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Monthly Archive:: February 2009

Photos: Inside the Palo Alto Research Center

"The Palo Alto Research Center was built here by Xerox in the early 1970s and was chartered with creating information architecture to serve as a West Coast center of research and development for the company. Linda Jacobson, PARC's communications and marketing manager, recently showed CNET News around the now-independent facility where laser printing and Ethernet networking - among many other innovations - got their start. Come along on our tour."

Snow Leopard: ZFS Server Only, Printer Drivers on Demand

Some more details concerning Apple's upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard release are trickling onto the web. First of all, as expected, Snow Leopard will include more thorough support for ZFS, but it's reserved for the server releases. In addition to that, printer drivers on Snow Leopard will be delivered on demand, shaving off a few gigabytes of space off a default Mac OS X installation. The drivers will be obtained via Software Update if necessary.

Linux Can Rule Cloud Computing

You can't read a technical Web site these days without some mention of so-called cloud computing. Cloud computing gives users access to massive computing and storage resources without them having to know where those resources are or how they're configured. This article discusses the anatomy of cloud computing and how Linux and the open source community contribute to the world of cloud computing. As you might have guessed, Linux and open source technologies play a huge role.

BeOS Lives: Haiku Impresses

Back when it was becoming clear that the time of the BeOS had come and gone, enthusiasts immediately set up the OpenBeOS project, an attempt to recreate the Be operating system from scratch, using a MIT-like license. The project faced difficult odds, and numerous times progress seemed quite slow. Still, persistence pays off, and the first alpha release is drawing ever closer. We decided to take a look at where Haiku currently stands.

AMD Launches New X3, X4 Parts; Debuts DDR3 on Socket AM3

"The ink is barely dry on AMD's Socket AM2 Phenom II launch, but Sunnyvale is making up for lost time when it comes to debuting new products. On Monday, February 9, the CPU manufacturer released a total of five new Phenom II-class processors, all of which are classified as Socket AM3 parts. Unlike Socket AM2 chips, which are only compatible with DDR2 memory, Socket AM3 CPUs can use either RAM standard and drop neatly into either motherboard. The backwards-compatibility of Socket AM3 chips should make them quite attractive to anyone upgrading an older Athlon 64 X2 or even a Phenom part; AMD's Phenom II (aka Deneb) offers a number of significant performance and thermal improvements over the ill-fated Phenom I. Remember that backward compatibility only goes one direction - AM2+ processors will not work in AM3 boards."

Small Win Psystar, Judge Hints at Consequences if Psystar Wins

The legal case between Apple and Psystar has just taken another, very small turn. Psystar gained a small victory over Apple today, because U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup allowed Psystar to modify its counter-suit against Apple, after he had dismissed the original counter-suit. However, something more interesting came out of this ruling: the judge hinted at what would happen if Psystar were to win.

The Incredible Shrinking Operating System

The center of gravity is shifting away from the traditional, massive operating systems of the past, as even the major OSes are slimming their footprint to make code bases easier to manage and secure, and to increase the variety of devices on which they can run, InfoWorld reports. Microsoft, for one, is cutting down the number of services that run at boot to ensure Windows 7 will run across a spectrum of hardware. Linux distros such as Ubuntu are stripping out functionality, including MySQL, CUPS, and LDAP, to cut footprints in half. And Apple appears headed for a slimmed-down OS X that will enable future iPhones or tablet devices to run the same OS as the Mac. Though these developments don't necessarily mean that the browser will supplant the OS, they do show that OS vendors realize they must adapt as virtualization, cloud computing, netbooks, and power concerns drive business users toward smaller, less costly, more efficient operating environments.

On Keyboards, and Particularly the Apple Aluminum Keyboard

Lately I bought the Apple Aluminum Keyboard, and thought people might be interested in how it worked out after extended use. It was bought because it is quiet. If your priority is quietness, its far and away the best that's readily available. Tried out in a store you could tell it would do the trick on quietness. It seemed it would probably be OK to type on. But this is something you only find out by long sessions.

AMD Shanghai Opteron: Linux vs. OpenSolaris Benchmarks

"In January we published a review of the AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs on Linux- when we looked at four of the Opteron 2384 models. The performance of these 45nm quad-core workstation/server processors were great when compared to the earlier AMD Barcelona processors on Ubuntu Linux, but how is their performance when running Sun's OpenSolaris operating system? Up for viewing today are dual AMD Shanghai benchmarks when running OpenSolaris 2008.11, Ubuntu 8.10, and a daily build of the forthcoming Ubuntu 9.04 release."

WebKit Gets CSS Animation

"WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS. CSS Animations is one of the enhancements to CSS proposed by the WebKit project that we've been calling CSS Effects (eg. gradients, masks, transitions). The goal is to provide properties that allow Web developers to create graphically rich content. In many cases animations are presentational, and therefore belong in the styling system. This allows developers to write declarative rules for animations, replacing lots of hard-to-maintain animation code in JavaScript."

Feel-good and Working on a Dream

No major events of announcements this week, but that doesn't mean we didn't have any interesting content the past 7 days. The steady stream of news about Windows 7 continues to flow, while the netbook stream dried up a bit. We also some very interesting releases this week, such as the latest ReactOS and a new JNode release. Linus Torvalds made headline news once again because of his comments about having multiple Linux distributions, and it became clear SGI is in trouble yet again. This week's My Take is about working on a dream.

German PearC Sells Macintosh Clones

US resident already had the pleasure/disgrace (take your pick) of buying non-Apple computers with Mac OS X pre-installed through PsyStar. European customers were left out in the cold, as PsyStar is a US-based company which undoubtedly makes shipping across the pond rather expensive. Despair no longer, European clone enthusiasts: German PearC is here.

Fedora 11 Alpha Comes With Huge Feature Set

Fedora 11 Alpha was released a couple of days back. Phoronix takes a quick look "While a few delays were experienced by the Red Hat engineers and community working on Fedora 11 (a.k.a. Leonidas), the first alpha release of this popular Linux distribution is now available. The 11th release of Fedora will bring a huge set of new features and updated packages, with much of the work already being visible in Fedora 11 Alpha." "Starting with the installation, Fedora 11 is now using the EXT4 file-system by default but there is support built into the Anaconda installer for Btrfs, which recently entered the mainline Linux kernel."

Blood Frontier: The Latest Open-Source FPS

Blood Frontier is a hot new free and open source first person shooter with original artwork and based on the Cube 2 engine. Phoronix takes a look "Blood Frontier is based upon the Sauerbraten engine and takes advantage of the features like a 6-direction height field world model, real-time map editing, light-maps, shader-based lighting effects, integrated physics support, and a particle engine. Like Cube and Cube 2, Blood Frontier uses OpenGL and SDL, which makes it multi-platform friendly with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X." Read more