OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Microsoft Releases Office 2008 for Mac SP2

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-20 Microsoft 4 Comments

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released today. This midcycle free update is designed to improve speed, stability and compatibility. SP2 delivers highly requested features throughout the suite as well as a new tool, Document Connection for Mac, that helps improve access and browsing to documents on SharePoint Products and Technologies and Microsoft Office Live Workspace.

Double-Take: Microsoft Contributes Drivers to Linux Community

weildish 2009-07-20 Microsoft 35 Comments

It all started with some free lunch four years ago, and then it morphed into a free patch. Along came Moonlight and some other developments, and now Microsoft has donated 20,000 lines of driver code to be included in the Linux tree. Yes-- Microsoft contributed drivers to the Linux community.

Episode 18: AmiRISCBeOS

Kroc 2009-07-20 Podcasts 18 Comments

We are joined on the show this week by our guest Tess Flynn, a consultant and technology trainer in the US midwest. She helps us discuss the past present and future of operating systems including the Amiga, BeOS and RISC OS camps and what monstrosity (or majesty) would arise if we combined their powers.

FSF: Microsoft’s Community Promise “Empty”

Submitted by Brandon L 2009-07-20 Mono 49 Comments

As you would have guessed, the Mono debate is long from over. Two weeks ago, Microsoft extended its legally binding and perpetual community promise to cover the C# and CLI ECMA standards, which was generally seen as a good thing for Linux-centric fans of the C# language as well as for the Mono project. The FSF has responded now, and it isn't too impressed with Microsoft's move.

Apperi Linux App Store Launches

Submitted by Ryan Quinn 2009-07-20 Debian 10 Comments

A new Linux App Store apperi.com has been launched allowing one-click installation of over 100,000 packages across recent Debian and Ubuntu versions. "Apperi provides a simple way to search and install applications on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux computer. By using the official repository package lists and apt-url it allows for one-click installation of every official package in its supported distributions. Apperi was developed by Ryan Quinn who is also the founder and lead developer of the currently dormant GNU/Linux distro SymphonyOS."

Linux Kernel Virtual Machine Improves Build Performance

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-20 Linux No Comments

KVM acts as the host for the guest operating systems that build the target software for the user. By switching from VMware build guests to Linux KVM guests, build times for each guest are reduced by as much as 50 percent. Learn how to set up the build server and create guests, customize build requests, and organize and access build results.

Submitted by diegocg 2009-07-18 3D 23 Comments

Mesa 7.5 has been released, the main new feature is the Gallium3D, infrastructure, which is a new architecture for building 3D graphics drivers. Phoronix has more details: "Mesa 7.5 also brings support for several new OpenGL extensions, reworked two-sided stencil support, updated SPARC assembly optimizations, initial support for separate compilation units in GLSL compiler, and various other fixes and optimizations."

Geek Chic: The Clickety-clack Keyboard

David Adams 2009-07-17 Hardware 69 Comments

How does the Alpha Geek establish dominance over the other techies in the herd? With a self-consciously old fashioned, expensive, and fussy computer accessory, of course! We take a look at the Das keyboard and see if it's that much better than the mushy crap keyboard that came bundled with your Dell.

Amazon Uses up the World’s Irony

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-17 In the News 66 Comments

Every now and then, these news items cross your path that simply don't need any words or imagery in order to make an impact. This is definitely one of those. You all know Amazon's Kindle, right? It's Amazon's successful e-book reader which allows you to buy a subset of Amazon's book catalogue in electronic form. Well, the term "buy" doesn't really apply here. Update: In a rare case of company mea culpa, Amazon has explained that deleting the books was a bad idea, and they assured us it won't happen again. The issue here was that the publisher behind the two Orwell books in the Kindle Store did not have the rights to sell these books, and after Amazon was informed by the rightsholder, they removed the books. Still, according to the NYT, more books were deleted from Kindles, even though Amazon doesn't have the right to do so according to its own TOS.

