Episode 65 – G&J Miss R of K&R

By | October 18, 2011
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Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie being awarded ...

Image via Wikipedia

Guru is dwelling in a hut outside in the rain, Jere is nice and warm in his home in Jacksonville.

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Show Notes

  • Fifty-five years ago, Fortran was introduced to the world. Fortran was the first modern computer language.
  • Dennis Ritchie, the pioneer of C and Linux, passed away after a long illness.  With Brian Kernighan he authored The C Programming Language, the book nicknamed K&R in reference to its authors. With Ken Thompson he designed UNIX. The successors of C and UNIX are still used today, including in the core of Android, which is a Linux operating system. 
  • Feedback – “Long time listener suggests it is time to abandon Skype as the primary communication failure generator as encountered at least once per episode for all the recent past episodes. Thanks. ” – Wolf Bogascz
  • Platform News
    • Google Voice team working on MMS support. Voice subscribers can now receive MMS from Sprint users, and they are working with other carriers. 
    • Google shutting down Buzz to focus on Google+, along with Code Search, Jaiku, iGoogle, and the University Research Program for Google Search
    • Rumors are that Google is set to open an MP3 store connected to its Music Beta service. 
    • Bill in US Senate wants to force and expansive their 4G is. Carriers respond against clear statistics.
    • Verizon will be tracking URLs of websites you visit and also your device’s location data while sharing it with outside companies…unless you opt out.
    • CNET Executive Editor Molly Wood calls out Android and fragmentation. 
      • Androinica and Android Central respond. Gingerbread was not a giant leap forward, and most of the problems users have had have been with the customizations of Android, not with the Android OS itself. Ice Cream Sandwich promises to reunify a platform that shouldn’t have been divided in the first place.
  • Guru searches for a new alarm clock
  • App News
    • Dropbox offers new beta, allows storage of “favorite files”, bulk upload for photos and videos, renaming of files and folders, upload from and export to local storage, and more. 
    • Mozilla is moving away from its usual XUL implementation in favor of a native Android user interface. Insisting on this framework for its frontend led to the long load times users complained about. Moving away from XUL will cause issues with extension development, however. More details as they develop.
    • AppExtractor can Pull Apps, SMS, and MMS for Nandroid Backups. (Market Link, Key is $1.99)
    • LibreOffice coming to Android as a new port. Likely will not be released for another year. 
    • Google Translate updated. Conversation mode launched with English and Spanish, and is now expanded to 14 languages, adding Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. (Market Link)
    • Bogus Netflix App steals account information. 
    • New PowerAmp beta released. 
    • Duke Nukem 3D being ported to Android. 
    • Evoqu Releases ShopAdvisor for Android. Will alert you when prices drop. (Market Link)
    • Review of the previously mentioned Logitech Harmony Link
    • Slingbox releases tablet-friendly version of app for $30.
    • Astro File Manager gets new tablet design and features. (Market Link)
    • TripAdvisor launches City Guide apps for 20 destinations 
    • Leisure Suit Larry getting a remake, including Android support…release sometime next year.
    • Marvel Comics app now available. (Market Link)
    • American Express launches AMEX for Tablets, for all of your AMEX needs. (Market Link)
    • Big Launcher launches simplified UI for elderly and visually impaired users. Big buttons and large text. (Market Link)
    • Nuance acquires Swype in $102 million deal.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:15 — 26.2MB)