Thinking that HP's memristors can't arrive early enough on the market? Here's competition already! A team at North Carolina State University, led by Dr Paul Franzon, has unveiled the
"double floating-gate field effect transistor", a component based on the same principles as flash memory which would allow to store data for "a couple of years" in around 15 nanoseconds.
"A class action lawsuit against Microsoft has been filed in Italy by a group claiming that
it's too difficult to procure a refund for the copies of Windows that come bundled in new PCs."
Today, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the two Bell labs scientists which began creating the Unix operating system in 1969,
have been named as winners of the 2011 Japan Prize for information and communications.
"A security incident on Fedora infrastructure has been reported by Jared Smith, Fedora Project's leader, who confirmed that
the account of one of its contributors has been compromised. According to preliminary results of an investigation mounted by Fedora Project's Infrastructure Team, the compromise wasn't the result of an exploitation a vulnerability."
"Previously, I demonstrated creating an animatic using Kino. That was an interesting exercise, but Kino is not really up to that kind of job. Blender, on the other hand, has a very nice "video sequence editor" built into it, and
it turns out to be very well adapted for this kind of task."
"The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels
will be available without the non-free blobs."
"Fedora developer, Matt Domsch, has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called
Consistent Network Device Naming."
"Sepaton today
announced the next-generation operating system for its grid-based deduplication, backup appliance, the S2100-ES2. The new 64-bit operating system, combined with Intel's new Westmere processor, runs the updated appliance at twice the speeds of its predecessor, the company said."
Over the last three years, we've seen a lot of impressive demonstrations of what the material graphene (a single-atom wide sheet of carbon with the atoms spread in an hexagonal mesh) can do. However, according to IBM, graphene does not have an energy gap, which means that graphene transistors can't be "switched on and off", and thus
that they are unsuitable for use inside of microprocessors.
"The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project."
"A team of researchers comprised of members from the Semiconductor Research Corporation and Stanford University has developed a new thermal nanotape which it claims will lead to chips that run cooler and last longer."
"The developers of the first jailbreak utility for Windows Phone 7 devices ceased development of the ChevronWP7 tool after Microsoft promised to work more closely with the homebrew software community. But not everybody wants to play ball with Microsoft, and
Windows Phone developer Julien Schapman says he'll soon release a new tool for jailbreaking WP7."
"The FreeBSD developers have made available
a second release candidate (RC2) for FreeBSD 7.4. This is a precursor to a third release candidate, due next week, as the developers say that there are "several bugs we feel are critical enough to warrant fixing before the 8.2/7.4 releases are finalized". FreeBSD 8.2 saw its second release candidate made available last week."
"Nothing can dampen the spirit surrounding this year's Linux.conf.au in Brisbane, not even
a flood crisis, as it officially kicked off in the state's soggy capital today."
Submitted by Amy Bennett
2011-01-25
Hardware
"Rumors and potential tablet applications have been quietly circulating for a while now that Nokia will ship a tablet based on its MeeGo OS. Although those rumors haven't been solidly confirmed, photos of what could be a recent prototype (which may or may not have made an appearance in TRON Legacy)
emerged over the weekend."
Submitted by Bob Gratton
2011-01-25
Linux
Alienware is currently "trying to gauge the level of interest consumers like you have in buying a new computer that features a Linux-based operating system" through a short (~3 min) survey. The more manufacturers that embrace Linux, the more popular it becomes and the better hardware support we all get, so
why not help out?
eCUPS, an eComStation port of the CUPS portable printing layer, has been developed by Paul Smedley for some years now. BlueNexus, a website dedicated to the promotion of eComStation and the review of eCS software,
has recently reviewed its 1.3.11 release.
I just want to put up a little notice to inform you all about the lack of updates on the main page. The problem is that I've been hit by the flu and have been down and out since last Thursday, unable to do the news. The rest of the team has been occupied as well, so that explains that. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and since I've pretty much almost recovered, normal posting schedule will resume either tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. Thanks for understanding. Also, read more for the most beautiful piece of art ever created in the history of the universe. And I mean it.
"The Ubuntu developers met last week in Dallas to make final design decisions about the popular Linux distribution's features and
decided to use LibreOffice for its office suite."
"Although the Tegra 2 chip with integrated dual-core processor has recently been released, NVIDIA is already
poised to announce its successor at the Mobile World Congress next month. According to Mike Rayfield of NVIDIA, Tegra 3 may incorporate a quad-core processor with main focus of supporting Android smartphones and tablet PCs."
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