Sales of desktop PCs and laptops are falling. It’s impossible to read any technical media without hearing about the “death of the PC.” And both Apple and Microsoft are soon to release operating systems that seek to merge the features of the computer operating system with those available on tablet devices.All this evidence mounts up to suggest that the Steve Jobs-coined “post PC era” is upon us. Well, I’m going to stick my neck out on this: I don’t buy it.Don’t get me wrong – I possess and adore an iPhone 4s, and if I need to quickly lo...

Summary: What are the top 6 myths? That open source software will enter every market, is inherently innovative, it improves faster than commercial software, that it has less lock-in, that it’s free and that it has little benefit if one is not involved in the community. IDC calls these ideas “myths” but acknowledges there’s more than a grain of truth to all of them At its Directions 2012 conference in Boston today, IDC revealed the top 5 myths and realities about open source software.The first myth is that open source will take o...

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form. Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all. But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers. This is simply a more personal telling.It wasn’t an easy decision to leave Google. During my t...

When Richard Gatarski and a few friends wanted to dine in the Swedish city of Norrköping a few weeks ago, they booked a table at a downtown Italian restaurant that seemed nice.When they arrived, they were greeted by the headwaiter, who asked if they had a reservation. Richard confirmed, and the headwaiter looked at his computer screen.”Gatarski? Hm, let’s see .. yes, there’s your reservation. Welcome!”The headwaiter then picked up what Richard first thought must be some kind of new, electronic touch-pen, and moved it toward the screen. Richard is a tech savvy Inter...

I spoke in the unconference at PHPUK last week, on running an open source project. I thought I would collect together my thoughts into one place before I lose the scratty piece of paper I wrote them down on. I'm not sure I'm the right person to be giving advice exactly, but these are the things that, having been project lead on joind.in for a while, I think are important.CommunityI love it when people share their code, just make something and publish it, but to my mind it isn't an open source project until it has people around it. There's nothing wrong with building something as a hobby, bu...

I often talk to students that want to contribute to open-source projects, but just don't have an idea what to work on.Here's a tip if you're in a similar situation (e.g. you want to apply for GSOC) :1 git clone repository_url_of_some_open_source_project target_directory2 grep -RIn TODO target_directory/*So, find the URL of the repository project you want to contribute to, checkout the repository using git/mercurial/svn and then find all the TODOs in the source code using grep.The -RIn flags will tell grep to do a recursive search (-R), skip binary files (-I) and include line numbers (-n) for r...

Ad targeting. Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once. This lets it combine the biographical information you initially enter such as age, gender, education, employers, and places you’ve lived with your activity on Search, Gmail, Maps and all its other products to create an accurate identity profile. And this powers targeting of more relevant ads it can charge more for.So despite comScore showing that the average Google+ user only spends 3 minutes per month on Google+, VP Bradley Horowitz wasn’t lying when he told the Wall Street J...

Hacker News is a very famous IT information hub. We can find many useful links about the latest IT news and fantastic technology demos. But there are two things I don’t like about Hacker News. Maybe some of you also have the same feelings.1.  About the more link. Every time we click the more link to go to next page, there will be a unique key generated to produce the new page. It is a good security mechanism. Also it may increase pages views as we need to read page by page but cannot jump to one specific page. But one problem is that if I open a page and navigate some pages and I h...