Mountain Lion may drop support for older Macs (The Verge) It appears that OS/X 10.8 won't work on many Macs more than about three years old. Apparently this is a consequence of cleaning up its 64-bitness, and so losing support for 32-bit EFI bootloaders. (The 10.7 release already dropped support for 32-bit CPUs, such as… Continue reading Sad Lion
Author: Chris Cannam
The Third Pad
I've become used to thinking of Apple's product releases as falling into two categories: "outreach" or "consolidation". Outreach releases are new products, or products introducing features that users will be unfamiliar with or that are novel enough to be headliners in adverts. Consolidation releases do essentially the same as the previous release, but faster or… Continue reading The Third Pad
Hard edges, small keys
Joanna Stern reviews the MacBook Air as a Windows laptop. I enjoyed this—I've considered in the past whether the MacBook Air would be a suitable laptop for me even though most of the time I don't run OS/X. (Conclusion: probably not any more, though it might have seemed that way once.) She does highlight the… Continue reading Hard edges, small keys
Wrapping a C++ library with JNI, part 3
In this series... Introduction, outlining the general steps from starting with a C++ library to being able to build and run simple tests on some JNI wrappers; Part 1, in which I design some simple Java classes and generate the stub wrapper code; Part 2, in which I add just enough of the implementation to… Continue reading Wrapping a C++ library with JNI, part 3
Operating system updates
Google have released a version of their Chrome web browser for Android, and it seems to be rather good—but it only runs on the very latest version of Android, version 4. Which is a bit of an annoyance, because hardly anybody has that version. Glancing at the 12 most popular Android phones on the Expansys… Continue reading Operating system updates
Wisława Szymborska
The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska died this week. I can't read a word of Polish, but in English translation she was one of my favourite poets. She wrote about large and sometimes terrifying themes using small subjects and a friendly, light ironic touch. She had perspective. It's gratifying that I can always wake up before… Continue reading Wisława Szymborska
The Breakfast Post 