Monthly Archive:: December 2008

IBM delves into what's new in PHP 5.3: Part-1 shows you the changes to the object-orientated capabilities, and Part-2 shows you the exciting new possibilities with real closures and lambda functions.

Microsoft and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs in Cambridge demoed their nifty NanoTouch, a small device fitting in the palm of one's hand, boasting a 2.4 inch screen and a touch pad on the back so as to utilize the small screen without having to block it with one's fingers. The developers say this technology could develop into electronic jewelry and high-tech clothing, though that NanoTouch looks an awful lot like one of those iPods or Zunes we keep hearing about. Anyone up for a touch-t-shirt with customizable images on front and back? You'd never have to buy another shirt again.

Palm recently announced over $500 million in losses, but then we all knew Palm wasn't too hot on the market these days despite their efforts to sell Windows Mobile devices. Palm is hoping to make a comeback, however, with new smartphones sporting Nova in 2009.

There might be a lot of companies stating that netbooks are just a fad, and that the whole thing will pass (Sony, Apple), but that isn't stopping several chip companies from putting serious effort into improving the performance of these small netbooks. NVIDIA, AMD, and VIA are all hard at work at improving several aspects of netbook computing.

From Phoronix: "Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative."

With ever increasing amounts of Javascript on the client side, maintenance is increased by duplicating business logic on the client side;"In this series, learn how to run JavaScript files on the server side, call remote JavaScript functions with Ajax, and use the Java Scripting API with the JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology." Part 1 of IBM's "Javascript EE" series- "Combine JavaScript with Java code on the server to get the freedom to use the same JavaScript routines on both servers and clients, and allow you to maintain a single code base for both Ajax and non-Ajax clients."

It was recently announced at the Android project website that the said mobile system would be receiving an update bringing to light many new features and various bug fixes. The Android team has already begun putting the new code on the public repositories under the "cupcake" branch. Some of the more notable new features and fixes include plentiful email and browser fixes, new video support, and even "basic x86 support," though we're not quite sure just where they're headed with that one.

I interviewed Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, who is the Community Manager for openSUSE and I asked him about his role in bringing this release to light and how the open source community drives this type of project.Full Story on DaniWeb

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.1. The openSUSE 11.1 release includes more than 230 new features, improvements to YaST, major updates to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and more freedom with a brand new license, Liberation fonts, and openJDK. This is also the first release built entirely in the openSUSE Build Service. Get it today!

Most of the attention has been going to Microsoft and its Internet Explorer web browser for having a severe zero-day security hole fixed, but Microsoft wasn't the only one hastily fixing its browser. Both Mozilla as well as Opera had to issue quick patches to fix several security flaws in their browsers.

IBM's primer to Cygwin. Cygwin is a UNIX-like environment for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Cygwin includes a real UNIX shell, a Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) emulation library, and thousands of UNIX utilities ported to Windows. Learn how to drop to Cygwin and use its UNIX-like command line to manipulate the system.

The French competition council has ordered the iPhone be opened up to other French carriers (Google-translated), breaking the exclusivity deal with Orange (France Telecom). The complaint was filed by France's third largest operator Bouygues Telecom who said that the deal violated local competition laws. Though the ruling is temporary whilst the issue is investigated further, the ruling did state that the arrangement reduced the effects of price competition, network quality and customer service.

Apple, which has outpaced the overall personal computer market this year despite its strategy of eschewing discounts, showed its first signs of weakness in November. NPD analyst Steve Baker blamed a 35% drop in sales of desktop Macs, noting growth in Apple's laptops still outpaced rivals . The decline marks a sharp reversal for Apple, which has enjoyed robust demand this year for its Macs, even as spending on Windows-based PCs slowed along with sales of other electronics like flat-panel TVs. Note by Kroc: With apologies to OSNews reader judgen for changing the news source provided from SmartHouse to WSJ.

Virtual Worlds User Interface for the Blind is a prototype user interface that enables blind users to participate in virtual world environments. It provides communication, navigation, and perception functions using GUI elements. As a way of enriching the virtual environment with descriptive semantic information, sighted users contribute annotations of virtual objects using a scripted gadget equipped by their avatar. These annotations are then made available to the blind users through the special user interface.