Monthly Archive:: December 2008

Python 3.0 Released

Submitted by J Bruno 2008-12-05 General Development 11 Comments

"Python 3.0 (a.k.a. 'Python 3000' or 'Py3k') is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed. Also, the standard library has been reorganized in a few prominent places." See what's new in Python 3.0 for differences between 2.x and 3.x.

Guest post by Flatland_Spider 2008-12-05 3D 8 Comments

Anand Lal Shimpi, founder of Anandtech.com, had the opportunity to sit down with Carrell Killebrew, Eric Demers, Mike Schmit and Mark Leather, collectivley known as the designers behind the current crop of AMD graphics chips, and quiz them about how the RV770 graphics chip came about. In the article, Anand recounts the history that influenced the chip's design and the obstacles that were overcome from his two hours meeting with the design team.

JavaFX 1.0 Released

Submitted by Stenley 2008-12-04 Java 66 Comments

Sun has released the first version of JavaFX, aptly named JavaFX 1.0. "JavaFX 1.0 returns to the sales pitch that Sun used during Java's launch more than 13 years ago: a foundation for software on a wide variety of computing "clients" such as desktop computers or mobile phones. JavaFX builds on current Java technology but adds two major pieces. First is a new software foundation designed to run so-called rich Internet applications--network-enabled programs with lush user interfaces. Second is a new programming language called JavaFX Script that's intended to be easier to use than traditional Java."

Widgets Enter the Third Dimension: WolfenQt

Submitted by Samuel RÃ¸dal 2008-12-04 Qt 6 Comments

This blog post on Qt Labs shows how to easily embed regular desktop widgets in a three dimensional Wolfenstein-like maze. The example includes web browser views, a mediaplayer with sound and video, OpenGL integration, and even a soldier scriptable in QtScript. All done in relatively simple code using Qt's QGraphicsView API. The example might not be directly usable by itself, but it demonstrates how easy it is to map 2D widgets to 3D scenes in Qt and could act as inspiration for future user interfaces.

One Flew Over the Songbird’s Nest

Kroc 2008-12-04 Editorial 59 Comments

Songbird is a new open-source music player that has this week landed at 1.0. Songbird is described as a "web player"- a music player for this modern, connected era. It blends the web-rendering core of Firefox (Gecko), with the media capabilities of GStreamer- a cross-platform, open-source media playback engine.

Submitted by nicoladagostino 2008-12-04 Apple 7 Comments

On StoriesofApple.net there's an exclusive interview with John T. Draper, better known as Captain Crunch, speaking about blue boxes, meeting and working with Wozniak and Jobs, the Charlie board and all of his business with Apple throughout the years. Related to this article, the latest addition to the OSNews team (who will step forward soon enough) supplied us with an interesting link to a story that shines a different light on John T. Draper.

Submitted by shaneco 2008-12-03 Microsoft 83 Comments

The month of December has already been unkind to Microsoft. The software giant's Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer browser saw significant market share drops reported on back-to-back days. Not only was the November percentage drop for Windows the biggest in two years, but Windows market share dipped below a number where it has historically held tight: 90 percent. According to Web metrics company, Net Applications, Windows market share as of Dec. 1 is 89.6 percent. Meanwhile, Mac OS X posted its largest gain in two years, with 8.9 percent market share at the end of November.

Real World Benchmarks of the ext4 File System

Submitted by Michael 2008-12-03 Benchmarks 18 Comments

The choice of filesystems on Linux is vast, but most people will stick with their respective distributions' default choices, which will most likely be ext3, but you're free to use ReiserFS, XFS, or something else completely if you so desire. Things are about to change though, with btrfs just around the corner. To bridge the gap between now and btfrs, ext3 has been updated to ext4, which adds some interesting features like extents, which are already in use in most other popular file systems. Phoronix decided it was time to do some performance checking on ext4.

