KDE's Aaron Seigo has published a blog post in which he details how Nepomuk and the semantic desktop can be beneficial to users. He introduces the concepts of "context" and "context switches" - possible states are "writing an OSNews news item", or "posting a blog entry", or "editing your MySpace page". When you switch from one of these contexts to another, it's called a context switch, according to Seigo. "What happens with the rest of the software running on your computer when you switch contexts?" Seigo answers his own question. "Pretty much nothing. At least not automatically."

A few weeks ago, I reviewed the Acer Aspire One notebook, the variant which came with an Acer-modified version of Linpus Linux. This version was locked-down and difficult to modify, so not too long after I installed Ubuntu, and was reasonably pleased - despite the amount of tweaking it took to get it working. A few days ago, however, I realised Linux wouldn't be ideal for me on my netbook. Due to pragmatic reasons, I'm now running Windows XP.

Over at one of IBM's many developer websites, there's an article on new features of the Korn Shell. "New features of the Korn Shell provide system administrators and management with the ability to monitor, track, record, and audit every command executed by any user of a system. This is different from the normal shell history, and provides detailed information that includes date, time, tty, user, and the command. This information can be stored locally or transmitted in real time to a remote logging system."

While Google's new Chrome web browser has been met with a lot of praise and positive responses (well, mostly, at least), there has been one nagging issue that arose quite quickly after people got their hands on Chrome: the End User License Agreement accompanying the browser. It more or less granted Google the rights to everything seen or transmitted through the browser. Google now changed the EULA, saying it was a big case of woopsiedoopsie.

Hadoop is a software platform for processing huge amounts of data. It consists of the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem which is capable of storing petabytes of data across thousands of nodes. HDFS ensures that data is always available, even if underlying nodes get corrupted or fail. Hadoop also includes Map/Reduce, a programming model for breaking the data into smaller chunks of work and distributing that work across the nodes in the cluster.

It appears that Google scored a PR success with their Chrome browser. In short, the promise is a web experience where web pages are allowed to behave more like desktop applications. This is done by boosting the abilities of common web pages in terms of performance, while also allowing 'plugins' to enrich the user experience of certain other pages. As it seems, the announcement shot at the heads of people who've been holding their breath for the fabled Google Operating System. However in the following text I will demonstrate that Chrome puts strain on the Designer and Developer communities, is not innovative (save for one feature), and copies ideas liberally from Google's worst enemy.

"In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, "What they would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that... Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit', and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll to take a look at the economics of peering of transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."

"One of the most frequently used Cocoa classes is NSImage which, as the name suggests, is all about displaying and manipulating image data. The imageNamed: method of this class retrieves an image reference for you - provided that you know the name of the image you're after. Many of the images that can be retrieved via the imageNamed: method have well documented names, but there's a lot of stuff in there that's not well-known. It's those images - including some for Windows - that I'll be digging into here. I shall also give you source code to a little utility that uses an entirely different mechanism to retrieve images used by OS X."

A common topic of discussion in the Windows world - in fact, in any operating system - is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft's Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai, Haiku now has support for a swap file. "As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences. Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet." The swap implementation borrows heavily from that of FreeBSD.

Dell, Inc announced on Friday that it will offer Windows XP operating system to their personal computer customers after the June deadline. Microsoft has scheduled to pull the Windows XP operating system from store shelves on June 30 in an effort to upgrade customers to Windows Vista.

The day after Google announced its answer to Apple's iPhone App store, it has announced the winners of a contest wherein developers win $275,000 or $100,000 for developing a top app for Google's upcoming Android mobile phone OS. To get an idea of where the trend in mobile computing is heading, all of the top ten use location-based data via GPS. Check out the winners.

Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife.

Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.