Does Windows Need a Linux Package Manager?

Editorial 111 Comments
InternetNews.com states: "Microsoft (or a really smart ISV) should build a full application manager for Windows, similar to what most Linux distributions do today." Most Windows applications come with their own distinctive updating mechanism (much like Mac OS X), instead of having a centralised updating location like most Linux distributions offer. While it certainly wouldn't be harmful for Windows to gain such a feature - the question remains: isn't it time we rethink program installation and management altogether?
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First Steps Towards USB 3.0 on Linux

  Submitted by kev009 Linux 12 Comments
USB 3.0 isn't even available to us mere mortals yet, but thanks to Sarah Sharp's hard work, the Linux kernel is already underway towards having basic support for the new specification. "Now that the bus specification is public, I can finally talk about the code I've been developing at work. I've been writing a Linux driver for xHCI (the new USB 3.0 host controller), and changing the Linux kernel stack to support USB 3.0 devices." Sharp got to demo her work at the USB 3.0 Superspeed Conference.
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Windows 7 Build 6956 Does Well in Benchmark

  Submitted by google_ninja Windows 96 Comments
I'm sure you're all still (sadly) familiar with the recent 'debate' I had with InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy, which detailed a lot of silly things. The seed of that discussion was planted with Kennedy's first article which, among other things, claimed that Windows 7 performed similarly to Windows Vista (meaning, slower than XP). Leaving the thread count discussion behind, Kennedy did include a benchmark which showed that Windows 7 performed similar to Windows Vista. There's a new benchmark out now, comparing a slightly more recent build of Windows 7 to Vista RTM/SP1 and XP SP3, and in these tests, Windows 7 blows all of those out of the water.
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Organize Your Desktop Like a Real Desktop

Graphics 19 Comments
Though this technology isn't incredibly new (the video is dated June of 2006, and OSNews has covered it before), it's still not publicly available; however, it'll supposedly have a beta out for subscribers to test someday. Branded "BumpTop," this new interface builds off of the idea of organization done on traditional desktops-- I mean the wooden, metal, or glass ones. People naturally organize papers and other items into piles that make sense to their own ways of thinking. This kind of organization is limited on operating systems today, but BumpTop makes an old idea new by turning your virtual desktop a little more real.
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First Successful ‘Mind Reading’

In the News 36 Comments
In Japan at ATR Computational Science Laboratories, the first thoughts in history were successfully read via a computer -- and not just by guessing or even educationally guessing. Scientists began by showing test subjects the six letters that spell "neuron." Afterwards, by measuring the subjects' brain activity, they were able to reconstruct the six images and display them on a monitor. The images were fuzzy, of course, but obviously spelled neuron. ATR said that it's very possible that one day this technology will be able to read our dreams.
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Google Tears Beta Label Off Chrome, Releases 1.0

Google 47 Comments
After just 100 days, Google has lifted the veil of betaness off its web browser, Chrome, by releasing version 1.0. When Chrome made its first public appearance earlier this year, it was met with positive reveiws due to its JavaScript performance, as well as its robust multithreaded model. Now that the beta label has been ripped off Chrome, Google can't hide itself anymore: Chrome will now have to take Firefox and Internet Explorer head-on.
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The A-Z of Programming Languages: Perl

  Submitted by Austen Tay General Development 3 Comments
Did you know that Perl creator Larry Wall thinks the community 'paints a little picture in heaven'? In a lengthy interview about the history of Perl, Wall talks about the evolving nature of programming languages, especially Perl, and in the future a lot of people will be getting into programming as a profession, but not calling it programming. Wall's genius is expressed in his desire to not recognise Perl in 20 years, instead to design the ability to create things we will need in 20 or 100 years. And, yes, Wall picked the Camel mascot as it is 'an animal that is self-sufficient in a dry place'.
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‘The Mother Of All Demos’ Turns 40

