René Rebe

As one can (not) see in the hands on shoots of Engadget, the iPhone 4 Verizon edition apparently does no longer spot a SIM card slot, maybe actication time programmed as rumored earlier?

Finally, with the CES 2011 AMD finally set free the new Fusion APUs built from the power-efficient Bobcat micro architecture. The new AMD C-50 and E-350 set off to finally end the performance stagnation that is the Intel Atom.

One certainly does not need exorbitant number crunching performance while on-the-go. However, enough performance for a snappy web browser and video playback is certainly welcome as are more than 1024×600 pixel real estate to view more than a Twitter tweet as well as to drive more than an aging VGA link on your favorite desktop to do real work.

It looks like the VIA dual-core Nano X2 will again arrive late to the party, and the more performant Bobcat will not leave much niche for VIA to play (abysmal open source 3D drivers will do it’s rest).

Cheers from my side -to booth of them- putting some real pressure on Intel, and I am desperately looking forward to sub 10W, slim & light AMD ultra portables:

Acer Aspire One 522
Acer Iconia Tablet
Fujitsu Lifebook PH50/C
Lenovo ThinkPad X120e
Hewlett Packard DM1
MSI Wind U270
MSI CR650
Sony VAIO Y
Toshiba Satellite C655D

And who knows, maybe we will eventually see AMD’s latest, greatest shipping in one or the other Apple, too …

Update: initial performance impressions!

Update 2: and another one, …

Update 3: wow, just wow, less than an inch thick Compulab PC3, with AMD Fusion Embedded G series APU

Udev did it again. Wasting my time during emergency maintenance at a remote datacenter server. The box was flunky and we eventually decided to exchange the hardware to cure sporadic reboots (may have been a faulty cooling fan, …). The question was:

Would the remote machine come back to remote managed life, or would it not?

In the past we usually had no problem with this, even tested it to be prepared for such disaster. But you probably already guessed so from the headline, … udev was again in between us and the network packet flow :-(!

Remote management kept black, and scheduling a reboot into the maintenance PXE & NFS recovery system revealed udev used it’s default persistent name glue to rename the new boards’s NIC with (obviously) different MAC from eth0 to eth1. Hallelujah!

A:

rm -f etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

and some very unnecessary down-time later an the system was back online running on the new server blade.

And this is even the second time this year the persistent naming got in my way - guess I’ll remove this persistent name gibberish from the default build.

Update: Turned out every new version of udev started to use another just new Linux system-call - as T2 uses dietlibc for the initramfs early-userspace we had to add support for a dozen new system-calls to dietlibc, just to update udev, again, sigh!

As I twittered the other day we are working like night and day and are making awesome progress on all fronts (yeah, there are quite some, more than you probably see right now). One of those bits just made an awesome sprint thru Apple’s iTunes App Store review process:

November 19, 2010 12:35 Pending Developer Release
November 19, 2010 06:33 In Review
November 13, 2010 09:34 Waiting For Review

Which is the fastest round trip time we got so far, yay!

If only the sales numbers would report more consistently, one day they are available at 1pm (CET) and the other days “iTunes” is apologizing for “reports being late” and we just get to see them after 8pm. Strange thing for such a huge server farm. Whatever. Maybe id’s Rage HD just sells too well, … :-)

Just today, 50% off sale of OCRKit at MacZot, enjoy!

OCRKit is the most accurate affordable OCR for Mac and converts any PDF or graphic file into searchable PDF, RTF, HTML and TXT.

For more information visit the product site - and it is a also available for iPhone and iPad.

So Google’s Andy Rubin said to PCMAG: …, the world doesn’t need another platform. Android is free and open; I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons.

Hear hear. The world said exactly the same when Android came along, and we had plain Linux, Windows whatever, RIM, Symbian, Apple’s then still named iPhone OS, QNX, and even yet more.

And then your initial versions where just so badly mangled, and visually lacking Linux flavors that few wanted it. Took you quite some years to polish and JIT it to visibility and speed that is Android 2.2, …

(And Andy, you [at Google] are even working on this other, alternative Google Chrome OS platform yourselves!!!)

If we would have followed such “political” advices in the last century, we would still travel in cars pulled by horses - would still search the index in the library, not need Google at all.

So, let the innovation continue …

Hey, LLVM 2.8 is out, and of course T2 already got it!.

Enjoy!

It only took 2 years for the contract to expire and endless calls to T-Mobile Germany. Unfortunately the IMEI exchange from the exclusive phone resellers to Apple is a little lazy, works by exchanging spreadsheets or even good old facsimile transmissions and does not appear to be directly database record exchange oriented.

So I had to dictate (wait what, should they not have that in their system to start with?) IMEI to a call center agent, and they pass it along to their Apple contact department, … And after the promised “unlocked in a week” had passed, nothing was unlocked and I called again: to find out that T-Mobile had not even passed it to Apple, yet. Sigh! That second person promissed “it will be activated by Friday night”, that was last Wednesday, … Of course nothing was unlocked by Friday, nor Saturday, or Sunday, … not even this morning, … but now it is!

Got some strange “session timed out” while taking the screenshot:

In case it helps someone the hyperlink pointed to:

https://albert.apple.com/WebObjects/ALUnbrick.woa/wa/default

…

Unfortunately calling T-Mobile is a rather annoying affair. They let you hanging in a to-be-payed-by-minute line and drop you out after some ten minutes, so I had to call them very often (like three or more times, which is over half an hour!) to actually get thru, …

Apple’s free (up to 50 per version) iTunes Connect App promotional codes unfortunately are currently for the US store, only. At first I thought this is no big deal, just switch to the US store (at the very bottom of every iTunes page: “Change Country”). However, it is not that easy, as iTunes requires to sign in with an US store count, as soon as you sign in with your non-US (read international) account it would not let you redeem the code.

Some web guides (mostly even from 2009) explain to simply setup an US account, however, iTunes wants an valid US credit card, or PayPal account. The “None” choose for payment method usually does not appear too easily (anymore).

However, the trick is: you have to be in the “App” store part of the US iTunes store, and best click to load a Free App. Only then the new account creation will show to you the “None” payment option.

Apple even has a knowledge base article about this :-) – I just found it by accident after I already had given up on this!

I for myself find this hilarious, why could they not just let anyone redeem their code in their country’s store? Especially as this way they get zillions of ghost US account, just used to redeem free iOS Apps for review, …. Maybe some database access problem with sloppy code, unless they want to artificially increase their US market share numbers – until they have more US accounts than citizens :-)

I already teased it the other day, but given Apple’s careful review I had no idea how long it would take to get accepted into iTunes.