NoStarchPress sent us in the newly released "
Book of Inkscape", written by Dmitry Kirsanov, who is also one of the core developers of Inkscape.
I never thought it was possible, but as it turns out, Microsoft has managed to produce some pretty good commercials for its brand new operating system, Windows 7. They are quite product-oriented, and carry the slogan "I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea".
"Digital civil liberties organization Open Rights Group, Knowledge Ecology International and software developer Richard Stallman tell the EC in a letter that they are
concerned about Oracle's possible squashing of competition in the database market by abandoning MySQL."
The
fourth update in the CentOS Linux 5 family is released. Highlights of the new release include a kernel-based virtual machine virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages, GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem etc. Grab a
CD set from a mirror, and via BitTorrent
32bit,
64bit DVD. On a related note, if you are already running CentOS-5.3 or an older CentOS-5 distro, simply
upgrade it over the Internet.
Today we feature a mini interview with Hongyu Chi, president at Nexvio Inc., the company that brought us the very first true video editor for the iPhone 3Gs, the
ReelDirector. Check in for more!
Funny Or Die has posted a video showing you how to have your very own party to celebrate today's Windows 7 release. It's strikingly similar, yet importantly different from the video that Microsoft put out a couple of weeks ago.
Remember when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and proclaimed, to much applause, that they patented the hell out of it? Well, apparently Apple likes to boast about its own patents, but when it comes to dealing with other's they're not so willing. That is, if you believe Nokia:
the largest phone manufacturer in the world has sued Apple for patent infringement.
It's October 22 today. A completely random date in the grand scheme of things (we Dutch lost a
big naval battle to the Ming dynasty on October 22 1633), but it also happens to be the release date of the newest version of Windows -
Windows 7. Since Windows is still the most popular desktop operating system out there, this is pretty big news.
Guest post by Alfonso Martinez
2009-10-20
Haiku
Since I encountered BeOS 5 Personal Edition, my experience with BeOS PE led me to purchase the BeOS 5 Professional Edition, which I used for some years. I am not ashamed to say that I love using this OS. After the demise of Be Corp., I still used BeOS as my "main OS" since it would do everything that I needed to do, except for gaming and academic works. I closely followed all the developments of the BeOS contenders after Be's fall... Until Zeta OS became the leading standard for a short time. I purchased every Zeta OS release that YellowTab produced. It is currently my favorite BeOS version today.
"With the imminent release of Windows 7, IBM and Canonical are clasping hands to sell an Ubuntu Linux- and Lotus-based desktop package to US businesses targeting low-end PCs and netbooks. The duo initially launched their Ubuntu-powered IBM Client for Smart Work desktop bundle to Africa back in September. But IBM said it decided to swing the offering State-side due to demand from its partners."
Submitted by Michael
2009-10-20
3D
"In late August we started asking our readers for any questions they had for NVIDIA about Linux and this graphics company's support of open-source operating systems. Twelve pages worth of questions were accumulated and we finally have the answers to a majority of them. NVIDIA's Andy Ritger, who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team for workstation, desktop, and notebook GPUs, answered these questions. With that said, there are
some great, in-depth technical answers and not the usual marketing speak found in many interviews."
"
BeRTOS version 2.3 is available. This version is backward compatible with the current version, so you can safely update your installation. We are currently implementing an aerospace device for research purposes thus we need to drive many different sensor types. These drivers are now available to all BeRTOS users."
At the last
Real-Time Linux Workshop held on September in Dresden, there has been a lot of discussion about the possibility of enhancing real-time capabilities of Linux by adding a new scheduling class to the Linux kernel. According to most kernel developers, this new scheduling class should be based on the Earliest Deadline First real-time algorithm. The first draft of the scheduling class has been called "SCHED_EDF" and it has been proposed and discussed on the
Linux Kernel Mailing List just before the workshop. Recently, a
second version of the scheduling class (called "SCHED_DEADLINE", to meet the request of some kernel developers) has been proposed. Moreover, the code has been moved to a public git repository on
Gitorius.
More details are available
here.
Can't wait two more days? Microsoft Technet has a
free 90 day trial of Windows 7 Enterprise for your evaluation pleasure. If you've been using the Windows 7 RC, this one is likely to have a bunch of bug fixes, as several bugs have been reported in earlier versions of the Windows 7 RTM that were made available to developers, including a pretty serious CHKDSK bug.
As expected, Apple has refreshed its entire consumer line of Macintosh computers. The Mac mini, the MacBook, and the iMac lines of computers have all been overhauled, with the MacBook even getting a complete redesign. Prices in Europe have been dropped slightly, and there's a new mouse, too.
"In the discussion about the best way to manage the Mozilla trademarks, the problem of sites charging people to download Firefox is often mentioned. However, not everyone has come across such a site. For your ediification, I present
'A Tour Of A "Pay to Download Firefox" Site', with detailed analysis and screenshots. You'll be pleased to hear we have recently been having some success using trademark law with preliminary injunctions and domain name disputes against such sites."
Yesterday, during the conference call following
Apple's stellar results for the fourth quarter of 2009, Apple talked about its forecasts for the coming quarter, which included a drop in revenues and lower margins. The web has drawn conclusions that this means Apple will be lowering its prices - but I'm kind of missing where the conclusion comes from.
Hello all, sorry about the over abundance of meta items on this week's front page, but we're adding one more item regarding changes to the podcast. The show has seemingly proven quite popular with viewers but Thom would prefer to switch to a fortnightly (every two weeks) schedule as we're finding the show difficult to do with a lack of news some weeks and Thom needs more preparation considering his schedule and that he has to talk to someone he can't see, in a foreign language. I'd like to keep the show running each week so we're looking for feedback and ideas of how to fill a show every other week with content not related to news items on the home page.
It's getting a little bit predictable, but Apple has reported
yet another stellar set of quarterly financial results. The company has sold more Macs and iPhones than the same quarter last year, but sales of the iPod were down compared to the same quarter last year. Profits and gross-margins were also up.
Darl McBride. It's the guy everybody hates. Well, he is no longer in charge of SCO, the UNIX vendor who relentlessly litigated against Linux vendors:
he has been fired as part of the Chapter 11 restructuring plans for the company. Sadly, the litigation does not end with him, as SCO's new leadership has
said in a statement they will continue the litigation.