Archive

InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' -- companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion.

Qualcomm showed off a previously unannounced Eee PC running Android at Computex in Taipei. The machine has a 10-inch screen, built-in webcam, and a universal 3G radio that supports all UMTS and CDMA networks on all frequencies used around the world. The 'smartbook' runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon, a 1GHz ARM processor core that marks a shift away from Intel Atom x86-based netbooks. A second Android-based netbook -- a prototype by contract hardware maker Compal Electronics -- was also demoed at the show. Google, meanwhile, declined to discuss what steps it is taking to adapt the smartphone OS for laptops.

InfoWorld's Galen Gruman chucked his laptop in favor of an iPhone to see how far the iPhone could take him as his sole work device for a month. The experiment, which mirrors a similar stint spent working solely on a BlackBerry Bold for a month, shows both the promise and limitations of pocket-based business computing.

Mozilla Jetpack makes it so easy to filter, modify, and mash up pages that it might end up pitting developers and users against content producers in a battle for the Web, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. By allowing users to modify the behavior, presentation, and output of Web apps and pages to their liking, Jetpack brings us one step closer to a more democratic Web. Yet, as Jetpack produces fruit, expect more SaaS providers and media companies to call for 'guardrails for the Internet.'

After Syllable Desktop 0.6.6 already brought a number of improvements to standards support, Kristian Van Der Vliet has now implemented the POSIX interface to memory-mapped files.

Another important bounty quota has been reached in the Power2People website, and this time the result comes from a common effort of the whole Amiga/Morphos/AROS Community. The result of this bounty being reached is that the Poseidon USB stack will be ported to AROS, and released as open source under the AROS Public License.

For all of you using FreeBSD and ZFS, Kip Macy (kmacy) and Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd) merged ZFS Version 13 into FreeBSD 7-STABLE. Here is a breakdown of some of the new features: kmem now goes up to 512GB so arc is now limited by physmem, the arc now experiences backpressure from the vm (which can be too much - but this allows ZFS to work without any tunables on amd64), L2ARC Level 2 cache for ZFS which allows you to use additional disks for cache, and more.

InfoWorld's Paul Venezia reviews VMware vSphere 4, what the company has billed its 'virtual data center OS.' The bottom line: "VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments."

Phoronix provides a status update on the Wayland Display Server project. The Wayland Display Server aims to be a mini-display server which makes use of the latest X and kernel technologies such as the Graphics Execution Manager and kernel mode-setting. It also comes with its own built-in compositing manager.

Few hardware vendors have not yet launched their own mini laptop (or, "netbook"). Most brands these days produce their own version of the same hardware, with Intel's i386-compatible Atom cpu's and Windows XP installed on a spinning hard drive or sometimes still a solid state disk. Some Linux models are still sold by some vendors, among whom Asus, which more or less started selling in this OLPC-inspired genre of laptops.

InfoWorld's Neil McAllister looks ahead at the impending netbook revolution, one sure to be fueled by the introduction of machines based on ARM processors. As McAllister sees it, the move to ARM-based netbooks will have implications beyond cost and performance; it will also mean a new OS, opening the door for Linux, most notably Xandros and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The emergence of ARM-based netbooks running Linux will represent a subtle shift in messaging on the part of netbook vendors. "Expect to see increased emphasis on netbooks as secondary machines or 'companion devices,' designed to be paired with a more traditional, full-featured notebook or PC, rather than standing on their own."

Something I bumped into on Maemo-developers mailing list: "Intel and Nokia are pleased to jointly announce the oFono project, an open source project for developing an open source telephony solution." The full announcement is available at the oFono website. It's GPLv2, but not really hampered by the license because the API is exposed through DBus.

Chris Montgomery, otherwise known as Monty, is the founder of Xiph.org foundation and creator of the Ogg container format. He has been sponsored by Red Hat for several years to improve the codec quality of Theora and the next generation version, called Thusnelda, is already proving to be better than H264 as bitrate increases. Monty has posted some test results demonstrating the improvements. Chris Blizzard from Mozilla Foundation has some updates as well.

I moved into the realm of digital SLR photography back in 2003 when when I got myself a Canon 10D. The 10D served me very well for 7 years and 14 000 pictures. Then I decided it was time for an upgrade so, I got myself a full frame 21 Megapixel monster, the EOS 5D MkII. It's quite an upgrade, it even does video. These are my impressions after having it for a few weeks.