The second pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring is here. This pre-release brings a near-final snapshot of KDE 4.0 (final 4.0 packages are currently being uploaded to the Cooker repositories), new NVIDIA and ATI drivers, the chance to test the experimental Nouveau open source driver for NVIDIA cards, kernel 2.6.24rc7, and more. See here for download information.

Noel Dellofano, who is part of the ZFS dev team at Apple, has a post on Mac OS Forge announcing a late Christmas gift: she is making available binaries and source code (plus instructions) of the ZFS filesystem for Mac OS X. "ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use."

"Earlier this week Apple released updated Mac Pros that use Intel's new Penryn processors. Also new is the fact that the standard Mac Pro configuration now comes with eight (instead of four) cores. Of course, what I've been wondering (as I sit here and think about getting a new Mac Pro) is how does the new standard eight-core Mac Pro perform compared to the old high-end Mac Pro? I've gathered Geekbench 2 results for both Mac Pros to find out."

"The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 3 is the third alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features."

Is Microsoft working on building a laptop for the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program? Yes, but the intended machine will run Windows XP only, rather than both Windows XP and Linux, Microsoft officials said today, refuting an earlier report that made the waves on Slashdot and OSNews.

Gizmodo has been running an interesting series of videos (part I | part II | part III) where they interview Bill Gates. They chopped the interview up into smaller pieces (as in, 2 minutes a pop), but the fourth installment only lasts 16 seconds. Bill Gates does say something very honest and open, though. After Gizmodo asked him what product of the last five years he would've wanted polished a little more, Gates answers: "Ask me after we ship the next version of Windows. Then I'll be more open to give you a blunt answer."

"Open source code, much like its commercial counterpart, tends to contain one security exposure for every 1000 lines of code, according to a program launched by the Department of Homeland Security to review and tighten up open source code's security. Popular open source projects, such as Samba, the PHP, Perl, and Tcl dynamic languages used to bind together elements of Web sites, and Amanda, the popular open source backup and recovery software running on half a million servers, were all found to have dozens or hundreds of security exposures and quality defects. A total of 7826 open source project defects have been fixed through the Homeland Security review, or one every two hours since it was launched in 2006, according to David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity, maker of the source code checking system, the Prevent Software Quality System, that's being used in the review." Note: I just want to state for the record that the headline has not been written by me. I do like the total kicking-in-open-doors air surrounding it, though.

The newest version of the popular RPM package manager is now out with improved performance and functionality. But there's a bit of a catch with RPM version 5.0. Linux vendor Red Hat officially considers RPM 5.0 a project fork. "RPM5 is a fork of RPM, and is not related to RPM.org," Daniel Riek, Product Manager Red Hat Enterprise Linux told InternetNews.com. "Neither Red Hat or Fedora are involved in RPM5, and have no current plans to use it. Red Hat remains committed to the main RPM.org releases and development."

Geeks.com was so kind as to send me the Vizio VX32L for review, a 32" widescreen LCD TV capable of doing 1080i. At USD 469.99, this 32" LCD television is quite affordable, so read on to find out if it is worth your money.

DesktopBSD 1.6 has been released. These are the most notable features introduced: "FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system. X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware. Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive. Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates. Improved package manager usability and performance. Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools. Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs. Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering. DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages" Download.

Thin TVs made with organic light-emitting diodes could become a big hit with consumers, but not any time soon, according to Toshihiro Sakamoto, president of the Panasonic AVC Networks company. "It will start to grow as a market in 2015," he said during an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show taking place here this week. "You won't be able to beat the cost and price performance of LCD and plasma for a long time."

"How do you get people interested in a USD 1500 keyboard? Simple, turn each key into an OLED screen. When you hit caps lock, the keys change to show they're upper case. Play a first-person shooter and the WASD keys turn into arrows. The Optimus Maximus keyboard brought this audacious idea to life, although since it was first shown in 2005 the hardware has gone through many delays. So many delays, in fact, that Art. Lebedev was accused of promoting 'vaporware' up until the price was announced, at which point there was a whole new set of sticker-shock-induced complaints."

I detailed Fitts' Law not too long ago in one of my usability terms articles (the series will pick up later on, by the way, I am currently too busy with my bachelor's thesis), and this article is a very detailed addition. It is a little old (October 2007), though. "Back in school, I remember that it wasn't until I started taking classes in physics that calculus made any kind of real sense to me. I just need diagrams to function. In that spirit, I thought it would be nice to go over Fitts's Law, a staple in the HCI diet, with a few visuals to explain both the concept and why it's ideas are a bit more complicated than most would have you believe."

"4Front Technologies is proud to announce the release of the source code to Open Sound System v4.0 under the BSD license for FreeBSD and other BSD compliant operating systems. OSS is a cross platform API that provides drivers for most consumer and professional audio devices for UNIX and POSIX based operating systems, including Linux. Owing to its open architecture, applications developed on one supporting operating system platform can be easily recompiled on any other platform. Open Sound System is also available for Linux under the GPLv2 license and OpenSolaris under the CDDL license. It is also available for commercial and proprietary operating systems under the 4Front commercial license."