Monthly Archive:: April 2008

MorphOS 2.0 Release Date Estimation

Submitted by -ujb- 2008-04-01 Morphos 9 Comments

MorphOS 2.0 got an official release date estimation now. According to the news section at the official MorphOS site a public release is estimated for Q2/2008. This release will support at least all computers by Genesi, such as the Pegasos 1 & 2, as well as the Efika.

Microsoft To Give XP Stay of Execution – for Budget Laptops

Thom Holwerda 2008-04-01 Windows 58 Comments

"What do you do if your flagship operating system isn't designed to run well on a popular new class of hardware? It's a problem currently faced by Microsoft. Budget laptops like the Asus Eee PC with minimal amounts of RAM, relatively slow CPUs, and solid state storage have proven popular, and Vista wasn't designed to operate well within such hardware confines. In response, Microsoft is reportedly planning to extend the availability of Windows XP for the budget laptop category."

Review: Windows Mobile 6.1

Thom Holwerda 2008-04-01 Wireless 3 Comments

PC Magazine has a review of Windows Mobile 6.1, released today. "Windows Mobile 6.1, the latest upgrade to Microsoft's main operating system for handhelds, has a few important invisible patches and a bunch of minor interface tweaks. It leaves all of Windows Mobile 6's core strengths and weaknesses intact. On the positive side, Windows Mobile is still a flexible OS with unparalleled Windows and Exchange support, and the greatest number of handset choices by far. No matter which carrier, manufacturer, or form factor you choose, you'll find a Windows Mobile device to suit your taste." Update: Ars reports that Microsoft has announced a desktop-grade browser for Windows Mobile, scheduled for Q3 2008.

Fools

Thom Holwerda 2008-04-01 Comics 7 Comments

Comic: "Fools".

Haiku Officially Self Hosting

Thom Holwerda 2008-04-01 Haiku 31 Comments

The Haiku project has reached a very important milestone. Bruno G. Albuquerque (bga) wrote the following note attached to a commit a few moments ago: "vnode_path_to_vnode() now returns B_NOT_A_DIRECTORY instead of B_NOT_ALLOWED as expected by POSIX programs. This allowed me to compile Haiku under itself without any hacks at all, so I guess this means that now we are officially self-hosting!" The official announcement can be found in the mailing list. In addition, there's a new Haiku alpha 1 status update.

Intel: ‘We Can Transform Single Thread to Multithread’

Submitted by Dan Warne 2008-04-01 Intel 30 Comments

Intel today revealed it can convert single threaded software to multithreaded mode without any code modification. The new 'speculative parallel threading' process monitors software and examines whether its processes can be run in parallel. If they can execute succesfully, the software can be recompiled to run as a multithreaded app. Intel says it has realised that programmers are going to need machine help to get software running as multithreaded. "We can't blame the programmers," an Intel spokesman said. "The industry has been complaining for 30 years about how difficult parallel programming is."

Submitted by RJop 2008-04-01 Gnome 35 Comments

Epiphany, GNOME's web browser, will drop support for the Gecko engine, focusing on WebKit instead. "we will choose only one web engine back-end to support and concentrate our efforts on it instead of spreading our efforts to multiple back-ends and restricting us to the common features all back-ends support. This single back-end will be WebKit." Assuming this is not an April Fool's joke, that is. Seriously, we ought to just shut down teh intertubes every April 1st. It's getting out of hand.