Posts

Showing posts from October, 2011

Chromebook Review

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a Google presentation in Auckland. It was a chance to catch up on the latest news from Google Apps and to also get a first look at an actual Chromebook. Chromebooks aren’t yet available (officially) in NZ and Ed from Google said that they’re due for release here early next year. If you can’t wait that long then Amazon are doing some good deals and you can pick one up from around US$350. If you haven’t already heard about the Chromebook, here’s the official info from Google . Chromebook Overview Uses Chrome browser as its user interface. Instantly boots to a web browser which can’t be closed as it’s the o/s. No gradual slow down as nothing is stored locally – it’s all online You can set up multiple logins on your Chromebook so that whoever logs in has access to their own Google apps Constantly up to date as apps are online and new apps are always being created Chrome O/S has built in security Built in wi-fi and 3G means you can...

Death of an icon

One of my all time heroes died this past week at the age of 70.  A man without whom modern coding would not exist, and yet news reports have missed this sad event.   I sent the following email to NZStuff in the hope that some coverage will belatedly occur.  The younger iOS generation should know about dmr and what he did for all of us. --------------------- Hi, There's been a lot of press coverage over the death of Steve Jobs, and yes, it's very sad and he was a great influence to the way we use technology and was one of my heroes purely because of his passion for IT, but an even greater influence on computing also passed away last week and there's been no mention of his passing. Dennis Ritchie, aka dmr, the inventor of the C programming language, co-creator of Unix and all round nice guy passed away on the 8th October.  Without dmr there wouldn't have been anything for Steve Jobs or any other younger generation of developers and inventors to build new ideas...