Monthly Archive:: March 2009

With the infamous PWN2OWN contest drawing ever closer, the heat is ramping up. This year's instalment pitches Apple's Safari (on the Mac), Google's Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox (all on Windows 7) against one another, while also allowing crackers to take on mobile platforms. Last year's winner, Charlie Miller, who won by cracking Mac OS X within minutes last year, says Safari on the Mac will be the first to fall.

Ertan D. has managed to install and run Android on the Dell Axim X51v, and there's a video demonstrating the working system, complete with a lovely sound track to keep one company. Android currently isn't completely friendly with the handheld computer as it still lacks WiFi support and has some power management issues (to name a few), but it's still a good beginning. Though the Axim was discontinued several years ago and is aging and getting more and more out of date when compared to today's mobile devices, the X51v still packs a punch with its 624 MHz processor, 3.7-inch VGA screen, and 2700G graphics processor. Ertan hopes to develop the project further to a point when Android can be a viable replacement OS to Windows Mobile 5 on the X51v.

InformationWeek reports that Red Hat is being sued for patent infringement by Software Tree. The patent involved is of an impedance-matching layer between an object-oriented system and a relational database. "Red Hat acquired open source developer JBoss in 2006 for $420 million. Software Tree contends that certain of Red Hat's JBoss products, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Hibernate, step on its patent. 'The infringing products have no substantial noninfringing uses,' Software Tree says in court papers. The lawsuit also names Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Genuitec as defendants because the companies sell JBoss-based software or include it on their products." This is not the first time Red Hat has been sued over JBoss technology. A previous suit was the first public GPL compatible patent settlement and protected not only Red Hat but downstream users and developers as well.

For Windows 7, Microsoft has made some changes to User Account Control to counter the criticism that UAC was too intrusive. It didn't take long before several holes were poked in Windows 7's default UAC settings, and now one is left to wonder: is it wise to sacrifice security for (perceived?) usability? Ars has an editorial that deals with this question.

The KDE team has released KDE 4.2.1. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Cream", (a.k.a KDE 4.2.1), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop." You can wait for your distribution to package it, or download it yourself.

To add to the amounting anecdotes of late, another Acer Aspire One review appears. Not to be confused with Thom's or Eugenia's, which were different models, this review concentrates on the ZG5 version of the Acer Aspire One and how well Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu 8.10, and Moblin 2 run on it, particularly in the everyday-netbooker's sense of functionality with word processing and Internet applications. Read on to get the full scoop on the One and these selected systems.

Well, it's a bit of a Microsoft day today, for better or worse. In any case, the European Commission has announced that it will scale back its monitoring of Microsoft. According to the EC, Microsoft has made progress in complying with the 2004 Statement of Objections - in fact, the company has already provided all the necessary documentation required by the EC's ruling.

Microsoft has released the release candidate for Vista's second service pack to the public. "Microsoft has released the Release Candidate build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to the public. The build number is 6002.16670.090130 and it contains 691 hotfixes."

NVIDIA's aspirations to enter the general purpose processor market may never have been clearly spelled out by the company before, but it was getting more and more obvious as each week passed by. Now, it's pretty much official: NVIDIA says it's not a question of "if", but "when".

The Engineering 7 blog has a post on how Microsoft hopes to ensure application compatibility between Windows Vista and Windows 7. "Delivering a new release of Windows includes a major effort to insure that applications continue to function as well on the new release as they have on the previous release. At the PDC we talked about some of the new areas of Windows Vista that reduced this level of compatibility, such as changes we made around the OS security model. With Windows 7 we renewed our engineering efforts to maintain compatibility. As with device testing, compatibility testing is an effort that spans the entire engineering organization, though we also have a group that is dedicated to this effort."

We have found the device of your dreams. Make no mistake: this is what OSNews readers have always wanted. You are going to buy this device, in droves. Trust me, as far as geekness goes, this is pretty much the best it'll ever get. Fully open source (from hardware to software), easily servicable, runs Linux, has an ARM processor, accelerometer, powerful 3D capabilities, 10-15 hours of battery life, touchscreen, and internal USB ports. And you know what? I didn't even mention the best part: the keyboard of the Touch Book netbook is detachable, leaving you with a 8.9" tablet. And all that for USD 299!

Just as everyone suspected, Apple updated its various lines of desktop computers today, bringing speed and performance improvements across the board. Mac Pro, iMac, and the Mac Mini were all upgraded, and especially for the Mini, it was a long time coming. The Mac Pro sees the most changes.

Nokia today announced the availability of version 4.5 of the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework. It also introduced Qt Creator, a new lightweight cross-platform IDE. Qt 4.5 and Qt Creator combined comprises the Qt SDK, an easy to install package that will let developers create applications quickly and easily. "Qt 4.5 is setting the benchmark for application development," said Benoit Schillings, Chief Technologist, Qt Software, Nokia (and for those who remember, one of the original BeOS developers). It's also the first release of Qt under the LGPL.

Not only has Intel teamed up TSMC to produce Atom CPUs, the company has also unveiled four Atom chips that will go into devices such as entertainment systems for cars, videoconferencing devices, robots and interactive kiosks. "The Z500-series Atom processors are integrated chips the size of a penny that draw little power and do not require fans to operate. The chips draw 2.5 watts of power or less and run at speeds of between 1.10GHz and 1.6GHz. They offer integrated 2D and 3D graphics and will be manufactured using Intel's existing 45-nanometer process."