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Monthly Archive:: January 2009

Game Review: Lost Odyssey, XBox 360

After our article on modern gaming a while ago, we decided to dive futher into gaming. That's why I met up with one of my friends, and asked him if he could loan me the best game he had for his XBox 360. Maybe I should have been a bit more specific, I thought, because when he came over, before I knew it, he shoved a Japanese RPG in my console. This would be my first foray into the strange, magical, and disturbed world of the Japanese RPG. Read on for a review of Lost Odyssey.

Apple Soars Past First-Quarter Earnings Expectations

Apple reported first-quarter earnings significantly higher than analysts had expected coming off a disappointing holiday season for most tech companies, but provided its usual conservative guidance. For the three-month period ended December 27, Apple recorded $10.2 billion in revenue, as compared with $9.6 billion a year ago, and net income of $1.6 billion, as compared with $1.58 billion a year ago. That translates into earnings per share of $1.78, far more than the $1.39 in earnings per share that analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial had expected. Expected revenue was $9.75 billion.

Mono 2.2 May Overtake .NET in Some Critical Categories

The Mono Project releases version 2.2 this week with full support for SIMD extensions being one of the more interesting features (Betanews article). The extension allows SIMD code to be accelerated above and beyond the speed of past Mono and current .NET releases. Johnathan Allen from InfoQ impresses the significance of the latest Mono release in a blog entry. "It represents something bigger; Mono is outgrowing the standard. Mono is not just playing catch-up any more, it is trying to move past the CLR in many areas. And as an open source project, they can slip in new libraries at a much faster clip than Microsoft. Instead of trying to build everything themselves, they can simply pick up mature projects like Mono. Options or the collection library C5 and include them in the standard release."

Apple Updates White MacBook, Releases QuickTime 7.6

If you thought that Apple kept the white MacBook around only temporarily, you thought wrong. The white MacBook remained on Apple's product listing, despite the introduction of the newer and faster unibody MacBooks. The newer MacBooks were more expensive than the white model, so Apple kept it around to serve the budget market. To confirm that the low-end MacBook will be around for a while, the company updated the machine today.

Corsair Enters Solid State Disk Race

On September 30, 2008 Fudzilla reported that memory manufacturer Corsair did not think the time was right to enter the SSD market, but they were watching the market closely. A little under four months later, Corsair feels the time is right to enter the SSD market. Hexus.net reports the 128GB drive will be named the S128, and it will feature Samsung flash memory and a Samsung controller. Corsair decided to use the Samsung controller over a JMicron controller due to problems with the latter. Even though the drive has not been announced by Corsair, Scan.co.uk has it listed as well as NCIX.

New Features in OpenOffice.org 3.1, an Early Look

OpenOffice.org 3.1 is 65 days away, and developers are finishing up more than 1000 issues targeted for this Microsoft-Office-killer packing an army of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Major new features include antialiased drawings, solid dragging, translucent selections in Writer, improvements in Chart axes and labels, improved grammar checking, macros and full support for SQL including syntax highlighting in Base, and many more.

Should You Move to 64Bit?

We've been able to drop the world of 32bit for a while now, with 64bit processors and support for them being prevalent in all popular, modern operating systems. However, where Mac OS X and Linux seem to make the move to 64bit rather effortlessly, Windows has more problems. Even though 32bit applications should run fine on 64bit Windows, some don't; and to make matters worse, drivers need to be 64bit, as there's no support for 32bit drivers in 64bit versions of Windows. Still, Gizmodo claims that with Windows 7, the time is right to take the plunge. But really, is it so? And why do Linux and Mac OS X seem to handle the transition so much easier?

Windows Embedded, on Your Desktop

The future of Windows is clearly Windows 7. But what if you could get a smaller footprint, way better battery life than Vista or XP (think days, not hours), and everything else your little heart desires already? You can, and even better, you have been able to for a while.

New Volume Control Interface for GNOME

Phoronix has a overview of the new volume control interface for GNOME currently in development. "One of the items being worked on by Red Hat for Fedora 11 is making the GNOME volume control and sound preferences area more intuitive and easier to use. With Fedora and most other distributions now using PulseAudio, they are beginning to take advantage of some of the features available through this sound server. Some of this work involves reworking the user interface for controlling GNOME Sound Preferences, which we are providing a glimpse of in this article. Among other benefits, there is finally the ability to adjust the volume level on a per-application basis."

More Information on Next-Generation Atom Chip

We already reported on the fact that updated Intel Atom chips are expected to arrive somewhere in the second half of 2009. With the Atom being Intel's only platform that's actually profitable, it makes sense for the chip maker to focus a lot of effort into improving the platform. Information provided by the usually-reliable DigiTimes points to some serious improvements making their way to Intel's Atom chip. The new chip is codenamed Pineview.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Released

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, the third update to the current stable version. "In the third update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support and incorporation of OpenJDK Java technologies. Customers with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription will receive the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 update, which is available for immediate download from Red Hat Network." More information including a short video explaining the new features via the subscription model is available here.

Drives Fail at High Rates, Seagate Offers Solutions

A recent unusual rise in Seagate Barracuda 1 TB hard drive fatalities got the company's attention as many customers were angry at the loss of their new drives. The Seagate forum was overrun with users asking for help and complaining of this "plague" that seemed to grip the drives made in Thailand and distributed to most major consumer countries throughout the world, but no one seemed to be able to find the answer-- directly from Seagate or elsewhere. In response to the epidemic, the company has isolated the "potential firmware issue" responsible and has provided a firmware upgrade to those who purchased the drive. Though the data remains intact on the affected drives (the hard drives simply locked up and became unusable), Seagate is also offering free data recovery to anyone who bought the drive and lost data afterwards.

Developer’s-Eye View of Smartphone Platforms

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner surveys the development landscape for six smartphone platforms. The survey -- which includes the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm -- shows how wide open the mobile development field has become. 'Unlike the desktop world, there are more than a few players, and the niches are evolving, merging, and splitting,' Wayner writes. 'Some of the platforms are better for tightly integrated enterprises, while others offer much better opportunities for gamers and experimenters. Some require the highest-end hardware with the most expensive contracts, while others work well with cheap phones too.' Throughout the survey, Wayner offers insights and questions to help you target the right device, as well as extensive tips for pursuing the cross-platform option: Web apps for smartphones.

EFI-X Dumps US Partner

We've already covered EFI-X a few times on OSNews. It's a boot processing unit that implements a working version of EFI, allowing you to boot all sorts of operating systems - including Mac OS X, without having to hack Apple's OS, meaning all updates will work flawlessly. And this is exactly where the problem lies: the company that makes the EFI-X, Arts Studio Entertainment Media, doesn't want to be associated in any way with people using the device to install Mac OS X. In fact, ASEM has stated that it will sue anyone who sells the EFI-X pre-installed in a machine that violates another company's terms of use, for instance by including a pre-installed copy of Mac OS X. EFI-X USA LLC (unrelated to ASEM), has done exactly this, and that's why ASEM severed its connections with the US company.