Monthly Archive:: November 2008

Strike one for Apple. Curling is a better sport anyway - the first end goes to Apple. The Cupertino company sued clone maker PsyStar for licensing and trademark violations and copyright infringement, only to be greeted by a counter lawsuit from PsyStar, who claimed Apple was a monopolist. U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with Apple on the counter lawsuit Tuesday. In his 16-page decision Tuesday, Alsup ruled Apple's products don't constitute a market to dominate. As a consequence, Apple then can't be considered a monopolist, Alsup wrote. An Apple spokesman had no comment. A representative for Psystar couldn't be reached for comment. The original lawsuit is still running, so PsyStar can, for now, continue selling its clones.

The new 0.4 version of Etoile had just been released. Etoile intends to be an innovative, GNUstep-based, user environment built from the ground up on highly modular and light components. It is created with project and document orientation in mind, in order to allow users to create their own workflow by reshaping or recombining provided Services (aka Applications) and Components. 0.4 is a developer-targeted release on its way towards this goal. As a developer-focussed release, this predominantly consists of frameworks. A few demonstration applications are also included.

Microsoft has released an initial release of version 2.0 of the Singularity operating system (research development kit, as it likes to call it). Singularity is a microkernel research operating system, where the kernel, drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Singularity is released under a shared source academic license, and you can do whatever you want with it, except making money (simply put).

Unveiled on Monday by the USB Implementers Forum, the USB 3.0 spec can theoretically support data-transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbps - 10 times the speed provided by USB 2.0. The new standard, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is also expected to be more power-efficient than its predecessor. "SuperSpeed USB is the next advancement in ubiquitous technology," Jeff Ravencraft, the president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that promotes USB technology, said in a statement on Monday. "Today's consumers are using rich media and large digital files that need to be easily and quickly transferred from PCs to devices and vice versa. SuperSpeed USB meets the needs of everyone, from the tech-savvy executive to the average home user."

"Apple has shown terrific growth over the past decade after virtually collapsing in the early 90s. However, one segment that it has never really been able to win back is the business sector. Not since the days of Apple IIe's or further back has Apple really enjoyed strong business adoption. And the business sector, consisting of everything from business laptops, to servers and business phones, is a huge revenue source so this was a big loss for Apple. However, Apple's hottest gadget, the iPhone is finally starting to win Apple a following in the business community."

One of those traditional "I'm a user of abc, trying out xyz" articles. This time, a Mac user tries Ubuntu 8.10, and concludes: "Linux has come a long way, but it's not totally ready for the mom and pop folks, in my opinion. In the two days of testing, with two occasions it refused to load the graphic drivers and I could not enjoy Compiz. I found a tutorial which taught me how to modify xorg.conf to load XGL (I suspect that messing with the resolution of the second screen might have overwritten the xorg.conf file). Even so, I'd say Ubuntu 8.10 is a fantastic operating system. I guess it may take a while to tweak an Ubuntu installation to perfection, especially for more demanding users. I will recommend Ubuntu to everyone who can't afford a Mac, are not into heavy media content creation or hard-core gaming."