We already
discussed David Finch, Dell's senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, last week. We missed, however,
some more interesting statements by Finch; Dell is looking into the
ARM-based netbook smartbook market, and close to a third of all of Dell's netbooks ship with Linux.
I had been following the mailing list for the Haiku project the past week with growing interest. The topic of discussion? Why, the alpha release, of course! What needs to be done, who needs to prepare what, and most importantly, what schedule are they going to settle on? Well, after numerous insightful back-and-forths, the community has settled on a schedule.
Finally, a week with a bit more news going on. We've talked about a lot of things this week, but there really weren't any overarching themes or whatever dominating the front page. This is the first Week in Review in a simpler format: a listing of the teasers of the more interesting stories (as opposed to a forced-colloquial recollection). They're in chronological order for your convenience.
Over the past couple of months, and especially over the past couple of weeks, I've been working very hard to write and complete my thesis. I performed all the work on Windows 7, but now that the thesis is finally done, submitted, and accepted, I installed Ubuntu - and immediately I was reminded of why I do not do any serious work on Linux: the train wreck that is X.org.
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Opera 10 beta 3 was released Wednesday for Windows, Mac, and Linux users. With a strong European following, the preview version has been able to keep this popular alternative browser competitive by offering page rendering quality comparable to Google Chrome, while offering a robust list of features."
"As it invites the world to play in a mysterious sandbox it likes to call 'Caffeine',
Google is testing more than just a 'next-generation' search infrastructure. It's testing at least a portion of a revamped software architecture that will likely underpin all of its online applications for years to come. Speaking with The Reg, ueber-Googler Matt Cutts confirms that the company's new Caffeine search infrastructure is built atop a complete overhaul of the company's custom-built Google File System, a project two years in the making. At least informally, Google refers to this file system redux as GFS2."
We've got some intriguing news about the Apple vs. Psystar case. The depositions where Apple asked questions to Psystar are now over, and now it's time for Psystar to hold depositions of several people in the very highest echelons in Apple. Psystar's new lawyer team takes a more open approach to the lawsuit, and has now published the list of Apple people that will be testifying, and is also
asking for community input.
The browser wars have really been heating up again lately. Thanks to Mozila's Firefox, Internet Explorer is no longer the undisputed king, and browsers are popping up all over the place trying grab a piece of the pie. A new browser project called
RockMelt is in development - and
it's backed by Mosaic developer and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen.
It's the end of the world. Again. According to some Linux developers and security researchers,
a bug in the Linux kernel has just been uncovered that makes just about every distribution utilizing kernel 2.4 and 2.6 on just about all architectures since May of 2001 vulnerable to a certain kind of attack.
Microsoft has now more or less given out every possible detail of its next-generation portable media player, the Zune HD. The really interesting part of this device is not the software or its competitiveness with the iPod Touch - no, it's the hardware inside it. This is the first mass-market NVIDIA Tegra-based device.
Let's continue the browser talk for a while. Let's move from
the pinnacle of browsing, all the way down to the very drainage pit: Internet Explorer 6. To me, Internet Explorer 6 is that annoying zombie that just won't die that chops off 80 of your health in a grueling midnight Left 4 Dead expert session. Microsoft may not say so outright, but they seem to be implying they agree with me.
"Microsoft announced Thursday that the next edition of Microsoft Office for Mac will be released in late 2010. The new edition of the venerable office suite will include Outlook for Mac, a new application that will replace Entourage." Whilst the new Outlook:Mac will not offer feature parity with the Window version, it will be written in Cocoa and feature tighter integration with OS X including Spotlight.
My Take: So it only took Apple integrating Exchange support into OS X for Microsoft to finally 'fix' the abomination that is Entourage.
When Google released its Chrome web browser for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X users were left out in the rain, without the ability to enjoy all the goodness that is Chrome. Thanks to the relentless porting efforts of the Chromium team, we now have daily builds of the Chrome/Chromium web browser, and I decided to take a look where the Linux version stands.
Submitted by Inkslinger
2009-08-13
OS News
Australian research organisation NICTA claims to be the world's first to develop a formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating system kernel, the Secure Embedded L4 (seL4). The organisation "beat" several other larger and better funded organisations to claim this achievement,
according to a spokesperson.
Adobe has announced it is
dropping PowerPC support from its next version of the Creative Suite for the Mac.
"By the time the next version of the Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either. Bottom line: Time & resources are finite, and with big transitions underway (going 64-bit-native, switching from Carbon to Cocoa), you want Adobe building for the future, not for the past."
I think we can finally put a certain myth to rest that's been circling around the web for a while now. Microsoft often claimed that netbooks running Linux saw higher return rates than those running Windows, but
according to Dell, this is utter nonsense.
Two of the losers in the smartphone wars are cuddling up. Historic enemies Microsoft and Nokia today
announced a wide ranging partnership covering mobile software, services, and eventually GUIs. Or as the execs put it today, as they exchanged dopey-eyed looks, the pair will "jointly design a range of new user experiences".
Peter Wayner of InfoWorld has
put Palm's still brand new webOS Mojo SDK through its paces, and came away impressed. Still, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed, but all in all the big advantage he sees is that over the course of the past few weeks, a very active and fertile community of developers has organically created its own development community, creating open source applications everybody is free to install - contrary to the iPhone.
In what some will undoubtedly call
ironic,
Microsoft has been declared guilty of wilfully infringing upon
an XML patent held by the Canadian company
i4i. The judge has ordered Microsoft to pay a fine of 290 million USD, and has barred Microsoft from selling Word in the United States if the company doesn't comply within 60 days (a detail omitted by many). Microsoft has already announced it will appeal the judge's decision.
"Sony has announced a new type of lithium ion rechargeable battery that combines high-power and long-life performance, using olivine-type lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material. The Olivine-type lithium iron phosphate used in this new battery is a perfect cathode material due to its robust crystal structure and stable performance, even at high temperatures. These bateries have a high power density of 1800W/kg, and extended life span of approximately 2,000 charge-discharge cycles. What’s most surprising is that the battery will keep an 80% charge retention after those 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, which is very impressive. This new battery is also able to charge rapidly (99% in 30 minutes)." These buckoes will debut in power tools originally, but they'll eventually cross over to be smiling up at you from your cell phone, lappy, and other consumer electronics.
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