‘Top 10 Linux Desktop Hurdles’

  Submitted by moleskine Linux 132 Comments
"Unlike the myths that are behind the prevention of Linux adoption, this piece will closely examine the indisputable obstacles and what will have to be done to overcome each of them. In the past, many desktop Linux users have opted to simply point to the hardware industry or Microsoft as the root cause of a lack of mainstream adoption. In reality, there are actually core issues extending beyond hardware - and competition from the proprietary markets - that simply must be dealt with head on. With that said, hardware compatibility and competition from closed-source vendors are valid issues, just not solid core excuses for the lack of mainstream interest. Here are the real hurdles."
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Windows 7 Eyed For Antitrust Violations

  Submitted by SReilly Windows 31 Comments
"The court-mandated committee overseeing Microsoft's compliance with a federal antitrust settlement has commenced reviews on the company's next major operating system to ensure it meets the settlement's terms. The so-called Technical Committee recently received a build of Windows 7 from Microsoft and is checking it for any features that might violate the agreement. Presumably, most heavily under scrutiny is whether the OS causes host computers to favor Microsoft applications over third-party software - a practice the federal government cited in its original complaint against the company."
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Beyond FreeBSD 7 Performance

  Submitted by Chezz FreeBSD 38 Comments
"Since the conclusion of the SMPng project, the focus of SMP development in FreeBSD has shifted from deploying locking infrastructure to careful profiling and optimization of kernel SMP strategies for increased performance on common workloads. FreeBSD 7.0 was the first release to benefit from this optimization work." The status of this work includes MySQL workload benchmarks and memory allocator performance in the new FreeBSD 8 branch. Also, here is a recent presentation showing FreeBSD compared to several other operating systems like NetBSD, DrangonFly, Solaris, and Linux.
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Plasma Improvements: KDE 4.0.2 and Beyond

  Submitted by irbis KDE 37 Comments
Ars takes a look at KDE 4.0.2. "When KDE 4.0 was officially released in January, there were a lot of gaping holes in basic functionality. During the past few months, the codebase has matured considerably, and the environment is steadily approaching the point where it will be sufficiently robust for widespread day-to-day use. Although there are still many features missing, version 4.0.2 - which was released last week - offers an improved user experience. We tested KDE 4.0.2 with the recently released Kubuntu 8.04 alpha 6." In addition, there is a new 'visual changelog' for KDE 4.1.
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Eric Sandeen on the ext4 Implementation in Fedora 9

  Submitted by Rodrigo Menezes Fedora Core 26 Comments
"One major feature present in Fedora 9 will be the ext4 implementation. The new filesystem will not be the default for the distribution, but will be available for users and systems administrators to enable. New functionality includes larger capacities and online defragmentation, for better performance and more reliability. To find out more, we talked with Eric Sandeen, Fedora project member and filesystem developer at Red Hat."
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Microsoft Challenges ‘Vista Capable’ Class Action

  Submitted by SReilly Legal 66 Comments
Microsoft Corp. on Friday asked that a lawsuit claiming it duped consumers in a Windows Vista marketing program be suspended while the company appeals a judge's decision to grant the case class-action status. If granted, the motion would also postpone any new disclosures of potentially embarrassing company e-mails. Last month, the release of similar documents showed that top-level company executives struggled with the new operating system on machines labeled "Vista Capable," and that partners such as Dell Inc. warned Microsoft that the campaign would confuse consumers.
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Snap Sun Decision Launches Java at iPhone

  Submitted by Moochman Apple 51 Comments
El Reg reports: "Less than a day after Apple unveiled its much-discussed iPhone SDK, Sun Microsystems has told the world it will build a Java Virtual Machine for Steve Job's handheld status symbol. 'We're very excited,' Eric Klein, Sun's vice president of Java marketing, told the The Reg. 'We've spent the last 24 hours furiously looking through what information was made publicly available, and we feel comfortable enough at this point on the information we have to commit the engineering resources to bring the JVM over to the iPhone and the iTouch as fast as our schedules and Apple's release schedule will allow.'" Sun plans to distribute the JVM free of cost via the App store.
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Mozilla Expands Prism Desktop Effort

Mozilla, Gecko 6 Comments
"Mozilla's greatest success to date has come from its online efforts with the Firefox web browser. Since at least October of last year they've been working on the Mozilla Prism effort to bring the online experience to the desktop. That effort is taking a major step forward today. Instead of struggling with Mozilla Prism to create a standalone desktop version of a Web app, there is now a point and click browser plugin to do the magic."
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AMD 780G Changes the Graphics Game

  Submitted by irbis Graphics 14 Comments
"AMD has done the seemingly impossible - made an integrated graphics part that does not immediately draw ridicule from all sides. It is actually good. The main trick AMD pulled out of the hat is to change the specs on what an IGP (Integrated Graphics Part) is. AMD decided to take a full GPU and put it on the chipset, so what you have is a full Radeon HD24xx (RV620) on board, video acceleration, 3D and all."
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ActiveX in IE 8

  Submitted by Punktyras Microsoft 24 Comments
"Conspicuously absent from Microsoft's annual MIX conference here was any discussion by the software giant about whether it plans to change the way ActiveX will run in Internet Explorer 8 . . . Some security experts, like Will Dormann, a vulnerability analyst at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute CERT/CC, are calling for ActiveX to be disabled from running by default in IE 8."
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Wal-Mart Hated Windows Vista Home Basic

Windows 5 Comments
Another interesting tidbit to surface from the Microsoft internal emails made public as part of the "Vista Capable" lawsuit is the revelation that Wal-Mart and other large retailers were very unhappy upon being briefed about the Windows Vista Capable program. These retailers, Wal-Mart in particular, did not like Vista Home Basic, seeing it as a crippled product that would confuse and dissatisfy customers. A Computerworld article has more details.
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Pioneer Claims That Kuro Will Live

Multimedia, AV 20 Comments
A few days ago the news that Pioneer, manufacturer of some of the best TV sets ever made, hit the net that they will cease manufacturing of their plasma panels. The reality is, amidst high prices and misguided customers who think that modern plasmas have limited lifetime, the LCD technology has won the market, even if inferior -- according to many expert A/V reviewers. Because of this, Pioneer will outsource their future plasma panels to Matsushita, who recently came up with a 30000:1 contrast ratio panels -- directly competing with Pioneer's thus far superiority. In a new interview with Gizmodo, Pioneer says that Kuro will continue to live, but LCD panels will also be sold by Pioneer, using Sharp's panels (Sharp LCD panels are known to have banding issues though, but there is not much they can do as Sharp almost owns Pioneer). What all this have to do with OSNews? The Kuro/Elite plasma Pioneer line runs on Linux. I bought for my household recently their 50" 5010FD model, which is indeed as good as reviews around the net and magazines say it is.
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