In the current economic climate, it's hard to make any sane predictions one way or the other. While we receive continuous reports that netbooks are the saving grace of the PC market, the light at the end of the tunnel, the beacon of hope, the Fiona Apple among the rest of the mediocre musician crowd, the, err, (okay I'm out of metaphors), we are now getting a report which states that during the first quarter of 2009, netbooks have not met their sales estimates.The report comes courtesy of DigiTimes, which usually comes with inside information about manufacturers in the far east (well, far east from my perspective, anyway). For instance, Acer had expected to ship 2 million Aspire One netbooks during Q1 of 2009, but sources claim sales in the channels were lower. The same sources also claim that Asus only sold 900000 Eee PCs during that same quarter, short of the 1 million projected. MSI reportedly sold 200000 Wind series netbooks. The story claims that market saturation might account for the lower-than-projected sales.
The figures are vague, and there's little to back them up at this point. Still, Intel did reveal they saw a slowdown in the number of Atom chips sold during the first quarter, which may corroborate this DigiTimes story. Still, not beating expectations is not that big of a deal, considering the insane growth the netbook market has seen so far - even during Q1 of 2009.
Another interesting story on DigiTimes has to do with Intel's new and upcoming Intel GN40 chipset for netbooks, accompanied by the Atom N280 processors. This chipset comes with increased 3D capabilities and hardware video decoding, but Windows XP will not be able to take advantage of this because the chipset relies on DirectX 10 and DirectX Video Acceleration 2.0, which are Vista-specific technologies. Windows XP does not make use of these new capabilities - you're going to need Windows Vista for that. Netbook makers confirmed the issue.
It seems as if Windows XP is finally starting to show its age. I won't make myself popular here, but I'm happy for it. XP's time has come and gone, and it's time the world moved on to more secure operating systems like Windows Vista and Linux.
"After a long wait, Apple has released the next major update to its pro-class photo workflow application, Aperture 3. The new version boasts over 200 new features, including the addition of the successful facial recognition and geotagging features, Faces and Places, that were introduced with iPhoto '09. Version 3 also adds edge-detecting adjustment brushes for non-destructive localized editing and touch-ups. Along with numerous UI and performance improvements, Aperture 3 adds full 64-bit support on supported systems running Snow Leopard."
"Every few months I make a pilgrimage to the Sysinternals website to look at its superb collection of tools. It's now hosted inside the Microsoft Technet monster since its authors joined Microsoft as employees some while ago, but the value of their site is still as strong as ever and the tools are now guaranteed not to be ignored or left to rust."
Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys, thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick. The technology allows, for example, scrolling down a long list or webpage faster as more pressure is applied. A division of Samsung that distributes mobile phone components to several handset manufacturers has now licensed the "Quantum Tunnelling Composite". The approach could find use in devices from phones to games to GPS handsets."Whereas the iPhone is aimed at short, focused tasks, the iPad is more likely to lend itself to longer, more general tasks that involve using multiple apps, just as we're used to on the Mac. It's easy to imagine wanting to use an iPad to read text in Mobile Safari, copy some text to a Pages document, and send that document to a colleague via Mail. That specific example may turn out to be possible with the current iPhone OS, but it points toward needing more ways for iPad apps to work together in the future."
"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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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."
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.