Monthly Archive:: February 2008

"Microsoft has reached a major milestone today for its Windows Server and Client products. Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service pack 1 have been released to manufacturing today which means they will soon be available to IT customers and consumers." Computerworld already has a review up, and claims there is much to like in Server 2008; eWeek is positive in their review too.

Ars posted their review of the MacBook Air. "Sure, there are other subnotebooks on the Windows side of the aisle that offer a variety of different configurations. There are ones with smaller screens that people love because they are even more portable. There are ones with built-in optical drives. There are ones with more ports. There are ones with more power. And there's nothing wrong with that, if that's what you want. But the MacBook Air is the only super-thin notebook that (legally) runs Mac OS X, and we feel that Apple did a decent job at figuring out how its users would use such a computer. It's not perfect by any means, and we hope to see Apple make improvements upon the Air with future iterations." AppleInsider has another review.

Intel has unveiled a slew of details on its portable and enterprise processors, new memory technologies and wireless development, as part of a 14-paper onslaught on the 2008 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which opened in San Francisco on Sunday.

Comic: "WTFs/m".

"Google invited developers to its London office for one of three workshops - the others being in Munich and Tel Aviv to spread the word and teach developers how to write for their new OS. Here's what they told us. The mantra for Android is that it's 'a complete and modern embedded OS, with a cutting edge mobile user experience, a world class software stack for building apps and open platform for developers users and industry'."

This article details the story of a KDE-loving software engineer who was forced to use Windows for his job. "His only hope was that he knew Qt was cross compatible with Windows Linux and Mac, and there was talk that someday, KDE was to be ported to Windows. So he waited. Well, KDE4 was announced and there was much joy. Betas were released and there was much bitching. KDE4.0.0 was released and there again was much joy (and still a little bitching). More importantly an actual honest to goodness Windows port is released. Here follows that engineer's report."

"A week ago we reported that a second preview release of Project Indiana, Sun's attempt at creating an operating system for the desktop based upon OpenSolaris and led by Ian Murdock, was on track to be released in the near future. Thursday afternoon that became true with the test image surfacing for Developer Preview 2 of Project Indiana, or what will formally be called OpenSolaris. Officially, this new release is known as the OpenSolaris Developer Preview 1/08 edition. The general availability release of Project Indiana is expected in March, but today we have up a tour of this new Indiana release."

Comic: "Hands".

"At a recent Australian Linux conference, Sam Varghese reported that two Debian developers pointed out that the Debian Project needs more corporate support for 'men, money and machines' to advance the operating system. They're right. It does. They also pointed out that many companies, such as HP, IBM, Silicon Graphics and Google, either use Debian Linux internally, or actually incorporate it into products. For example, HP uses Debian 'Etch' 4.0 in its new t5735 thin-client device. Right again. Debian, either directly or through related Linux distributions such as Xandros, is used both by Linux enthusiasts and Fortune 500 companies. Of course, you couldn't prove that by the vast majority of Debian developers who never see a thin dime from their Debian work. Or, I should add, get access to new hardware, travel expenses to Debian developer conferences and so on."

"Ext4, being the successor to ext3, may well be the filesystem many of us are using a few years from now. Things have been relatively quiet on that front - at least, outside of the relevant mailing lists - but the ext4 developers have not been idle. Some of their work has now come to the surface with Ted Ts'o's posting of the ext4 merge plans for 2.6.25."

"Does Microsoft have an open-source strategy - beyond finding new ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary wares? Sam Ramji, Microsoft's Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company's Open Source Software Lab, says it does. I met with Ramji last week when he was passing through New York on his way to Europe, and had a chance to ask him to provide a succinct definition of what Microsoft means when it refers to its own 'open-source strategy'."

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for USD 44.6bn in cash and shares. The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo's board, is 62% above Yahoo's closing share price on Thursday. Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional USD 300m this year trying to revive the company. It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft. Update: More here.

At the Linux.Conf.Au conference today, Intel has announced NDA-free programming documentation covering the 965 Express and G35 Express IGPs. Intel's display driver has long been open-source, but up until now, they have not been releasing the programming documentation for these products to the public. This move comes months after AMD announced their new open-source strategy and began releasing register documentation on their R500 and R600 GPUs. These newly released documents by Intel even cover 3D and video programming for their IGPs.

Comic: "Cube"