http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2010, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:30:59 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/22849/Battery_Bug_Caused_by_Batteries_Not_by_Windows_7/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22849/Battery_Bug_Caused_by_Batteries_Not_by_Windows_7/ The past few weeks or so, there's been a lot of interest in a supposed battery status report bug in Windows 7. After installing Windows 7, some users reported seeing "consider replacing your battery"-warnings in systems that appeared to be operating just fine on Windows XP or Vista. After extensive research, Steven Sinofsky has now explained on the Engineering 7 blog that the fault is not with Windows 7 - it really, really is your battery. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:55:22 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Windows 22 http://www.osnews.com/topics/37 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22848/AMD_Reveals_Fusion_CPU_GPU_To_Challege_Intel_in_Laptops/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22848/AMD_Reveals_Fusion_CPU_GPU_To_Challege_Intel_in_Laptops/ "The 'Llano' processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU - instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an 'application processor unit', or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die." Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:34:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) AMD 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/55 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22847/Concept_Stream_Adaptive_Computer_System_Locus_OS/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22847/Concept_Stream_Adaptive_Computer_System_Locus_OS/ Developed by industrial designer Barton Smith, the Stream Adaptive Computer System is an interesting take on making computing easier and more adaptable to suit the user's current needs. Today, he also unveiled the operating system and user interface that would run on Stream. It's... Amazing. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:38:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) OSNews, Generic OSes 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/1 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22845/Power7_Big_Blue_Eye_on_UNIX/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22845/Power7_Big_Blue_Eye_on_UNIX/ "The scuttlebutt is that IBM seemed perfectly content to wait until May to launch the Power7-based Power Systems servers, but something changed and compelled the company to move up the announcement of its first machines using the eight-core processor to today. Big Blue is not in a habit of explaining its motives or its timing for product launches, but it seems clear that IBM wanted to get out in front of a whole lot of processor and systems launches that are expected between now and the summer." Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:38:44 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) IBM 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/8 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22844/Dropping_Mac_OS_X_10_4_Support_in_Gecko_1_9_3/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22844/Dropping_Mac_OS_X_10_4_Support_in_Gecko_1_9_3/ Mozilla has announced that they are going to drop support for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger definitively. "Mac OS X 10.4 was released in April of 2005 and a lot has changed since then," Josh Aas writes, "We would like to take advantage of more modern technologies on Mac OS X and 10.4 support has been a hindrance. Where we can work around supporting 10.4, doing so consumes valuable time and effort. Neither Chrome nor Safari has to deal with this." Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:33:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Mozilla & Gecko clones 7 http://www.osnews.com/topics/18 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22846/Some_Changes_to_OSNews_Features_and_Information_Display/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22846/Some_Changes_to_OSNews_Features_and_Information_Display/ We've been working on an "OSNews version 5" upgrade for several months, and with several months to go, we decided to make some incremental changes to OSNews on the existing codebase. The major change, as you probably already noticed, is that we've removed the "Page1/Page2" tabs and instead have OSNews stories with original content and commentary in one column, and news, items on OS-related topics gleaned from other sources in the other. Read on for more details on the changes we've implemented. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:29:34 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) OSNews, Generic OSes 39 http://www.osnews.com/topics/1 Feature http://www.osnews.com/story/22843/Introducing_Pinta_a_Gtk_Clone_of_Paint_NET/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22843/Introducing_Pinta_a_Gtk_Clone_of_Paint_NET/ You may remember that back in November last year, I wrote about the lack of a decent Paint.NET-like application for Linux (or, more specifically, for Gtk+ distributions, since Qt has Krita). As it turns out, this compelled Novell employee Jonathan Pobst to code a Paint.NET clone in Gtk+ using Cairo. Version 0.1 is here, and it's remarkably advanced for something so young. