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.

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.

It's time for another phone review. PureMobile.com sent us the Nokia E71 for review. The E71 is a BlackBerry-style phone, with a full qwerty keyboard in a candybar form factor, meaning the E71 is direct competition for the phone we reviewed in October, the BlackBerry Bold 9000. Read on for our findings.

In an almost indiscernible and confusing article filled with various scientific terms that most cringe to hear, it was described how in October of 2008 scientists successfully stored and retrieved data on the nucleus of an atom-- and all for two short lived seconds. With this new type of storage, a traditional bit can now be both zero and one at the same time, but in order to understand just how this is possible, translate the article linked above to plain English. Data integrity returns after two seconds at 90% and storage is obviously impermanent, so there are many kinks to work out before atomic storage actually serves a purpose, but give these scientists a couple of decades, and it's theoretical that we'll one day have nuclear drives the size of USB drives today (or MicroSD cards, or why not even specs of dust?) that can hold hundreds of terabytes-- even pentabytes-- of information.

HP and the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State recently demoed a new technology we thought was only possible in Minority Report. Dubbed flexible displays, these modern miracles not only may one day be used in netbooks, smartphones, and other mobile and compact devices (perhaps even digital paper), but are supposedly indestructible, use 90% less resources to manufacture, and basically sip electricity when compared to today's standard display technologies.

Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. "Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that - if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most."

It kind of slipped underneath our radar last Friday, but Novell has released its financial earnings figures for the fourth quarter. While the company still shows a loss of 16 million USD (compared to 18 million during the same quarter last year), individual divisions of the company are doing quite well, with only two of them showing losses. Total revenue was 243 million USD. Interestingly enough, the company's Linux business is doing very, very well.

Always wanted to try out RISC OS, but were you set back by the fact that you had to buy a new computer? RISCOS Ltd. has released a very cheap ROM image of RISC OS 4.02 which you can use in a free emulator like RPCemu. At only 5 GBP, this image, dubbed "Virtually Free" by the company, is the easiest way of trying out RISC OS. "RISC OS "Virtually Free" is a fully licensed complete package. It consists of a single 4 MB zip file containing a RISC OS 4.02 ROM image with the !Boot structure and other necessary applications and utilities. It is designed to be unzipped and installed in the emulator itself with most of the work being done from within the host environment." It will be available from RISCOS Ltd.'s sales page starting December 8.

Serenity Systems announced the availability of eComStation 2.0 RC6a. eComStation is the next evolution of IBM OS/2 operating System. Between the updated for this new RC are Audio, ACPI drivers and improved version of the bundled applications.

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom "languages" and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. Wall and his co-developers are doing with Perl 6 -- starting again. "It will break backward compatibility in order to simplify it we have to get rid of old cruft, particularly the regular expression cruft," Wall said. "A lot of the unreadability of Perl is related to the regular expression syntax – and we didn't do that, we got it from Unix. It needs to be end-of-lifed."

Is Windows 7 leaning too much towards the Mac side of life? Many Microsoft bloggers are saying that it does, that Windows 7 is too much "form over function", something they accuse Apple of. While superficially they may have a point, the differences between Windows and Mac OS X are still glaringly obvious. Are a few changes to the taskbar enough to make Windows OS X-like? Bloggers like Mary-Jo Foley, Paul Thurrot, and others seem to think so.

"Python 3.0 (a.k.a. 'Python 3000' or 'Py3k') is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places." See what's new in Python 3.0 for differences between 2.x and 3.x.

Sun has released the first version of JavaFX, aptly named JavaFX 1.0. "JavaFX 1.0 returns to the sales pitch that Sun used during Java's launch more than 13 years ago: a foundation for software on a wide variety of computing "clients" such as desktop computers or mobile phones. JavaFX builds on current Java technology but adds two major pieces. First is a new software foundation designed to run so-called rich Internet applications--network-enabled programs with lush user interfaces. Second is a new programming language called JavaFX Script that's intended to be easier to use than traditional Java."

This blog post on Qt Labs shows how to easily embed regular desktop widgets in a three dimensional Wolfenstein-like maze. The example includes web browser views, a mediaplayer with sound and video, OpenGL integration, and even a soldier scriptable in QtScript. All done in relatively simple code using Qt's QGraphicsView API. The example might not be directly usable by itself, but it demonstrates how easy it is to map 2D widgets to 3D scenes in Qt and could act as inspiration for future user interfaces.