In the News 14 Comments
It's been exactly 40 years since a man, one of the greatest visionaries in the world of computing, showed a crowd things that they really, really didn't understand. The visionary showed things you could do with a computer that we can still barely do today. He was the first to show windows, a mouse, video conferencing, document collaboration, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, and so much more. Yes, yesterday was the 40th anniversary of what would become known as The Mother Of All Demos. Please pay your respects.
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Inside Tsubame: Japan’s NVIDIA GPU Supercomputer

  Submitted by caffeine deprived Benchmarks 14 Comments
Japan's Tsubame supercomputer was ranked 29th-fastest in the world in the latest Top 500 ranking with a speed of 77.48T Flops (floating point operations per second) on the industry-standard Linpack benchmark. Why is it so special? It uses NVIDIA GPUs. Tsubame includes hundreds of graphics processors of the same type used in consumer PCs, working alongside CPUs in a mixed environment that some say is a model for future supercomputers serving disciplines like material chemistry.
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Teacher Throws Fit; Linux Is NOT Free and Holds Children Back

  Submitted by jawbreaker Humor 149 Comments
A teacher in Austin, TX reprimanded a student for demonstrating Linux to his classmates and distributing free Linux CDs. She then goes on to contact Ken Starks of the HeliOS Project, who provided the CDs, and claim that "putting Linux on these machines is holding our kids back" and "No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful". Although she claims to have used Linux herself in college, she feels that "putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all". On the HeliOS blog, Ken Starks hints that this may be more than just ignorance of the teacher's part.
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RISCOS Ltd Might Take Legal Action Against RISC OS Open Ltd

  Submitted by teigetje RISC OS 10 Comments
And it seems as if another minor, barely-alive operating system will become encumbered by legal bickering between two small companies. The RISC OS scene, which is already a tangled and complicated mess of companies, version number teasing and incompatible versions, might be torn apart even further because RISCOS Ltd might take legal action trying to prevent RISC OS Open Ltd from releasing a RiscPC compatible ROM from the RISC OS 5 shared source project. Should you feel confused, you needn't worry: so does everyone else.
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Parallel Machine Learning Toolbox for Linux

  Submitted by jmalasko General Development 2 Comments
Many sophisticated machine learning algorithms cannot process large amounts of data on a single node, but Parallel Machine Learning Toolbox (PML) can do so by distributing the computations. This distribution speeds up computations and expedites training by weeks, days, or even hours in an easy, reliable way. PML can run on a wide array of architectures including single-node, small clusters, grids, and BlueGene.
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Google Releases Native Client, Runs Code Natively in Browser

  Submitted by BluenoseJake Google 36 Comments
Google has released an early version of Native Client, a framework designed to run portable x86 binaries inside a web browser - in a sandbox. Native Client also includes technologies that allow for easier communication between JavaScript and Native Client executables, which makes it possible for web applications to leverage native code when it comes to processor intensive tasks. This sounds eerily similar to Microsoft's ActiveX - one of the biggest security failures of the Windows operating system. Google insists, however, that Native Client is much, much more secure.
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OpenCL 1.0 Specification Finalised, Released

  Submitted by Stenley General Development No Comments
The Khronos Group has released the finalised, completed specification for OpenCL 1.0, "the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices." The specification was first proposed as a draft by Apple, with its new home being the Khronos Group, a consortium that develops and promotes royalty-free media APIs.
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Harness the Power of Ruby for Efficient System Administration

General Development 2 Comments
Apart from its use as a powerful Web application development platform, in combination with the Rails framework Ruby is also a powerful scripting language. It has immense capabilities, owing to the availability of many built-in and external libraries, the power of which can be harnessed to solve a great deal of the scripting needs that surface in typical systems administrative work environments.
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Distributed Computing with Linux and Hadoop

  Submitted by jmalasko Linux No Comments
Every day people rely on search engines to find specific content in the many terabytes of data that exist on the Internet, but have you ever wondered how this search is actually performed? One approach is Apache's Hadoop, which is a software framework that enables distributed manipulation of vast amounts of data. This article introduces the Hadoop framework and shows you why it's one of the most important Linux-based distributed computing frameworks.
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