Monthly Archive:: April 2008

GoboLinux 014.01 has been released. "We are pleased to introduce GoboLinux 014.01, the new release of GoboLinux, the Linux distribution featuring a rethought file system structure. This release is our first 'point release', providing a stability update for our latest major release, GoboLinux 014, which was released three months ago."

The releases just keep on coming, don't they? The GNUstep live CD has been updated "The GNUstep live CD contains a lot of software for GNUstep, a free implementation of the OPENSTEP framework (which was also the base as Cocoa in Mac OS X)." The GNUstep page can tell you more about GNUstep itself.

"It's easy to view the computer interface as nearly static. Since the advent of mouse-driven, windowed interfaces over 20 years ago, much of human-computer interface (HCI) has gone the same route. But a proliferation of mobile devices is beginning to change that and, even if that weren't the case, important differences are developing in what information is available to computers, and how we access it. In March 2007, Microsoft Research invited 45 leading researchers to discuss where HCI would be in 2020; a report summarizing their conclusions has now been made available."

A first release candidate of version 4.4 of Qt, the cross-platform C++ development toolkit, was released today. Thiago Macieira says that this is considered release quality and good enough to use for most tasks. Major new features include support for Windows CE, a WebKit-based HTML rendering module (WebKit is based on KHTML and used in Safari), a Phonon-based multimedia module, XQuery 1.0 (and thus XPath 2.0) support in XML, a concurrency framework allowing multi-threading without the mutexes needed previously, and a new help system. Downloads are available (source, Windows and Mac installers) from Trolltech.

"Testing 64-bit performance is still a somewhat dicey proposition. Major benchmarks are either lacking, or don't work properly. For example, SYSmark 2007 simply doesn't run on a 64-bit OS (Vista or XP). And while there's now a 3ds Max 9 SPECapc benchmark, the benchmark crashes consistently with a scripting error before it completes when running on 3ds Max 9 64-bit under Vista 64-bit. On the other hand, there are more 64-bit applications and benchmarks now. That system-sapping game, Crysis, ships with a 64-bit client. 3ds Max 9, Lightwave 9, POV-Ray, and the Cinebench rendering benchmark all have 64-bit versions. Futuremark's PCMark Vantage offers a 64-bit version of that Vista-centric, synthetic test. On top of that, anyone using 64-bit Vista will still be running a lot of 32-bit applications. So we benchmarked some of those as well. Let's take a look at the benchmarks and test system."

From a Microsoft press release: "AT&T will become the first company in the world to bring Microsoft Surface to life in a retail environment, giving customers the ability to explore their mobile worlds using touch and device recognition technology. Microsoft Surface is the first commercially available surface computer from Microsoft. Beginning April 17, customers can experience Microsoft Surface in select AT&T retail locations, including stores in New York City, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco. Based on the success and learning from these initial pilot deployments, plans for further expansion across AT&T's 2200 US retail stores will be determined."