Monthly Archive:: April 2009

In the current economic climate, it's hard to make any sane predictions one way or the other. While we receive continuous reports that netbooks are the saving grace of the PC market, the light at the end of the tunnel, the beacon of hope, the Fiona Apple among the rest of the mediocre musician crowd, the, err, (okay I'm out of metaphors), we are now getting a report which states that during the first quarter of 2009, netbooks have not met their sales estimates.

Instant-On is an attractive to have for any system, but most commercial OSs haven't been able to accomplish this. Users are generally left waiting the few minutes to boot, and for some people in a hurry, that's simply not good enough. The aptly named program known as Presto is available for $19.95, and is installable on most any Windows computers. It installs a Xandros-based partition and boots up quite instantly. "Presto allows on-the-fly computing to check email, browse the web, chat with friends, make Skype calls, create documents, download media, apps and games, or enjoy music, videos, and movies stored in a user’s Windows folders." I'd say that's worth $20, and they're also offering to work with OEMs to get it on new computers on a mass scale.

"RISCOS Ltd gets fired at from all sides, it seems. There are those who have RISC OS 5 and are fed up with RISCOS Ltd saying: "Yes, we want to do RISC OS Select on Iyonix, but..." Then there are those who have subscribed to ROL's Select scheme, but the features they want have not been implemented or they are frustrated by a lack of progress. It is fair to say ROL has made a large number of improvements to the OS over the years and many of these are 'under the hood' that are not always immediately obvious to users. There have been a few obvious user-facing improvements since the release of RISC OS 6, as part of Select 5, so let's take a look at these."

"Reflecting a strong 2008 in which its sales - if not its stock price - jumped sharply, Apple this week made its first appearance in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 since Steve Jobs' return. Apple became a Fortune 500 company in 1983, but it fell off Fortune magazine's list of America's 500 largest companies (ranked by revenue) in 1995, while Jobs was running NeXT. Apple climbed back onto the list in 2005, eight years after Jobs' return. It vaulted an impressive 32 spots this year to land at No. 71, thanks in part to the declining fortunes of some of the firms that were above it, but mostly to revenues that grew 35.3% to $32.479 billion in 2008."

Most netbooks and laptops are bland and boring, with none of them having any unique selling points that make them stand out from the crowd. Every now and then, however, a device comes along that looks like any other, but comes with something special that makes it stand out. The Sharp Mebius is one of those netbooks: it comes with an LCD touchpad.

Red Hat today published a new study together with Georgia Tech mapping open source activity across 75 countries. Officially called the Open Source Index (OSI), the final score is made of a number of factors including policies, practices in the Government, Industry, and Community. Topping the list current is France with a score of 1.35. Spain is second at 1.07, Germany third at 1.05.

After being admitted to the hospital earlier today, the health situation of Professor Stephen Hawking has improved, and he is now "comfortable" according to a spokesperson of the University of Cambridge in the UK. He was admitted into the hospital today after "chest problems", and university spokespeople stated he was "very ill".

With today's surprise announcement that Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems, several questions were raised as to some Sun products, including MySQL, Solaris, and OpenOffice.org. Browsing around the net, there are several viewpoints on the future of these Sun products, and the OpenOffice.org team has even issued a statement itself.

We've been debating the merits of a possible IBM-Sun deal for a while now, and even Sun itself seemed to be in the dark as to if it would be a good idea to be bought by IBM. These debates are now all moot: in a surprise move (at least, I didn't see any speculation about it) Oracle has bought Sun Microsystems, at USD 9.50 a share, which equates to a total of 7.4 billion USD. The news got out through a press release.

One Laptop Per Child has refreshed its XO-1 laptop hardware, dumping chips from AMD in favour of processors from Via Technologies, the VIA C7-M. "In our continued effort to maintain a low price point, OLPC is refreshing the hardware to take advantage of the latest component technologies," OLPC officials wrote. Note that we are talking about the current OLPC laptop, and not any upcoming models.

We had an interesting week here over at OSNews. We had lots of talk about the Windows worm Conficker, information regarding computer sales figures, a sentence in the Pirate Bay case, and much, much more. This week's My Take is about the irony of copyright law.

The Xfce team has released the first bugfix release in the 4.6.x tree of the Gtk+ desktop environment, Xfce 4.6.1. "The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released. Thanks to all the people who have been using xfce 4.6 and took the time and effort to submit bugreports for stuff that wasn't quite working the way it is supposed to. We have been able to fix several issues during the past few weeks."

"A Customer Experience Index report from Forrester Research came to the conclusion after studying almost 4600 computer users' experiences from 2008 and asking them to score the ease of use of their computers, how enjoyable the experience is and whether or not the systems fulfill their owners' needs. Apple's overall score reached 80 and was not only enough to give it the lead but also leave it as the only company to earn a 'good' ranking in Forrester's view. Every other manufacturer in the list scored significantly lower, with Acer's American label Gateway being closest with a score of just 66; the standing is only 'okay' in the research group's chart."

Ulrich Dreeper, the glibc maintainer, details on his blog the main features of version 2.10 of the library: POSIX 2008, C++ compliance, C++ 201x support, DNS NSS improvement, use NSS in libcrypt, printf hooks and, perhaps more interesting, better malloc scalability.