Monthly Archive:: March 2009

More and more rumours and bits of news are making their to the web about Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard operating system. With the date set for Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in early June (as usual), rumours have shifted focus away from features, but towards Snow Leopard's release date. AppleInsider now claims to have the answer.

The Fedora team has announced the Fedora 11 beta release. It comes packed with new features, such as Ext4 as the default filesystem, Nouveau driver by default, kernel mode setting on Intel, ATI and Nvidia drivers, many virtualization improvements, IBus input method, GCC 4.4, and much more.

Many have gotten antsy the past months about the Conficker worm, and all with good reason. Though the worm hasn't done much of anything (yet) except spread like the plague, it's infectious if one doesn't have his or her Windows operating system up-to-date with the most recent security updates. The worm is supposed to execute on April 1st, and the computer world is holding its breath to see if a disaster comparable to the hyped-up supposed Y2K doomsday will ensue or if it's just someone's idea of a sick April Fool's Day joke.

Not only can this nifty old-school 8-bit computer play all of your old NES games (with a converter, of course), but you can also program your own mind-challenging games, stimulating chiptune music, and "circuit-bending art" with this affordable keyboard, mouse, and controller combination. The package includes the keybaord, mouse, two game controllers, an OS cartridge (containing a GUI in Madarin Chinese as well as an English DOS prompt, BASIC programming language and sprite manipulator, and an 8-bit music composer), RCA cables, and a nine-volt power supply. What's more is that it ships in 3-5 business days, so you can relive the golden days of Saturday mornings with the NES before the week is out.

The Mono guys have released Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0. "We just released two big projects we have been working on for quite a while. Mono 2.4 is a much faster, scalable and tuned version of Mono, like you have never seen before. Major highlights from the previous release are documented in our release notes."

Navigation device maker TomTom and Microsoft have resolved their patent dispute by entering into a settlement agreement out-of-court. The outcome of the agreement is that TomTom will license the infringed patents, but that they will remove the encumbered code from their implementation of the Linux kernel within two years.

Any discussion about GNOME vs. KDE is sure to end in tears. It's basically impossible to discuss which of these two Free desktop environments is better than the other, mostly because they cater to different types of people, with different needs and expectatotions. As such, Bruce Byfield decided to look at the two platforms from a different perspective: if we consider their developmental processes, which of the two is most likely to be more successful in the coming years?

"If you have spent enough time around Linux it's almost certain you know about the file systems ext2 and ext3, and have probably heard of ext4. Get ready to hear some more. On October 11, 2008, the 'experimental' label for ext4 was removed. While this doesn't necessarily mean that you should change all of your file systems over to ext4 immediately, it does mean that you should consider using ext4 moving forward. With the 'experimental' label gone and openSUSE (among others) considering it for the default file system in a late-2009 release, it's a good time to review ext4 so you have a solid working knowledge of what it is and what features it brings to the table."

The team behind the eCos operating system has released version 3.0. eCos is an open source real-time operating system for the embedded market. eCos can run on systems with only a few tens or hundreds of kilobytes of RAM, is written in C, and has support for POSIX and µITRON.

"ThinkPads are well known for the quality of their keyboards. This has long been a strength of the ThinkPad brand, but when we say how good ThinkPad keyboards are we almost always implicitly mean 'relative to the keyboards on other laptops'. That might not be the case for everyone though, because the ThinkPad Full-Size UltraNav USB Keyboard is currently available for sale and it is a testament to how attached people have become to these keyboards."

I had prepared myself to experience the world's best game. Judging by other people's reviews, Grand Theft Auto 4 was crafted in a special gaming studio in heaven, authored by Jesus Christ himself, and it descended upon us from the heavens on a golden chariot made out of chocolate covered in fairy dust. Imagine my surprise when I experienced the world's biggest turd in gaming since Davilex' A2 Racer (Dutch people will understand).

Some weeks ago the popular AROS distribution VmwAROS has changed name into Icaros Desktop, for two reasons: to avoid confusion with VMware-related products, and to better focus on the "Live" version, which runs on top of real hardware. This new release, Icaros Desktop 1.1, the first with the new name, has got many enhancements over the previous ones.

Nvidia filed a countersuit against Intel for breach of contract yesterday, in which it alleged Intel had made misleading statements in an effort to weaken the graphics chipmaker's licensing rights. The suit is also seeking to kill off Intel's licence to Nvidia's graphic processing and 3D computing patents. "Having breached the contract and irreparably injured Nvidia, Intel has lost the right to continue to enjoy the considerable benefit of its license to Nvidia's patent portfolio," reads the filing.

"Two Middle Americans have sued Acer over its low-cost Aspire notebooks, claiming that the Taiwanese PC giant pre-installed Windows Vista on machines ill-equipped to run Microsoft's latest OS. With a lawsuit filed Wednesday in San Francisco, California, two residents of Fostoria, Ohio seek damages and relief from the world's third-largest computer maker after purchasing a sub-$600 Aspire notebook that included Windows Vista Premium and a gigabyte of shared system and graphics memory."