Archive

Mind your manners, now. We're not saying that they do in general. There's just a good chap who has come up with a list in two parts of varied Linux distributions that he deems use-worthy. He also gives a short description about them and a link to their project websites. Some are the obvious Ubuntu, Gentoo, and other major players, but others you may or may not have heard of and may find useful. Enjoy reading part one from May of this year and part two that was published just recently in October. What are some of the perhaps more obscure Linux distributions that you've found useful and noteworthy?

Microsoft has been thinking about Windows 8 for a while now even through the production of Windows 7. Some information has been gathered by our friends over at Ars, and all of this said information points to possible 128-bit versions of Windows 8 and definite 128-bit versions of Windows 9. Update: Other technophiles better-versed than I in this whole 64/128-bit business pointed out that it must be for the filesystem (such as ZFS described in this article) rather than the processor and memory scheme.

A while back, we covered the release of the free Cloudera distribution of Hadoop-- handy software to manage data across a multiplicity of servers-- the same software behind Yahoo!, Facebook, and other successful companies. Though Hadoop and Cloudera's Hadoop have been truly stellar at what they do, it's all essentially been done via command line, which for many people isn't the most productive or user-friendly type of interface. The folks at Cloudera knew this, so they've gone ahead and created a graphical interface to communicate with Hadoop.

"MacRumors discovered that Apple quietly acquired mapping service Placebase back in July. Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman's updated LinkedIn profile now lists him on the 'Geo Team' at Apple. So what's Apple's interest in a mapping company? The obvious guess would be as a replacement for the Google Maps application that is installed by default on all iPhones."

A long-term patent battle between Microsoft and a California- and Singapore-based security software company known as Uniloc has found Microsoft on the winning side... again. The said battle began about six years ago when Uniloc first sued Microsoft for allegedly infringing a patent of a technology that decries piracy by way of an activation key. Microsoft was supposed to have violated the patent by integrating the technology into the Windows XP and Office products' activation sequences that we all know and love. In short: Microsoft won the original case in 2003, Uniloc appealed and eventually won the appeal in April 2009 after many years of long and drawn out legal proceedings, and Microsoft appealed the appeal and won that appeal just recently, now not having to pay the US$388 million from the last appeal. Oh, and Uniloc already has plans to appeal.

"There are no current European standards on volume controls for MP3 players, though under French law personal music players must be limited to an output of 100 decibels (db). The Apple iPod, which can reach 130db, was briefly withdrawn from sale in France in 2002 until Apple updated the software to reduce the maximum volume. All iPods sold in Europe are now limited to an output of 100db. The European Commission’s new proposals call for the default setting on all personal music players to be 80db. This would apply to MP3 players and mobile phones that are capable of playing music. However, the proposals apply only to the default setting, not to the maximum setting for the device."

Phoronix was kind enough to add a deliciously lengthy nine-page compare and contrast between FreeBSD 8 and Ubuntu 9.10 to their arsenal of articles. "Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation."

Remember those magical speakers with invisibility cloaks? They're back, and they reek more of "awesome" than ever. Though not available to the public quite yet, these handy dandy speakers are planned to be implemented into your everyday flat-panel televisions, desktop monitors, laptop screens, and mobile devices. They're a slim technology made from a membrane and little micro motors embedded into the screen. The motors vibrate the membrane on each side of the screen and bring about what we call sound directly from the screen itself, eliminating the need for miniature crummy speakers planted in leftover space on our ever-smaller display technology. Anyone who doesn't integrate them into their products when this technology becomes available is foolish. In my mind's eye, I see people not needing to buy those funny portable iPod speakers anymore as well as me not needing to put my head on my netbook in order to hear the sound played on it. Glorious.

"With just over a week left before the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Department of Commerce, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) urges the US government to closely re-examine ICANN's structure, governance, and oversight mechanisms before committing to any further long-term cooperation. Significant adjustments must be made to the JPA in order to remedy the egregious problems CADNA has found with ICANN." CADNA not only proposes that an audit be made of ICANN, but they also have released a "top-ten list" detailing the most prevalent problems they find in the non-profit organization.

We all have our most favored machines of yesteryear; in this I assume that most people are like me, anyway. Breaking away from the mundane every-day news of boring (I jest) new technologies such as touchscreens the size of a wall and upcoming operating systems that support graphics cards with 1.5 GB of vRAM, take a walk down memory lane-- or "Neurological Alley" as I like to call it-- and take a look inside, outside, and in all of the nooks and crannies in between the circuits of the Macintosh Plus and its accompanying System 6, fresh from the splendor of 1986.

"Quoting an inside source, the German economic newspaper, 'Handelsblatt' reports that staff at IBM have been given ten days to change to Symphony, IBM's in-house Lotus software. The use of Microsoft Office will in future require managerial approval. With immediate affect, the Open Document Format (ODF) will rule at IBM with the file ending .doc soon belonging to the past... IBM's management have obviously decided to practice what they preach. 330,000 IBM workers already use Symphony, reports the newspaper. The motive for the migration appears not to be the saving of license fees, and according to an IBM press officer, the move is a clear statement in appreciation of open source standards."

"The KOffice team is happy to announce the second Beta of the upcoming 2.1 release that implement the KOffice 2 vision. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to fixing the remaining bugs. As can be seen in the full changelog the bugfixing is very active in all parts of the suite. Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters."

"Microsoft late last week said it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. 'We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible,' said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast, referring to Windows 2000 and XP.... 'By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability,' the company said. 'Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems include a stateful host firewall that provides protection for computers against incoming traffic from the Internet or from neighboring network devices on a private network.'"

"ClearOS is a next-generation Linux server operating distribution for the small organizations and distributed environments. The ClearOS Linux distribution has an installed-base of over 120,000 systems that serve approximately 1.2 Million users. It is available in over 20 languages and is utilized in more than 122 countries around the globe. Historically known as ClarkConnect, ClearOS has been made open and free by ClearFoundation, including software such as MultiWAN which allows multiple, balanced Internet connections. Other limitations and commercial restrictions on the ClearOS platform have also been removed for this version and all subsequent versions. The ClearOS Operating System tightly integrates dozens of leading open source applications in a single management interface. The distribution is free to download and use and redistribution is encouraged." The new version of ClearOS can be read about more, tested using an online live demo, and downloaded at the ClearFoundation website.