I get the feeling that for the next little while, a number of bug reports and unit testing failure messages will end with the line “Fix yo’ shit, man!”
This is an amazing example of William Gibson’s line “the street finds its own uses for things”.
Shipments for the fourth quarter of 2015 were 75.7 million units, an 8.3% drop from the number shipped in 4Q 2014, and
shipments for the entire year of 2015 were 288.7 million units, an 8% drop from the number shipped for all of 2014.
Their preliminary 2015 shipment estimates for vendors worldwide show that the top 6 vendors by shipment all experienced a drop in shipments (randing from 3% to 11%) with one notable exception — Apple, who say a nearly 3% growth:
Click the graph to see it at full size.
In the United States, vendors fared a little better. While the top two vendors, HP and Dell, saw shrinkage (especially HP, whose 4Q shipments dropped 8.5 from the previous year’s number), Apple and Lenovo made significant gains (a decent 6.5% and a stunning 21.1%, respectively), and Asus stayed even:
PC sales are now dwarfed by smartphone sales these days — the PCs sold in all of 2015 don’t even amount to as much as the smartphones sold on average for any given quarter of 2015. Here’s how many PCs and smartphones shipped in the previous quarter:
There’s not a lot new in this data to be honest, but it confirms a lot of what everyone believes is happening. We are converging on a single device format in mobile and that’s driving some important changes in usage. We are in the phablet era.
Bruce Toganazzini, who’s done all sorts of UI work, starting with founding Apple’s Human Interface Group (which in my opinion needs to review its priorities).
Evernote used to be my go-to note-taking app in 2011. I worked across platforms, and I loved that I could start a note on my laptop, continue on my iPad, and then later make tweaks or addenda on my phone. But as time went by, it got buggier and increasingly less usable to the point where I abandoned it worse and buggier until I abandoned it in annoyance.
You may have heard that the ongoing legal battle between Oracle (who own Java) and Google (who own Android, which is Java-based) has led to Google’s decision to move from their proprietary version of the JDK to Oracle’s OpenJDK. You may be concerned, but you probably shouldn’t be. It may cause headaches for Google and Android mobile phone vendors, but as Android developers, it shouldn’t really affect you.
We write our code accessing the same libraries, and things just work. Of course its going to be a decent chunk of work for Google to get this all working so that we dont have to worry about it, but if anyone has the resources to do it, Google do.
…
What do you need to do as an Android developer? Absolutely nothing, its business as normal! You dont need to change anything in your development process and it may well be that when Android N arrives you won’t have to either. So fire up Android Studio, and get back to coding!
This photo of someone’s answer to a computer science exam question has been making the rounds:
Click the photo to see it at full size.
I have no idea if they’re still teaching the waterfall model of software development in universities these days, but judging from the exam question, I suspect the “correct” answer to the question was this:
While psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’five stages of grief wasn’t the answer the professor was looking for, I’d have awarded the student a couple of points if I were marking the exam.
Consider these recent stats for major software projects:
While the Empire in Star Wars had a lot of fearsome war machinery, a rag-tag gaggle of rebels was able to defeat them thanks to their terrible computer and network security. The folks at the security company CyberPoint have taken clips from A New Hope (a.k.a. Episode IV, a.k.a. “The Original”) and used them to make a funny video that illustrates the many security mistakes that even the biggest organizations make with securing — or more accurately, failing to secure — their systems.
I know of a number of places whose systems were bamboozled by the system equivalent of the Jedi mind trick…
…and it’s amusing how many open USB ports there are in the Star Wars universe for R2-D2 to plug into and start injecting malware…
…and while it’s forgivable for a 1970s screenwriter to not think that the Death Star’s tractor beam controls wouldn’t have some kind of way of preventing use by unauthorized parties, I’ve seen real-world, 21st-century organizations who should know better do exactly the same thing:
In the spirit of all the current nerd hoopla about the new Star Wars movie (and yes, I’ve already seen it, and will probably see it again over the holidays), go watch the video and have a laugh at the Empire’s woefully inadequate security. Then go patch up your own organization’s weak spots. Kudos to CyberPoint for putting together the video, and here’s hoping Disney’s lawyers don’t send them a takedown notice.
I’ve got to give CyberPoint bonus points for using video from the original, non-special-edition version of Episode IV, complete with the English labels on the tractor beam controls (the Special Editions show all text in Aurebesh, the space alphabet), and theold-school ring-free Death Star explosion:
Note the sticker on its chassis, which reads: “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!” Creative Commons photo by “Coolcaesar” at Wikipedia. Click the photo to see the source.
In this weekend’s collective geeky euphoria over Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the 25th anniversary of the first web page has gone largely unreported. It was on December 20, 1990 when the NeXT computer pictured above served it, kicking off what I consider to be the world’s most successful side project.
The folks at CERN tweeted about the anniversary in the wee hours of the Eastern Time Zone…
It’s more of a platform than a bunch of documents, and it’s now available on everything from the phone in your pocket to a display on your head. However, its core remains the same: it’s a vital, dynamic tool for sharing information around the planet. Barring surprises, you’ll likely be surfing the web by the time the first site marks its 50th birthday.
My first experience with the Web was in the fall of 1994 on the NCSA Mosaic browser at Queen’s University on a terminal running X, followed soon by Mosaic running on my Mac Quadra 660AV. A number of my friends first experienced it on Windows 3.1, where the first web page looked like this:
As for the inventor of the web, he’s done quite well for himself. How many developers get to take part in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, never mind for their technological achievements?
Here’s a quick video featuring Sir Tim talking about how the web went from idea to reality, and his continuing hopes for the platform:
To close this article, I’ll leave you with Sir Tim’s TED talk from last year, A Magna Carta for the Web, in which he reminds us that the fight for openness and access, for net neutrality and against filter bubbles and centralized corporate control, continues:
There are still some areas of the world that will see double-digit growth. While sales growth is slowing in most of Asia/Pacific, Western Europe, and Latin America, the hot spots are in the middle east, Africa, India, and Indonesia.
Cheap phones are expected to drive faster replacement cycles. As they put it in their press release, “the components that comprise a sub-$100 smartphone simply do not have the ability to survive two years.”
More higher-end devices will be sold through financing plans. One example they cite is of Apple taking the reins by introducing their own financing: “Apple has taken the lead with its iPhone Upgrade Program, and several other vendors are expected to implement similar plans in the months ahead. These plans could represent the most effective way to get flagship devices into the hands of consumers while speeding up the upgrade cycle through trade-in and incentives.”
Here’s how the smartphone market share for mobile OS vendors looks like, according to IDC’s numbers:
They were so sure that the combination of two industry giants, Microsoft and Nokia, would create a juggernaut that would bring the Windows Phone OS to the number two position, ahead of iOS and BlackBerry.
“The new alliance brings together Nokia’s hardware capabilities and Windows Phone’s differentiated platform. We expect the first devices to launch in 2012. By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be number 2 operating system worldwide behind Android.”
Gartner’s 2011 predictions for the 2015 smartphone market weren’t all that different:
But the prize for the most comically-wrong prediction about the 2015 smartphone market has to go to Pyramid Research, who predicted that Windows Phone would take over the number one spot:
As the late great Yogi Berra said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”.
