Category: General Tech

NPR:

An “equipment outage” at Atlanta’s William B. Hartsfield International Airport has forced a “ground stop” there, the Federal Aviation Administration says.

There’s also a “ground stop,” at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental.

The problems, as often happens with the airline system, are rippling across the nation.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “a computer glitch shut down most, if not all, departing flights at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and other airports across the country Thursday morning.”

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Ryan Paul:

Despite its strengths, Karmic still has a long road ahead before it will be a suitable candidate for desktop dominance. Audio support, hardware compatibility, upgrade reliability, and ease of use remain areas where the developers still have a lot of work to do. Canonical and the Ubuntu community clearly take those challenges seriously and are making good progress in each new release.

That’s always been an issue for Ubuntu, but this release is really, really slick.

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Camino is a weird, wonderful application. It’s a full-blown Cocoa browser powered by Gecko — which is the rendering engine behind Firefox. In almost every way, it is what Firefox for the Mac should be — fast, nimble and very Mac-like. And today, it’s reached the infamous 2.0 status:

After over a year of hard work by devoted volunteers, the Camino Project is proud to give you Camino 2. This latest version includes many bug fixes and new features, providing all users with an improved browsing experience.

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TUAW’s Brett Kelly:

A couple of weeks ago, I had decided that it was time to make Google Voice a more central part of my communication workflow. Having not launched GV Mobile in a while, I fired it up to reacquaint myself with the interface, capabilities, etc. Trouble is, I couldn’t authenticate with Google. I triple-checked my credentials but the app would just throw an error on launch and that was that. A couple of people on Twitter had mentioned having the same issue and a quick Google search informed me that, sure enough, the app no longer worked. Apparently, Google had modified the Voice API such that authentication now worked differently than it did when GV Mobile was written. Because the app no longer had Apple’s seal of approval, I had little recourse because there obviously weren’t going to be any updates to the app anytime soon.

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Oh man, this would be sweet.

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Gizmodo, on the Palm Pixi:

The Pixi is screwed. It’s totally cannibalized by the technologically superior Pre, which you can find for under $100. Even if you can get the Pixi for $30 at Walmart, it’s worth trading up to the Pre for $40 or $50 more if you’re absolutely wedded to the idea of a webOS phone, simply for the speed and screen. Mostly the speed, since the Pixi is brain damaged, three-legged dog slow, as nice as the hardware is on the outside.

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Via AppleInsider:

“Well, he’s done a fantastic job,” Gates said. “Apple is in a bit of a different business where they make hardware and software together. But when Steve was coming back to Apple, which was actually through an acquisition of NeXT that he ran, Apple was in very tough shape. In fact, most likely it wasn’t going to survive.”

He continued: “And he brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that’s made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things. And it’s great to have competitors like that. We write software for Apple, Microsoft does. They compete with Apple. But he, of all the leaders in the industry that I’ve worked with, he showed more inspiration and he saved the company.”

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Not surprisingly, most are in large cities.

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Chris Ziegler over at Engadget has put together a good overview of the never-ending battle between the two carriers:

So listen, AT&T, we’re sorry Verizon made you upset, but the solution’s actually pretty simple: compete. Fix your network, keep scoring hot exclusives, and get hungry again – because in a year or two, no one’s going to give a damn that you used to have an exclusive on the iPhone.

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It’s perfect.

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The NY Times:

Trying to resolve a longstanding legal case, the chip maker Intel agreed on Thursday to pay its rival, Advanced Micro Devices, $1.25 billion to settle antitrust and patent disputes.

The settlement will resolve a case pending in Federal District Court in Delaware and two in Japan. In addition, A.M.D. said it will withdraw all of its regulatory complaints worldwide.

In the antitrust complaint filed in 2005 in Delaware, A.M.D. contended that Intel had bullied dozens of computer makers, retailers and distributors by threatening to retaliate against them if they did business with A.M.D. The complaint also accused Intel of using improper tactics, like discriminatory rebates and subsidies to win and keep customers.

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Steven Pressfield:

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

In a world where we all carry Internet-connected phones in our pockets, this is even more true.

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