OSNews

A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content. Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.

This article describes the various refactorings available in Eclipse Java Development Tools, including what each refactoring does, when to use it, and how to use it. It also explores the refactoring script functionality in Eclipse, which allows library developers to share code refactorings with their clients.

The GNOME Journal team has published issue 17 of the GNOME Journal, titled "Women In Open Source". This is their first issue with a unified theme, and with all articles written by women from the open source community. The idea and execution of this issue was created by the GNOME Women community. It comes packed with articles about GNOME and its underlying frameworks.

Microsoft has delayed the open source release of their Windows 7 USB/DVD tool, which contained GPL code. "As you know, Microsoft recently committed to making the source code as well as binaries for the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available this week, under the terms of the General Public License v2 as described here. While we worked extremely hard to try and get the code ready for release by today, we still need to test and localize it. Our goal is now to release the tool in all languages on the same day in the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to make the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available once again."

"HP is pleased to announce the availability of OpenVMS Version 8.4 Field Test. OpenVMS Version 8.4 will be a generally available release for the Integrity servers and Alpha platforms. This release builds upon the capabilities provided by OpenVMS Version 8.3 for Alpha and Version 8.3-1H1 for Integrity server systems."

Phoronix talks about an upcoming feature in Fedora 13 (scheduled to be released on April 2010) that provides system rollback support via the Btfs filesystem.

German website Heise Online has received confirmation that IBM is terminating its Cell processor line. This means that no future development will take place, making the PoweXCell 8i the last Cell processor. Parts of the Cell project will still make it into future processor designs, however.

"Dell reported its third-quarter earnings results Thursday, showing a small improvement over the last quarter, but revenue was down 15 percent over the last year, and profits fell 54 percent. The company reported revenue of $12.9 billion, within analysts' expectations between $12.8 billion and $13.5 billion. Earnings were 17 cents per share, when excluding 6 cents of pretax expenses and amortization. That's 54 percent off the 37 cents Dell recorded a year ago. Besides its acquisition of Perot Systems last month, there weren't too many positive signs in the recently completed quarter. Shipments were also down 5 percent across its businesses."

"Camino - the Gecko-based browser with native Cocoa interface and more seamless Mac OS X integration - has finally landed an official 2.0 release. The browser uses a much newer version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine (the same one used in Firefox) along with updated tabs and improved security features. However, Camino still lags Firefox in support for Web fonts and advanced HTML5 features like the video tag and offline storage."

"Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. The announcements also blow right past Amazon EC2 and targets Microsoft at Google, Force.com (Salesforce.com's cloud), OpSource and others offering hosting on demand, web services and bus interconnection services in the cloud. Microsoft peeled back last year's Azure onion, showing us how Microsoft wants to do much more than just offer computing platforms or hosted Microsoft products."