Chip company ARM is prepping to make its move into the netbook market, and now it has shown off a few prototype designs that really show off the benefits of using the ARM platform: thanks to passive cooling, no fans are required, enabling ARM netbooks to be much thinner and lighter than their Intel counterparts. Thanks to ZDNet,
we have a nice video overview of these ARM netbooks - as well as a few very tiny ARM desktop machines.
Apple
released the Safari 4 Beta today.
Features: Tabs on top. "Top Sites" 'Speed Dial' feature. "Smart" address/search fields. HTML5 Canvas. HTML5 Audio/Video (though no Ogg). Acid 3. CSS Animation/Gradients/Masks/Reflection. CSS Web Fonts. New "Nitro" Javascript engine -
"Up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1". 'Native' look and native font rendering on Windows Vista/XP. I can think of only one thing: "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!"
Whenever we're talking market share and Macs, it'll inevitably get late. There are different means of measuring market share, and different ways to interpret the resulting data, usually leading to heated debates about who is right and who isn't. Ars decided to
take a look at the different methods of measurement and see what they mean.
This series of articles (3) shows how to build a global positioning system (GPS)-aware application using the Linux-based Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and its built-in GPS receiver. You will find that
developing for the Nokia N810 is a real joy. The developer tools and community forums provide a wealth of resources to get the job done, as well as these articles.
Obviously, Linux vendors will not remain untouched by the economic downturn. Novell has already announced a number of lay offs,
and the openSUSE Linux division has not been spared. openSUSE board members Pascal Blesser and Bryen Yunashko announced the lay offs.
Red Hat has
announced it's virtualization plans for the future which includes a
switch from Xen to KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, three new virtualization products based on KVM, Solid ICE and the spice protocol. Red Hat which acquired these tools as part of the Qumranet acquisition will be making them free and open source software and develop them into a cross platform management tool.
Thanks to people familiar with PsyStar, we know now that the mediation procedure between PsyStar an Apple, a compulsory attempt at settling out of court,
has failed to produce any outcome. It was mostly a going through the motions, according to WorldOfApple.
In what can only be called "totally frakking awesome", someone
installed Microsoft Windows 3.1 on a Nokia N95. By using
DOSBox, Polish developer Marcin-PRV was able to install the ageing operating system on the Symbian-powered smartphone, allowing both operating systems to run side-by-side.
UNIX's method of handling file systems and volumes provides you with an opportunity to improve your systems' security and performance. This article addresses the issue of why
you should split up your disk data into multiple volumes for optimized performance and security.
Like so many other manufacturers, Dell has
entered the 10" netbook market this week with
the launch of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10. Despite the machine being fairly standard in its hardware specifications, it does make a few peculiar choices - especially when it comes to its resolution.
Submitted by caffeine deprived
2009-02-23
Web 2.0
A new proof-of-concept application from Microsoft's research arm
integrates elements from the Windows OS and its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure to let users share files from their desktops with Web users via social networking. More information can be found at the
project's home page.
With Intel's Core i7 and Nehalem processors being out and about; Intel's "next-gen" processors are already here today. AMD hasn't been sitting still, and launched the Phenom II earlier this year. Ars decided to
take a look at how the competition will go this year, and overclocked a Phenom II to 4.2Ghz, and benchmarked it against Intel's latest and greatest.
The next generation of the extended file system; ext4, provides improved scalability, reliability, and
considerable new functionality. This article covers ext4 Functionality, scalability, and performance. It's an easy read to get to know the latest and greatest Linux file system.
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."
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