Monthly Archive:: June 2009

IBM has built a new sort of supercomputer that is not only more energy-efficient than supercomputers cooled traditionally with air-conditioning, but the excess heat from the computer can be used afterwards to heat a building. Water siphons off the heat via tubes and small capillaries that take the liquid very near to the chips, cooling it at 60 degrees Celsius. IBM says that the new supercomputer design, which they call "Aquasar," will reduce overall energy consumption by 40 percent as well as 30 tons of carbon dioxide. The heating function of the system will only help reduce heating costs a little, but it has some very promising applications in the future.

The NPD group has done a study into customer satisfaction among netbook buyers, and they came to some surprisingly unsurprising results. As it turns out, people who expected a notebook when they bought a netbook were more likely to be disappointed than buyers who set out to buy a netbook from the get-go. No doodoo, Sherlock.

"Mandriva Linux 2010 Alpha 1 is now available on public mirrors. This first alpha is available only through Free version, 32 and 64 bits DVDs. This development release is the first one realized without mkcd, our historical build tool, but using bcd available also on Mandriva svn. This new tool should improve global quality of our release and make tests much easier and efficient... Final release of 2010 version is due the 21st of October."

Here at OSNews I have hammered and hammered on a few times already about the major flaw in Windows 7's default User Account Control, which allows people or software with malicious intent to completely bypass UAC in such an easy manner that you wonder why UAC is there in the first place. Well, the source code to this flaw has been released - since Microsoft has made it clear they have no interest in fixing it anyway - and Long Zheng, fellow advocate of fixing this bug, made a very clear demonstration video.

Software moves on at a break-neck pace these days--version numbers clock up ever quicker as vendors try to market their apps as the latest and greatest. Software generally ages badly, falling into a state of looking grossly out of date, lacking new functionality that we've come to depend upon as well as compatibility problems. Dear OSNews readers, what old software (5+ years) do you still use, why, and what problems do you come across in sticking with it? Read More for my own contribution to the list

With Google Summer of Code underway for the Haiku project, the first results start coming in. The most exciting so far is the work being done on a native multi-process WebKit browser, worked on by Ryan Leavengood and GSoC student Maxime Simon. They've got an interface, and they've got most of WebKit to build.

The relationship between the United States government and ICANN, the private non-profit corporation which oversees the assignment of domain names, has often been a thorn in the eyes of the European Union. A recent document issued by the European Commission again advocates a change in internet oversight - but at the same time, the document also states that ICANN has actually been doing a pretty good job.

To add to the amounting set of expected Android phones in coming time, Garmin has announced that they will stop making devices with their own operating system and instead switch to solely Android- and Windows Mobile-powered phones. They expect to release their first Android device by the end of 2009.

We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology that is a massive resource hog. The answer is the HTML5 video tag, which allows you to embed video into HTML pages without the use of Flash or any other non-HTML technology; combined with open video codecs, this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardise the web. Sadly, not even Mozilla itself really seems to understand what it is supposed to do with the video tag, and actually advocates the use of JavaScript to implement it. Kroc Camen, OSNews editor, is very involved in making/keeping the web open, and has written an open letter to Mozilla in which he urges them to not use JavaScript for HTML video. Note that Kroc's website may not work properly in Internet Explorer. (Update The letter has been mirrored in the article, Read More for the full text)

Firefox 3.5RC1 has been released. "Firefox 3.5 (Release Candidate) is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use, and adding new features for users."

Currently, there's a lot of hype around Android on ARM-based netbooks, a type of netbook arriving later this year. However, despite the obvious choice for Android and other Linux systems, NVIDIA has openly stated their preference for... Windows CE. ARM and Asus are also quite sceptical about Android on ARM netbooks.

"Microsoft today officially announced Microsoft Security Essentials, its free, real-time consumer antimalware solution for fighting viruses, spyware, rootkits, and trojans. Currently being tested by Microsoft employees and a select few testers, MSE is Microsoft's latest offering intended to help users fight the threats that plague Windows PCs. Microsoft notes that the threat ecosystem has expanded to include rogue security software, auto-run malware, fake or pirated software and content, as well as banking malware, and the company is aiming to help the users who are not well protected. A beta of MSE will be available in English and Brazilian Portuguese for public download on June 23, 2009 for the first 75,000 users. This is a target number, but Microsoft is willing to increase it if necessary."

"samurai-x is a highly modular and configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is written in pure python utilising ctypes. samurai-x is targeted at people wishing to experiment with desktop programming and people who want more control over their desktop (without having to code in C)." Version 0.2 has been released recently.

The Palm pre has been out and about for a while now, so stories and items about what it can do are popping up all over the place. One thing is becoming quite clear already: the Pre and its WebOS are quite hacker-friendly, and hackers have already found all sorts of ways to extend the device's functionality.