Monthly Archive:: April 2009

Microsoft on Wednesday was hit with a USD 388m verdict in a long-running patent-infringement case. In the suit, Uniloc alleged that Microsoft used its patented technology as part of the software giant's product-activation methods. A federal jury in Rhode Island found that Windows XP, Office XP and Windows Server 2003 infringed on a Uniloc patent.

At the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, Intel Open Source Technology Center director Imhad Sousou discussed the company's plans for the next major version of its Linux-based open source Moblin platform. The aim of Moblin, Sousou says, is to improve the quality of the Linux user experience on Atom-based devices. For Intel, this is a broad mandate that reaches deep into the platform and will require improvements at many different layers of the stack. One especially important aspect of Intel's platform improvement agenda is to reduce overall startup time.

It's been a long time coming, but yesterday Google has announced that Java will be available on their App Engine. While the SDK is available for everyone to develop their applications locally, the initial sign up allowing people to upload their applications to the App Engine is limited to 10,000 users. The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

Sun has launched VirtualBox 2.2. Sun is adding support for the Open Virtualization Format standard to its VirtualBox virtualization software. With the OVF standard incorporated into VirtualBox 2.2, users can not only build virtual machines, but also export them from a development situation and import them into a production environment. Sun also is adding greater hypervisor optimization, 3D graphics acceleration for Linux and Solaris applications, and support for Apple's upcoming 64-bit Snow Leopard platform.

"The Mono Migration Analyzer tool, or MoMA, helps users port Microsoft .NET programs to Mono, with the ultimate goal of porting Windows software to Linux. But is it really necessary? eWEEK Labs puts MoMA through its paces."

If all this works out, then IBM will be one of the luckiest companies in the world. eWeek has learned a lot of details regarding the IBM-sun acquisition talks, as well as that today, the Sun board is holding another meeting to discuss the talks. The outcome could be that IBM would buy Sun after all - but at a much lower price since Sun's shares fell 25% after it had broken off the negotiations with IBM.

It's rare to see some truly interesting ideas in Linux distributions, as most seem content to just remaster Ubuntu with a different theme. Therefore, we at OSNews are always interested in fresh and interesting distributions that try to add something of value to the landscape. One such distribution is xPUD, a fast-booting, kiosk-like distribution that uses the Mozilla Gecko Runtime to display a simple user interface that allows you to launch normal desktop Linux applications.

Back when Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, there was a bit of a minor controversy around the artificially implemented cut-off point; you could only install Leopard on machines with G4 processors of 867Mhz or more, leaving out capable machines like the dual 733Mhz or dual 800Mhz. The community soon found ways around this limitation, and recently, I found myself in a situation where I had to do the same.

We've been waiting a while to see NVIDIA's Ion-based computers, and now Acer is taking the lead in this race by debuting the first Ion "nettop" since the ones shown off at CES by NVIDIA: the Acer AspireRevo. This little 7.1- x 7.1- x 1.2-inch box sports an 1.6GHz Intel Atom, up to four gigabytes of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, Four-in-one card reader, six USB sockets, Ethernet, and HDMI and VGA outputs while running Windows Vista Home Premium or Basic. It'll be able to play any of your 1080p content, of course. There isn't any word on when Acer will start rolling these out to consumers nor what the said consumers will be paying, but since it's likely that other Ion-based nettops will begin to appear at large come summer, the AspireRevo will most likely be up for grabs near the end of the second quarter. I suppose it's safe to say that the desktop equivalent to the netbook is coming.

The live migration work in the L4-based "NomadBIOS" hypervisor, which inspired Xen's live migration and the influential "Live Migration of Virtual Machines" USENIX NSDI 2005 paper, also resulted in a Ph.D. thesis called "Virtual Machine Mobility with Self-Migration". The author of the thesis, Jacob Gorm Hansen from the University of Copenhagen, was recently awarded the EuroSys Roger Needham Ph.D. Award for best European operating systems thesis in 2008. Last year's award winner was Adam Dunkels, author of the uIP/LWIP embedded TCP/IP stacks. See this link for more information.

"Microsoft Research was in the news not too long ago regarding the innovative, outside-the-box research being done by MSR scientists on display at the annual MSR TechFest event. One of the stars of the show was a new web browser project named Gazelle. This is a great conversation with Gazelle project lead Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk, a PhD student intern developer working on the Gazelle project. We cover a lot of ground and Erik and I are unusually curious given the fascinating model Gazelle represents for a truly secure web browser."

After a long period of no updates, Apple has finally updated its often overlooked line of server hardware, the Xserve. The last update was in January 2008, which added the Xeon "Harpertown" processor, and this latest update introduces - as expected - Intel's Nehalem processors, as well as a host of other upgrades and new options.

Continuing the recently started trend at Microsoft to be a bit more aggressive towards the competition, Brandon LeBlanc wrote on the Windows Experience Weblog about why Windows is such a huge success on netbooks compared to Linux. Also, what is up with that story on AppleInsider about Microsoft offering Windows-7-to-XP downgrade rights? Is that really so special?

The browser wars are well underway. Apple released a beta for Safari 4, Chrome 2.0 is in beta, Internet Explorer 8 has just been released, and Firefox 3.5 is almost here. Still, that isn't stopping the Mozilla team from looking ahead, beyond Firefox 3.5. They call it Firefox 3.6, but since that version number is likely to be bumped higher, they actually prefer the code name Namoroka, or the alternative name Firefox.next. A new roadmap for Namoroka has been published, and it details some interesting goals.