Sun Shareholders Approve Acquisition by Oracle

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-17 Oracle and SUN 6 Comments

"Sun announced that at a special meeting of stockholders held on July 16, 2009, its stockholders adopted the merger agreement entered into with Oracle Corporation, under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. Approximately 62% of the shares of Sun common stock outstanding as of the record date for the meeting voted to adopt the agreement." Well, it seems I won't have to take down our fancy Oracle icon which I put up when the news first got out.

Chrome OS to Bring More Linux IT Jobs?

weildish 2009-07-17 Google 14 Comments

The news has been abuzz about Google's upcoming OS. Many people have been arguing reasons for and against the system, its viability in such a market, and, if the OS is successful, even the morality of the company who may be trusted with even more private information than it already has. Well, here's another reason for Chrome OS: it could bring more jobs in the area of Linux IT.

Audio Recording in the Browser

Kroc 2009-07-17 Mozilla, Gecko 10 Comments

"I'm really excited to announce a new feature in Jetpack 0.4 -- Audio Recording. 'Jetpacks' can now access the microphone with just a few simple lines of Javascript The result is an audio file encoded in Ogg/Vorbis, which you can then playback, or if you choose to upload the file to a remote location". A while ago we discussed Jetpack (and Google's) HTML / JavaScript based browser extensions. Now the ante has been upped, with such creativity as URL-based voice memos!

Gartner, IDC: Dell Loses, Acer Wins

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-17 Hardware 14 Comments

Both IDC and Gartner have released their preliminary figures on the state of the US and worldwide PC market, and while both companies agree that overall, the market declined about 3-5% worldwide, they differ when it comes to the figures of Apple. Quite interesting.

Mono LLVM Compilation

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-17 Mono 28 Comments

Mono from SVN is now able to use LLVM as a backend for code generation in addition to Mono's built-in JIT compiler. "This allows Mono to benefit from all of the compiler optimizations done in LLVM. For example the SciMark score goes from 482 to 610. This extra performance comes at a cost: it consumes more time and more memory to JIT compile using LLVM than using Mono's built-in JIT, so it is not a solution for everyone. Long running desktop applications like Banshee and Gnome-Do want to keep memory usage low and also would most likely not benefit from better code generation. Our own tests show that ASP.NET applications do not seem to benefit very much (but web apps are inherently IO-bound). But computationally intensive applications will definitely benefit from this. Financial and scientific users will surely appreciate this performance boost."

Xubuntu: The Better Ubuntu than Ubuntu

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-17 Xfce 51 Comments

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).

Employee’s Email Hacked, Twitter Information Stolen

weildish 2009-07-17 Privacy, Security 6 Comments

"Is password protection an inherently flawed security model? A hack into a Twitter employee's Gmail provided access to a number of confidential Twitter docs housed in Google's cloud. What does that say about cloud security? Information from the docs was leaked to the media and published on various outlets." This may be a hard blow to those who have hopes in tossing sensitive data into the cloud.

The Challenges for Open Source in China

Submitted by caffeine deprived 2009-07-16 Open Source 1 Comment

The uphill battle that open-source programs face to steal ground from proprietary software comes with added pitfalls in China, where problems like software piracy take away strengths that open source has elsewhere. The Chinese government backs multiple domestic open-source projects, but their software is not widely used. Low awareness, a lack of big open-source projects and difficulty finding expertise in certain programming languages all hamper the development of open source in China.

Submitted by lqsh 2009-07-16 Ubuntu 1 Comment

Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS has been released. "In all, 80 updates have been integrated, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS."

Courgette Significantly Reduces Chromium Update Sizes

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-16 Google 33 Comments

One of the more controversial features of Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser is the way it handles updates. Contrary to other browsers, updates on Chrome are installed silently and automatically, without asking for the user's consent. While convenient and effective, it was also a security risk and sometimes it slowed people's machines down. Google now proposes a fix called Courgette.

Palm Releases webOS Mojo SDK to All

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-16 Wireless 16 Comments

For a while now, the Palm Pre and its webOS have been out and about, but the accompanying App Catalog remained remarkably empty, because Palm had not yet opened its software development kit for everyone. The SKD was leaked not too long ago, and today Palm has announced the official release of the Mojo SDK for everyone who wants to get their hands on it. It includes a webOS emulator.