Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux Released

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux today. "Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.36, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools. We have improved support for Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and preliminary support for Internet Explorer 7 in this release, there has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the back-end."

What’s Next for Solaris, Linux at Oracle?

"Several of the concerns about Oracle's acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts. In the case of Solaris, Oracle had already been a big supporter of the rival Linux operating system. Oracle has its own Enterprise Linux offering, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the idea that Linux and Solaris are mutually exclusive is a false choice."

Oracle’s Bold Plans for Java Bode Well

Any doubts regarding Oracle's stewardship of Java were dispelled yesterday, as Ellison and company have made it clear that they are very interested in making Java an even stronger alternative to .Net, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. "We have the money to invest in Java, because Java is a very profitable business for us already," said Ellison, whose plan for integrating Sun technology is ambitious, serving an even more ambitious goal: to create a soup-to-nuts tech juggernaut akin to IBM in the 1960s. Java will remain a key component of this push, with a new Java runtime, greater modularity, better support for non-Java languages, improved performance, and multicore-optimized garbage collection in the works, McAllister writes. Also revealed are plans to unify the Java SE and Java ME programming models and APIs and to enable JVM to run natively on hypervisors, allowing developers to run multiple Java instances on a single virtualized server.

Preview of QML UI Designer

Trolls (the Trolltech ones) are blogging about a technology preview of the UI designer for QML, integrated to Qt Creator. A youtube video is provided. QML, accompanied by an UI designer, provides an open alternative for piecing together flash-like high-FPS programs with heavily customized and animated user interfaces, built on QGraphicsView framework. While QML allows authoring the whole program in QML markup and Javascript, QML can be incorporated to Qt C++ programs with relative ease.

Web Applications on the iPad

Wolfire writes: "Today, Apple announced the new iPad and humbly claimed that there will be a "gold rush" of native apps for the App Store. Sure, but what I find more interesting is that Apple also ironically created the most promising open web app platform, which may eventually undermine the App Store itself. The iPad is the first mainstream device which combines all of the following factors: reasonably powerful hardware, a (potentially) huge user base, a mature WebKit implementation, and constant 3G internet capabilities. All the dominoes are in place, and I think that the iPad will knock the first one down."

Apple Unveils iPad

In what everybody already saw coming for weeks (months) now, Apple has just unveiled its latest product, a tablet called the iPad. Basically a bigger version of the iPhone, Steve Jobs presented the iPad during a press event in San Francisco. The most interesting news? It's powered by... An Apple processor, called the A4. The most shocking news? The price.

Mass Effect 2 Released

I just went out in the blistering cold (windchill factor -12) for a very specific purpose: a certain online retailer had broken the embargo on a certain product, and in the faint hope that real-world stores would follow, I figured I'd be able to get my hands on said product that way, too. What are we talking about here? Oh, only what will most likely be the game of the year.

Once Impenetrable PS3 Cracked Wide Open

"The first hacker to successfully jailbreak the iPhone says he has pulled off yet another modding marvel, this time penetrating the previously impervious PlayStation 3 gaming console. The hack by 20-year-old George Hotz, aka geohot, is significant because the PS3 was the only game console that hadn't been hacked, despite being on the market for more than three years. The feat greatly expands the functionality of the box by allowing it to run unrestricted versions of Linux and a wide range of games that are currently forbidden. The hardware and software designer told El Reg it took him five weeks to develop the hack using a combination of modifications to the console's hardware and software."

Atomthreads Open Source RTOS Released

"Atomthreads is a free, lightweight, portable, real-time scheduler for embedded systems. It is released under the flexible, open source BSD license and is free to use for commercial or educational purposes without restriction. It is targeted at systems that need only a scheduler and the usual RTOS primitives. No file system, IP stack or device drivers are included, but developers can bolt on their own as required. Atomthreads will always be a small number of C files which are easy to port to any platforms that require threading by adding a simple architecture-specific file."

Holiday Cheer Gives Apple Some Eye-Popping Earnings

"Today, Apple announced that the holiday season brought booming sales to most of its product lines, the lone exception being the iPod. Although the music players declined slightly to 21 million units from the year before, Mac sales shot up by 33 percent to 3.36 million, while iPhone sales doubled, hitting 8.7 million. Those sales, plus changes to accounting rules, helped the company book $3.38 billion dollars in profits."