Monthly Archive:: February 2008

The envelope had been lying there on the minimalist desk all throughout Jobs' keynote. The rumours had been clear: Apple is going to launch a subnotebook, a sort of MacBook Mini. Despite the rumours, the collective gasp of amazement was clearly audible when Jobs pulled the MacBook Air out of the envelope. I have to admit, even I was all wowed. Consequently, you can imagine I was delighted when Apple NL agreed to loan me a review unit as soon as they had the MacBook Air in stock. Read on for the review.

AndandTech has thoroughly reviewed the new Penryn-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros and concludes: "The biggest improvement by far comes in the battery life department. Just as we had seen earlier, you can expect these new models to outlast their predecessors by a good 7 - 15%. The performance side of things is more of a mixed bag. There are some situations where Penryn is clearly faster than Merom while others show the two with equal performance. It's for this reason that we say the biggest improvement lies in battery life, not performance." This puts to rest any uncertainty over the new laptops' battery life.

As happens every year or so, some juicy Microsoft e-mails have surfaced as part of litigation that the software maker is party to. In this case, Microsoft is being sued over a program in 2006 that labeled some PCs as Windows Vista Capable ahead of the operating system's mainstream release in January 2007. As part of the discovery process, a number of e-mails have emerged with Microsoft executives discussing various problems with Vista as it came to market.

GNOME 2.22.0 release candidate has been released. "This is the last unstable release before 2.22.0. It's been a pretty fun ride since September. New features. Bug fixes. Translations. Documentation. Lots of bug triaging too. And we're getting ready to start again for 2.23! But before, we need to make sure 2.22.0 will be rock-solid. There's still a few days before the hard code freeze, so it's not too late to fix this last bug you're ashamed of."

"The iPhone (or iPod Touch) is a 667MHz computer (albeit one that is only running at 412MHz) with 128MB of RAM and between 4 and 32 GB of flash. For software, it is running a pared down Mac OS X with its standard compliment of a FreeBSD-based userland over a Darwin kernel. While some people wonder why anyone would attempt to use it as a Unix workstation, to me and many others it seems ludicrous not to."

The fifth alpha release of Kubuntu 8.04 has been released. "Kubuntu-KDE4 Hardy Alpha is here. There will be two editions of Kubuntu with the 8.04 release, a commercially supported KDE 3 edition and a community supported KDE 4 edition. We recommend the KDE 4 edition to those who want to try this exciting new desktop version and can put up with some missing features." There are screenshots of the KDE4 version.

FreeBSD 7.0 has been released. "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches."

"Windows Server 2008, which was released earlier this month, was officially launched today. Windows Server 2008 brings many eagerly anticipated admin-pleasing features such as a stripped-down mode called "Server Core" that does away with many unnecessary features that are normally installed, and a new virtualization platform - 'Hyper-V' - that should increase Microsoft's foothold in this increasingly important market sector. Windows Server 2008 wasn't the only product to be launched today either; Visual Studio 2008 also saw its official launch, even though it has been finished and available since November, and some fanfare was made about SQL Server 2008, though that won't be finished until later in the year."

"As anyone who is into 3D computer graphics knows, there is something mysterious and special about The Teapot. It's not just any teapot - it's 'the' teapot. The teapot was made by Melitta in 1974 and originally belonged to Martin Newell and his wife, Sandra - who purchased it from ZCMI, (a department store in Salt Lake City). The teapot was eventually donated to the Boston Computer Museum but now resides in the Ephemera collection of the Computer History Museum. It's cataloged as 'Teapot used for Computer Graphics rendering' and bears the catalog number X00398.1984."

AnandTech takes a very thorough look at Vista SP1, and they conclude: "As far as the Vista user experience is concerned, users shouldn’t expect any significant changes with SP1. In this respect Vista SP1 is much like any other Windows service pack, rather than being another XP SP2. To that extent if you threw a pre-SP1 system and a post-SP1 system in front of us, we’d need to do some low-level benchmarking to identify which one was using SP1. In day-to-day use, the difference is not obvious outside of the specific improvements we’ve talked about."

"Microsoft was fined a record 899 million euros (USD 1.35 billion) by the European Commission on Wednesday for using high prices to discourage software competition in the latest sanction in their long-running battle. The executive arm of the European Union said the U.S. software group defied a 2004 order from Brussels to provide the information on reasonable terms. Microsoft has now been fined a total of 1.68 billion euros by the EU for abusing its 95 percent dominance of PC operating systems through Windows."

The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD 50000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google's Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.

"Microsoft is getting ready for what it calls its biggest IT launch in history. I'm not sure everyone will agree with that notion, but the launch of Windows Server 2008 and the next version of Visual Studio is clearly an important one for Microsoft, given that the server and tools unit has been one of Microsoft's fastest-growing businesses in terms of sales and profits (Microsoft is also 'launching' SQL Server 2008 at the event, but the product itself won't actually be ready until the second half of this year). Ahead of Wednesday's launch, I had a chance to talk with Server and Tools boss Bob Muglia. Here are some of the highlights from our interview."

Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.