Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
I finally got my Pixel reward, a HP Chromebook 14.
Its taken 4 months to reach me and I’m wondering if its worth it, but its going up on ebay pretty soon. It will be in its original box, untouched, unused and If anyone is interested do get in touch. Otherwise I’ll post the ebay link soon.
I have sold the untouched chromebook sorry…
Me and David were arguing like old times about the state of the industry and we got around to the mobile industry… We talked about mobile operating systems and got around to Firefox OS and Ubuntu. David said remember WebOS, look how that ended…
I reminded him that it was going Opensource, however today David pointed me at this…
Electronics giant HP is selling off the code, staff and technology involved in its WebOS software to Korean firm LG.
HP acquired the WebOS operating system when it bought veteran gadget maker Palm in 2011 for $1.2bn (£789m).
Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed but HP is not thought to have recouped much of the money it paid for Palm.
LG said the WebOS code would be used to power its next-generation smart TV technology.
The WebOS was created to run smartphones, tablets and other devices developed by Palm that, in its early days, pioneered the handheld gadget industry. However, Palm’s influence has diminished as Apple, Google’s Android and RIM’s Blackberry have come to dominate the smartphone and tablet markets.
In the deal, LG gets WebOS source code, engineers working on it, documentation and the websites that promote it. HP is holding on to patents underlying WebOS as well as technology that helps it connect to web-based services.
It looks like the deal doesn’t effect the code? maybe? who knows?
So much for going Opensource?, I had thought it was going to be like the BeOS of the mobile operating systems.
Everyone is talking about HP’s announcement that WebOS is going open source… Which is great news and one of the best moves they could have done with WebOS. However I do wonder if WebOS might go the way of BeOS?
What I mean really is… by the time WebOS goes open source, will it be too late like I would conclude BeOS or rather haiku was/is…? Linux become the de-facto open source platform and BeOS took too long to finally become open source. HP really should be taking advantage of the fact there are a lot of people who bought Touchpads and Hackers are falling over themselves with the possibilities, now! Or at least sooner than 2013! Which would be a real shame because I actually quite like WebOS…
I love my pacemaker but Tonium have really screwed the community of pacemaker djs.
It started when they moved lets mix from a pacemaker community to a generic dj community. I understand the reason why they did it but the pacemaker only djs were pretty much invaded by all types of other djs. Tonium did setup a getsatisfaction account and people started using that to voice there concerns. But after a few years, get satisfaction reports Pacemaker monitors but is not active in this community. There hasn’t been a update in years now and there’s still plenty of outstanding issues.
My pacemaker is still working as good as it always has but I could certainly do with a replacement battery. It currently lasts about 2 hours while recording is on, it use to last about 5 hours.
I couldn’t get the Pacemaker editor working with Wine again, so I finally switched to using VirtualBox (virtualisation) the closed source version because you have to use the USB to talk to the Pacemaker. It is a pain having to drag the mixes over and export them but it does work.
Open source Pacemaker
Amias Channer wrote 1 day ago
has anyone reported tonium to the eff for GPL violations ? you are required to make source code available if you use GPL’ed code and the EFF have a legal fund to force companies to do this tonium, please save yourself a lot of money (you will have to pay their expenses) and publish the damn code. its not hard to do. i will help you if you don’t know how.
musicinstinct commented 1 day ago
I noticed if you go into settings on the device, select ‘about’ and then ‘legal notice’, then scroll down to the bottom you will find a notice that source code is available by sending 5 EUR to GPL Compliance Manager at Tonium AB. I wonder if anyone has tried this and successfully received it?
Amias Channer commented 1 day ago
http://getsatisfaction.com/pacemaker/…
this thread suggests that they have been refused every time.
So it looks like Tonium could be in breech of the GPL, but this may take a long time to resolve its self.
So its time to hack the pacemaker
I said for a while since the pacemaker does actually mount on Linux, it should be easy to hack it specially because it seems to store everything in .pacemaker and uses a SQLlite database for most of its things.
Musicinstinct wrote
I’ve also managed to access the tracks database using sqlite manager in Ubuntu, but in order to successfully install new tracks I would need to create the metadata. This is an XML file and should be doable if we can reverse engineer the format of the beat mapping data, or get access to the source code.
So now its the race to understand the XML format and create a schema which works with the pacemaker. Of course there is now another forum if your interested in following the hacking.
Fun times ahead…
Just read about the changes to the Windows Home Server on my Kindle via Ars Technica.
Microsoft’s Windows Home Server is a funny little product. The company’s ambition when developing the product was to have us all run little home servers: small, low-power, appliance-like machines with some network connectivity and gobs of storage. We’d use these home servers as a place to back up our PCs, share files and printers across our home networks, stream media to our Xboxes, and gain remote access to our files when away from home.
In practice, most of these things can be done perfectly well with a normal desktop version of Windows. Windows Home Server does have some advantages—it had a management front-end that let the server be easily controlled remotely, and it is based on Windows Server 2003 to slim down its own hardware demands—but for the most part, it isn’t doing anything too unusual. As a result, Windows Home Server has remained a niche product. Much loved by its users, but never really making it as a mass-market success.
It does, however, have one special feature, a feature without any real equivalent in any other version of Windows, whether for desktop or for server. That feature is called Drive Extender. Conceptually, Drive Extender is quite simple: it allows multiple hard disks (regardless of interface or size) to be aggregated to provide a single large pool of storage. Folders on the pooled storage could also be selectively replicated, meaning that Drive Extender would ensure that copies of the files were found on multiple physical disks.
It goes on to say HP (one of the biggest supporters of WHS) will no longer be supporting WHS, instead they will be developing there own WebOS.
Engadget is reporting that many of the HP staff previously working on MediaSmart have been redeployed to focus on webOS devices, though any direct webOS-powered equivalent to the MediaSmart systems seems unlikely.
So much for Microsoft Windows Home Server… I got a feeling it was released too early and I do stand by the idea that most people will have a Home Server in there home in the very near future, even with the deluge of online backup services and streaming services.
This was taken from the dl.tv episode 124. Whats very interesting is the 4 laptops reviewed are exactly the same as what was on my final list and they also recommend the Dell XPS 1210, even over the Mac Book.
Oh I forgot to mention my wife also bought a new laptop. A HP DV2000 from Comet which she loves at the moment.