This week had some interesting things in it. In Sweden, they think they can stop piracy by sending The Pirate Bay to court, Apple faced its first Mac sales slow down in like forever but they're still high on customer satisfaction, and we wondered if a cat an agree to an EULA. This week's my take is from Jordan "weildish" Spencer Cunningham, and is about winter.
Submitted by John Mills
2009-02-21
Ubuntu
Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth has
announced the plans for Ubuntu 9.10, named Karmic Koala. Jaunty Jackalope isn't out of its cage yet (April 2009), but the Ubuntu team is already planning for 9.10, which will see the light of day in October 2009. The desktop side will focus on beautification and an improved boot-up experience; the server side will target cloud computing.
Asustek is going to start
shipping only 10-inch and 7-inch Eee PCs, reports have claimed. Separate reports have also revealed how the manufacturer is contemplating putting the Android operating system onto netbooks.
Oh, batteries -- technology's weakest link. Back when we mostly needed them to run pocket calculators and wristwatches, things were good. The future was now, and the world was electrical. Now that the world really is electrical, and gadgets the size of those pocket calculators are sporting the computing power of yesterdays Crays, we're in trouble. Please excuse the fanboyism, but I'm a big fan of the iPhone, for all its flaws. With all battery-powered computing devices, you have to make some tradeoffs between processor power and battery life, but I think Apple did a pretty good job. Nevertheless, if you sit down for a protracted web browsing session, the combination of the screen and the radio really drain that battery. After an hour, you're pretty much dead. What to do?
I recently
joked that we might want to rename OSNews to CourtNews, and with each passing day that silly joke seems to become less silly. This week, it became clear that Psion Teklogix, the company behind various small computing devices back in the '90s, has
started an all-out legal offensive to prohibit other companies from using the term "netbook".
"Earlier this month
we published an article looking at the Linux versus OpenSolaris performance when using the new AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs. Ubuntu Linux was faster than OpenSolaris 2008.11 in nearly all of the tests, but as mentioned in that article, OpenSolaris is still dependent upon GCC 3.4 where as Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions are now shipping with the newer and much-improved GCC 4 series. Following that article being published, Sun Microsystems had requested some compiler tests since they were confident the results would be different had their Sun Studio compiler been used. Well, in this article we now have some
OpenSolaris benchmarks from the same AMD setup using GCC 3.4, GCC 4.0, and Sun Studio 12."
Submitted by Jarle Anfinsen
2009-02-20
Qt
According to a recent
announcement, Nokia/Qt Software has decided to discontinue the development of Qt Jambi after the March 2009 release of version 4.5. Jambi is a Java version of the popular Qt toolkit. The library will be made available under the LGPL license, and Qt Software will host and facilitate a community driven continuation of Jambi.
An interesting story is making it rounds across the internet the past few days about someone
who made a system to get his cat to agree to the EULAs she was presented with. While that's just a funny joke, it does raise a very interesting point: if person A agrees to an EULA, does its power extend to person B?
With the recent
news that Microsoft will not release a second beta but will instead move Windows 7 directly into release candidate stage,
several Windows testers have become a tad bit disgruntled. They claim that due to a lack of test builds, they cannot properly test Windows 7 to see if the bugs they submitted have been fixed. As a result, Steven Sinofsky simply replied: email me your concerns.
"Last night we had a geek outing with our favorite hacker, Brian Jepson, who you may remember from our feature on Hacking the XO laptop. This time around Brian got a hold of a development G1 and
hacked around with cupcake. Included in the video is a demonstration of the on-screen keyboard, prettier transitions, some fun in the Linux shell, and more. We also have some photos (the video was a little blurry) of the skateboarding androids–which come up as you hack–and the obligatory Snake game on the Android OS."
We may have reported
earlier that Apple might finally face the headwind from the economic downturn, but that's not everything there's to this story. Recent data suggests - once again - that
Apple customers are very, very satisfied with their Apple purchases. In other words, most current Apple customers are very likely to buy Apple again. Interestingly, ASUS and Acer did very well in the survey as well.
Intel has filed suit against NVIDIA seeking a declaratory judgment over rights associated with two agreements between the companies. The suit seeks to have the court declare that NVIDIA is not licensed to produce chipsets that are compatible with any Intel processor that has integrated memory controller functionality, such as Intel’s Nehalem microprocessors and that NVIDIA has breached the agreement with Intel by falsely claiming that it is licensed. Intel claims that it has been in discussions with NVIDIA for more than a year attempting to resolve the matter but were unsuccessful. As a result Intel is asking the court to resolve this dispute. Shall we rename OSNews to CourtNews?
If you have ever been interested in awk and sed Unix utilities, then you probably know about the
awk1line.txt and
sed1line.txt files that are floating around the Internet. Each file contains around 80 idiomatic sed and awk one-liners for performing various text modification tasks.
Microsoft has achieved a major win in the "Vista Capable" class action lawsuit against the company. The suit, which is about if Microsoft knew the PCs it labelled as "Vista capable" weren't actually capable of running Vista's more advanced features,
has lost its class action status.
Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a
skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.
Palm has
released the first chapter of a book that details its new webOS. It answers some of the questions people had about developing applications for the new platform.
"You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you'd use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that gives standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. WebOS is designed around multi-tasking, and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context." Ars has more.
With the economy in decline, many fear that the one company to take the financial blow would be Apple. The company focusses on the higher end of the market (at least in price), and with many people having less and less money to spend, as well as facing insecure financial prospects, people may decide to choose for a cheaper, non-Apple computer. Piper Jaffray, an Apple-friendly analyst firm, has projected that the Cupertino company is
about to face a decline in year-over-year Mac sales; for the first time in six years.
We already knew netbooks were popular, but according to new data by research firm IDC,
they are even more popular in Europe than we anticipated. The firm says that in 2008, netbooks sales accounted for 30% of total consumer portable sales in Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa. A big contributing factor are the telecommunication providers in Europe who subsidise netbooks.
Submitted by 
Guest post by 
Submitted by