Submitted by MechaShiva 2008-12-03 Solaris 22 Comments

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has been released. In addition to improvements in ZFS, DTrace, IPS (the new OpenSolaris package manager) and the other OpenSolaris specialties, it also ships with a host of other OSS goodies: Gnome 2.24, Firefox 3, CherryPy, MySQL, DTrace for Ruby and many more. This new release targets developers and desktop users as well as traditional server roles. Download the live cd and give it a spin. Release notes here.

Vista/Server 2008 SP2 Beta To Be Opened to Public

Thom Holwerda 2008-12-02 Windows 24 Comments

In late October, Microsoft announced the beta of the second service pack for Windows Vista and Server 2008. This beta was limited in audience, and today Microsoft has fixed that: it opened up the beta for MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and coming Thursday, it will be opened to the general public. The releases will be distributed via TechNet.

Apple Hits Psystar with DMCA Charges

Submitted by anon 2008-12-02 Legal 78 Comments

The legal back-and-forth between Apple and clone-maker PsyStar continues to develop, with the latest news being a move by Apple - the Cupertino company has invoked something with many already predicted Apple would call upon: the DMCA, or the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This was done in an amendment to the original suit, filed in July this year.

Red Hat Spacewalk Expands Linux Management

Thom Holwerda 2008-12-02 Red Hat 14 Comments

Red Hat's Spacewalk project is getting into place. The project wants to feed development of the Red Hat Network Satellite product for system management. Satellite is a critical tool for Red Hat users as it provides management capabilities for multiple servers for software deployment and updates. Almost six months ago, Red Hat kicked off the Spacewalk project in an effort to create an open source version of Network Satellite that would serve as the upstream project that drives development. According to Red Hat executives, Spacewalk is still in the process of getting aligned with Network Satellite releases in terms of the development model. As well, Spacewalk is now gearing up to replace Network Satellite's proprietary Oracle database backend with an open source database. It's all part of Red Hat's larger efforts to use the open source model effectively in all parts of its business, as well as reducing the costs associated with proprietary databases.

Debating 7: Randall Kennedy, Thom Holwerda

Thom Holwerda 2008-12-02 Windows 78 Comments

Two weeks ago, I published an article in which I explained what was wrong about Randall Kennedy's "Windows 7 Unmasked" article. This was noted by Infoworld's editor-in-chief Eric Knorr, who suggested that Randall and I enter into an email debate regarding the various points made in our articles. We agreed upon publishing this email thread as-is, unedited (I didn't even fix the spelling errors), on both Infoworld and OSNews. We agreed that Randall would start the debate, and that I had the final word. Read on for the entertaining email debate (I figured it would be best to give each email its own page, for clarity's sake. My apologies if this makes each individual page much shorter than what you're used to from OSNews).

Good OS Announces Cloud

amjith 2008-12-02 OS News 23 Comments

Good OS, a company well-known for it gOS linux distribution and their $199 Walmart computers has announced a new OS called "Cloud". Good OS described their new Operating System in a press release "Cloud uniquely integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the computer from inside the browser."

Submitted by linuxlinks 2008-12-01 Desktop environments 49 Comments

"Mainstream Linux distributions typically default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these environments provide users with an intuitive and attractive desktop, as well as offering a large raft of multimedia software, games, administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, artwork, web development tools and more. However, these two desktops focus more on providing users with a modern computing environment with all the bells and whistles featured in Windows Vista, rather than minimising the amount of system resources they need. For users and developers who want to run an attractive Linux desktop on older hardware, netbooks, or mobile internet devices, neither KDE or GNOME may be a viable option, as they run too slowly on low spec machines (such as less than 256MB RAM and a 1 GHz processor). This article seeks to identify the best lean desktops for Linux, for users that have old or even ancient hardware."

Etoile 0.4.0 Released

Submitted by Ian Dumych 2008-12-01 Desktop environments 15 Comments

There are lots of interesting desktop environments for X, other than the big ~~two~~ three GNOME, KDE, and Xfce. One of those is Etoile, a highly modular and leightweight environment based on GNUstep. Etoile is entirely project and document based, which means that you focus on your documents, and not on applications. Earlier this month - and we missed it, my apologies - the project released version 0.4.0.