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:23:34 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Graphics, User Interfaces 76 http://www.osnews.com/topics/47 News kragil http://www.osnews.com/story/22842/Windows_Phone_7_No_Multitasking_Stricter_Microsoft_QA/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22842/Windows_Phone_7_No_Multitasking_Stricter_Microsoft_QA/ Later this month, Microsoft will most likely unveil Windows Mobile 7 Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress. Rumours abound, and the latest set of rumours paint a rather dramatic turnaround for Microsoft's mobile platform - no more multitasking, application distribution limited to official channels, and a whole lot more. Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:11:44 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Windows 122 http://www.osnews.com/topics/37 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22841/Microsoft_To_Patch_17-Year-Old_Computer_Bug/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22841/Microsoft_To_Patch_17-Year-Old_Computer_Bug/ "The ancient bug was discovered by Google security researcher Tavis Ormandy in January 2010 and involves a utility that allows newer versions of Windows to run very old programs. Mr Ormandy has found a way to exploit this utility in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and 2008 as well as Windows Vista and Windows 7. The patch for this vulnerability will appear in the February security update. Five of the vulnerabilities being patched at the same time allow attackers to effectively hijack a Windows PC and run their own programs on it." Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:46:29 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Microsoft 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/23 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22840/OGG_in_Silverlight_MS_Join_SVG_Flash_Improvements_WebGL/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22840/OGG_in_Silverlight_MS_Join_SVG_Flash_Improvements_WebGL/ A quick round up of various web-related news items. First up, a new open source product entitled the "Highgate media suite" will bring OGG video decoding to Silverlight. Microsoft have just joined the SVG working group (arguably 10 years late, but it's better than nothing). Adobe promise significant improvements in Flash 10.1, including Core Animation rendering on OS X and lowered CPU usage. Finally, CoperLicht--a WebGL JavaScript 3D engine (Quake in JS will be here one day) Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:28:02 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc Camen) Web 2.0 38 http://www.osnews.com/topics/80 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22839/Zucker_Misses_the_Mark_Wrongly_Accuses_Boxee_of_Stealing/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22839/Zucker_Misses_the_Mark_Wrongly_Accuses_Boxee_of_Stealing/ In a way, it's kind of sad. The old media squealing and squirming, trying pathetically to hold on to a time that has long been lost to the sands of... Well, time. Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, made such a pathetic attempt before a US Congress committee yesterday, claiming Boxee stole Hulu's content. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:24:40 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Multimedia, AV 19 http://www.osnews.com/topics/46 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22838/LLVM_Clang_Successfully_Self-Hosts_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22838/LLVM_Clang_Successfully_Self-Hosts_/ "Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM's regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap." Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:50:14 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) General Development 20 http://www.osnews.com/topics/31 News tyrione http://www.osnews.com/story/22837/Virtio_An_I_O_Virtualisation_Framework_for_Linux/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22837/Virtio_An_I_O_Virtualisation_Framework_for_Linux/ With all the virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:43:29 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/9 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22836/Mono_Project_Delivers_Moonlight_3_0_Preview/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22836/Mono_Project_Delivers_Moonlight_3_0_Preview/ "The Mono Project releases the first preview of Moonlight 3.0, giving application developers a first look at the open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 technology for the Linux platform." Sadly, it's still Firefox-only. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:41:03 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Mono Project 10 http://www.osnews.com/topics/64 News http://www.osnews.com/story/22835/Fusion_Garage_Market_Big_Enough_for_iPad_i_and_i_Joo_Joo/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22835/Fusion_Garage_Market_Big_Enough_for_iPad_i_and_i_Joo_Joo/ Finally something we can work with. While both the iPad and the Joo Joo are technically still vapourware, people have at least had the opportunity to play with the former, while the latter remained somewhat illusive. Now that the device has been set to ship at the end of this month, Ars Technica finally had some time to play with the Joo Joo and talk to Fusion Garage's CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan. There's good news, and there's (potentially) bad news. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:41:31 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless 30 http://www.osnews.com/topics/17 News