The Ubuntu Edge: Can Canonical succeed?

I’m sure by now all readers know about Canonical’s rather ambitious goal of financing the creation of its own smartphone through crowdfunding. Mark Shuttleworth’s company isn’t playing around either, he doesn’t want just to build a smartphone, he wants to buildthe smartphone meant only for the biggest tech enthusiast out there, using technology that’s cost prohibitive on the consumer space. In order to do manufacture their dreams they’ve estimated they need 32,000,000 dollars. That’s not a small number, in fact, is big enough to break all crowdfunding campaigns to date. Meeting their goal obviously requires a bunch of things to align,… Continue Reading

Google’s master plan: NaCl

Judging by the title you may be wondering if Google’s big idea is to enter the pharmaceutical market or some other activity heavy on chemistry.  Sadly, as attractive as the idea of buying my amoxicillin  straight from Google is, NaCl actually stands for Native Client: Google’s effort to finally bring native-like performance to the web. Unlike Netrunner, or any other Linux distribution or relevant operating system, Chrome doesn’t support running native apps (Chrome itself aside), this severely limits how much can be done in the platform, developers could potentially be trapped between Javascript and Flash as their only choices to develop. A bit of… Continue Reading

Editorial: Will 2013 be the year of… Microsoft?

For many years the consensus among “experts” (journalists) has been that Linux wouldn’t ever reach the consumer market, nor would Apple. Recently on a famous and entertaining (yet technically deprived) show On The Verge from the american website known as The Verge, Mary Jo Foley laughed at the idea that Linux could ever be relevant. This is a form of delusion, as I pretend to show in this editorial: The year of Linux has already happened, while its now Microsoft the one crawling to get its own. Surely many readers would dismiss such an assertion based on Microsoft’s share of the PC market,… Continue Reading