Digital Switchover to Be Delayed?

In an editorial previously on OSNews, there was some amount of detail about the upcoming US digital television switch, coming (now somewhat tentatively) on February 17th. Apparently, some 21 million Americans are still waiting for the $40 coupons the government promised but could eventually not deliver seeing as how the well went dry. These millions of Americans, assumed to not have gone out and bought a digital converter despite being coupon-less, will now be at a loss of "news, information, and emergency alerts" come the official switcheroo (but we all secretly know they mean "soaps, game shows, and sitcoms"). For this reason, some of those political fellows are vying to delay the transition to June 12th; a good idea, or will this just cause more confusion and problems with the already fuzzy topic? A great deal of money has been spent on telling the public "January 17th, 2009, folks!" for years now. Is it really worth it to delay?

Google Rises Over Profit, Revenue Estimates

For the last quarter of 2008, Google followed the example of Apple and IBM, not Microsoft and Intel, reporting financial results above financial estimates amid a grim economic environment. "Google performed well in the fourth quarter, despite an increasingly difficult economic environment. Search query growth was strong, revenues were up in most verticals, and we successfully contained costs," Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement. "It's unclear how long the global downturn will last, but our focus remains on the long term, and we'll continue to invest in Google's core search and ads business as well as in strategic growth areas such as display, mobile, and enterprise."

Introduction: Parallel Programming

"Parallel computing is the use of multiple processors in order to solve a specific task. For quite a few decades now parallelism has been used in the domain of High Performance Computing (HPC) where large, difficult problems are split up into pieces which are solved and then recombined to form the answer. With the emergence of multiple cores per processor this has become more and more important for the everyday user and programmer. In this article I will explain some of the elementry concepts of parallel computing and point the reader to further points of information."

Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS Released

The Ubuntu team has released the second maintenance release for Ubuntu 8.04. "The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, the second maintenance update to Ubuntu's 8.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, and alternate installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures. In all, over 200 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." Get it from their download page.

Mesa 7.3 Released

Four months after Mesa 7.2 was released, Mesa 7.3 has now officially surfaced. Mesa 7.3 has been in testing since earlier this month with it having gone through three release candidates. The new features found in this latest version of the standard Open-Source OpenGL stack is proper support for GLSL 1.20 and the Intel DRI driver now supports the Graphics Execution Manager and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2.

Ext4 To Be Default for Fedora 11, Btrfs Also Included

The latest Fedora development snapshot makes Ext4 the default file system and adds experimental support for the next generation btrfs filesystem. "According to current plans, version 11 of Fedora, which is expected to arrive in late May, will use Ext4 as its standard file system. That's what the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) recently decided, following a heated discussion in an IRC meeting. If however Ext3's successor encounters big problems with the pre-release versions of Fedora 11, the developers will dump that plan and revert to Ext3."

New Mac OS X Trojan Found in Pirated iWork ’09

"Intego has discovered a new Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is currently circulating in copies of Apple's iWork 09 found on BitTorrent trackers and other sites containing links to pirated software. The version of iWork 09, Apple's productivity suite, are complete and functional, but the installer contains an additional package called iWorkServices.pkg." Update: A new variant has been discovered in a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop CS4, also information about one target of a DDOS attack coming from the trojan.

Scripting with Guile

Guile isn't just another extension language: it's the official extension language of the GNU project. Guile makes Scheme embeddable, which makes the interpreter ideal for embedded scripting and more. The days of building and delivering static software and products are over. Today, users expect their products to be dynamic and easily customizable. Learn how, with Guile, you can interpret Scheme scripts, dynamically bind scheme scripts into compiled C programs, and even integrate compiled C functions into Scheme scripts.

Game Review: Lost Odyssey, XBox 360

After our article on modern gaming a while ago, we decided to dive futher into gaming. That's why I met up with one of my friends, and asked him if he could loan me the best game he had for his XBox 360. Maybe I should have been a bit more specific, I thought, because when he came over, before I knew it, he shoved a Japanese RPG in my console. This would be my first foray into the strange, magical, and disturbed world of the Japanese RPG. Read on for a review of Lost Odyssey.

Apple Soars Past First-Quarter Earnings Expectations

Apple reported first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance. For the three-month period ended December 27, Apple recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, as compared with $9.6 billion a year ago, and net income of $1.6 billion, as compared with $1.58 billion a year ago. That translates into earnings per share of $1.78, far more than the $1.39 in earnings per share that analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected. Expected revenue was $9.75 billion.

Mono 2.2 May Overtake .NET in Some Critical Categories

The Mono Project releases version 2.2 this week with full support for SIMD extensions being one of the more interesting features (Betanews article). The extension allows SIMD code to be accelerated above and beyond the speed of past Mono and current .NET releases. Johnathan Allen from InfoQ impresses the significance of the latest Mono release in a blog entry. "It represents something bigger; Mono is outgrowing the standard. Mono is not just playing catch-up any more, it is trying to move past the CLR in many areas. And as an open source project, they can slip in new libraries at a much faster clip than Microsoft. Instead of trying to build everything themselves, they can simply pick up mature projects like Mono. Options or the collection library C5 and include them in the standard release."

Apple Updates White MacBook, Releases QuickTime 7.6

If you thought that Apple kept the white MacBook around only temporarily, you thought wrong. The white MacBook remained on Apple's product listing, despite the introduction of the newer and faster unibody MacBooks. The newer MacBooks were more expensive than the white model, so Apple kept it around to serve the budget market. To confirm that the low-end MacBook will be around for a while, the company updated the machine today.

Corsair Enters Solid State Disk Race

On September 30, 2008 Fudzilla reported that memory manufacturer Corsair did not think the time was right to enter the SSD market, but they were watching the market closely. A little under four months later, Corsair feels the time is right to enter the SSD market. Hexus.net reports the 128GB drive will be named the S128, and it will feature Samsung flash memory and a Samsung controller. Corsair decided to use the Samsung controller over a JMicron controller due to problems with the latter. Even though the drive has not been announced by Corsair, Scan.co.uk has it listed as well as NCIX.

New Features in OpenOffice.org 3.1, an Early Look

OpenOffice.org 3.1 is 65 days away, and developers are finishing up more than 1000 issues targeted for this Microsoft-Office-killer packing an army of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Major new features include antialiased drawings, solid dragging, translucent selections in Writer, improvements in Chart axes and labels, improved grammar checking, macros and full support for SQL including syntax highlighting in Base, and many more.