We already introduced Dell's new laptop wonder, the Z600, to you earlier this week. What makes this laptop special is that it contains a small ARM motherboard which runs a special version of openSUSE Linux, allowing for instant access to basic functionality like checking email, browsing the web, and playing multimedia files. What's news, at least for OSNews, is that research from Dell has shown that people spent 70% of their time in the Linux environment.It's an interesting route to take. A regular, full-featured computer takes too long to boot up, so why not include a small, embedded system, and have it act like a phone or whatever which boots up instantly, and provides access to the most commonly used features.
Latitude-On, as the feature is called, uses a TI OMAP3430 ARM processor to load a Linux-based environment providing access to things lik web browsing, checking email, and playing multimedia files. According to studies by Dell, users used the Linux environment 70% of the time - making Windows seem more like a stone around the laptop's neck than a useful environment.
However, one does have to wonder - how often are laptops actually turned off completely? Don't most people just put them to sleep, allowing for instant wake up and access to a full environment? All the major operating systems provide reliable instant wake up, so what exactly the role of an add-in ARM board is remains to be seen.
On top of that, isn't all this just a giant clumsy patch to cover up the fact that operating systems are simply extremely crude, inefficient, and power-hungry? Wouldn't money be better spent on making operating systems better instead of jamming an additional embedded board into a laptop?
Despite those questions, fact remains that this feature is just plain cool. When I was younger, I used to drool over those PCI x86 cards Sun made - an entire x86 system contained on a single PCI board, ready to be plugged into your SPARC system. They actually still sell those; the SunPCi IIIpro Coprocessor Card sports an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1.6-GHz mobile processor, up to 1GB of memory, an integrated ProSavage8 graphics chip, and a lot more. Oh, and you can plug multiple SunPCi cards into a single machine.
Sorry, I got lost in a geek dream there for a second. Anyway, what do you think of functionality like this? Is it the way to go? A waste of time? A waste of space?
"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.