Jeff fears a more serious attack targeting the United States computer infrastructure is already under way. And as other menacing computer malfunctions pop up around the world, some with deadly results, he realizes that there isn’t much time if he hopes to prevent an international catastrophe.
Written by a global authority on cyber security, Zero Day presents a chilling “what if” scenario that, in a world completely reliant on technology, is more than possible today—it’s a cataclysmic disaster just waiting to happen.
Well this is what google says in their corporate philosophy but I seriously doubting this.
If you are not aware of the most recent cuffle about google, let explain and perhaps rant a little.
Google; in an attempt to prevent the spread of the gpl-2 license from the linux kernel on the android platform to user’s application decided to clean the kernel headers of it so it can be used in the bionic libc.
My understanding of the gpl-2 license is that once you have applied the license to your code, you are free to change it, include it and attribute your changes but the gpl-2 remains, so I can not see how they can clean the code of the license when the license itself prohibits it.
Cleaning up the linux headers files does not seem such a big deal at first especially given the linux chaps have the own sanitised version themselves but it really does open it a huge whole in the open source arena. If you can remove the gpl-2 from the linux headers which contain macro’s aka inline code then why can’t you do the same for other gpl-2 software and release it or use it anyway you wish. After all if google can do it without doing any evil… why can’t anyone else do the same?
Is this the end of gpl-2 or just the start of new legal battle with the do no evil company being covered the brown stuff.
So what should google to next…
– standup and say “sorry” and “we will fix it”
– move bionic libc to the proper sanitized headers
– reissue a firmware that mitigates issue
– put some more love in the open source arena and stop taking evil shortcuts
Anyway rant over… lets see what happens next…
http://www.brownrudnick.com/nr/pdf/alerts/Brown%20Rudnick%20Advisory%20The%20Bionic%20Library-Did%20Google%20Work%20Around%20The%20GPL.pdf
What can a company do with a 1 Billion USD?
Well if you are Microsoft you can use this or more to ensure one of your competitors becomes a OEM vendor!
This is exactly what is said Microsoft did to influence Nokia to use their mobile offerings… Which at first seems a bit of amazing turn around for Nokia given the amount of effort it has put into Symbian but I guess cash is king! Good luck Nokia..
Over the last couple of years I have not been getting on too well with my second generation iPod Touch but it has been a bit of a love hate relationship… I love it when works well with my mac’s at home but find it a real pain on Windows, it works but it feels like I’m forcing it to work… even the sound feel damp and uninspiring..
Anyway, I thought it time was to try something different out, so I had a look around and decided to pick up the Cowon J3.
So what do I think about it, well I had an interesting first day experience… I managed to brick… yes… completely brick it… even for me this was a first!
I used to have an old creative labs mp3 player and this used Microsoft’s MTP protocol and so did the new shinney J3… so I downloaded and built libmtp and started to play around with the protocol to see if I could automatically create some playlist… well that was my intention… a couple of hours later the cowon froze up on me and pressed the reset switch and the reset button… and the rest has gone down in brick laying history..
Using the guide at iaudiophile.net I manager to get the right tools and the firmware to try and repair it myself.
Using the tools above, I managed to install a new firmware but it still crashed with “checking albums” on startup.. so I decided to place the firmware on the micro sd card and I found it booted off this…. wow I thought its not completely bricked… Then I was able to mount the drive… re-format it as fat and then I re-installed the firmware… this time it worked!
Anyway, as you can imagine after this first day experience I really was not too impressed with myself, libmtp or the cowon.
Nows, its a couple of weeks later… I now have started to like my lovely cowon… at first I thought the user interface was childish but it has grown on me.. it simpy works when I need it to work.. however the nicest surprise is that I now love my music again but I have left libmtp alone!
