Monthly Archive:: July 2009

The rumours around an Apple tablet device, and with tablet device I mean an iPod Touch but larger, have been circling around the internet for a long time now. As usual, Apple's secretive nature means we know absolutely nothing for sure. In the meantime, Micheal Arrington, who quit his iPhone in favour of an Android headset out of frustration with Apple, and Fusion Garage have been working on their own tablet device. The release date is getting closer, and the specifications are - allegedly - actually here.

In this exclusive interview, Rich Sharples, Product Management Director at Red Hat, talks about OpenJDK. the free and open source implementation of the Java SE platform. The IcedTea project, one of Red Hat's major contributions to the OpenJDK ecosystem, has done a great deal to enable upstream adoption of Java on the Linux platform; however, the question remains whether Java would've been more ubiquitous throughout the Linux universe had Sun open sourced Java much sooner than it actually did. Rich discusses some of these issues and talks about some of the new features in OpenJDK 7, as well as the impact that dynamic languages, increased modularity and virtualization will have on the Java platform. He also describes the impact he thinks Oracle's acquisition will have on licensing options around OpenJDK.

Yesterday, the Dutch online community was surprised by a verdict from a judge who declared that The Pirate Bay had to make itself unavailable in The Netherlands. This verdict was cast in a case the Dutch RIAA/MPAA-like organisation BREIN had started against The Pirate Bay. With it being a widely known and established fact that downloading copyrighted content off the internet - even if the upload was illegal - is not illegal in The Netherlands, where does this verdict come from? Is it truly a win for the entertainment industry, and a loss for Dutch consumers? Not really - the situation is much, much simpler than that.

With Apple doing really, really well, and with Microsoft having its first sets of negative figures since the company's founding, Microsoft CEO points his arrows towards Cupertino. In a talk to members of the press and analyst community, Ballmer talked about Microsoft vs. Apple.

"Novell has launched a new Web service called SUSE Studio that simplifies the process of building Linux-based software appliances. It provides a convenient interface for creating custom versions of Novell's SUSE Linux distribution with specialized configurations. The service is part of Novell's broader SUSE Appliance Program initiative."

Intel had to hustle to catch up with competitors in developing chips for mobile devices like smartphones, but the effort led to the development of the highly successful Atom chip, an Intel exec has revealed. Intel kicked off the Atom project in 2004, when it was doing work on developing Arm chips in parallel. At the time the company was "running like crazy" to develop a chip for mobile devices to catch up with the fast evolution of wireless devices, especially voice services, which were peaking at the time.

We've talked about Creative's brand-new Stemcell computing platform before. They developed a new processor, the ZMS-05, which consists of two ARM-926 cores, and 48 programmable 'processing elements' which can develop in real-time into performing any of the specialised acceleration functions needed by modern computing. In addition, the system-on-chips, called Zii, could be linked together freely, achieving teraflop speeds on a sheet of A4 paper. Back then, they claimed that a Zii could easily playback HD content (even on HDTVs). They put the Zii in a iPod Touch-like device, and their promises turned out to be true.

The CentOS project, the Linux distribution aimed at the enterprise built from Red Hat's freely available source code, has hit a significant bump in the road: the project's main administrator, Lance Davis, has gone missing-in-action. This is kind of a problem as Davis is the sole administrator fo the CentOS.org domain, the IRC channels - and the CentOS funds.

Windows might be a popular platform for running certain kinds of Web applications. But too many developers have been burnt by trying to deploy PHP applications on a Windows server. "If you banged on too hard on Windows, IIS would crash, and nobody could tell why it died," Microsoft's Garrett Serack says. Microsoft is aiming to change that. In fact, while you weren't looking, they already made some improvements.

This morning Intel has announced the release of Clutter 1.0.0, the graphics library that is gaining speed within the GNOME development community (it is used by Gnome Shell). "This toolkit provides a library/API for creating rich user interfaces in a relatively easy to use way that conceals much of the challenges of programming your application to directly use OpenGL or OpenGL ES. Clutter is already being used within Moblin V2 and its user interface is very impressive."

The venerable master boot record (MBR) partitioning scheme can't fully handle disks larger than 2TB. With 1TB-hard disks now common and 2TB-disks becoming available, forward-looking individuals are thinking about alternatives to the MBR partitioning scheme. The heir apparent is the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Learn how to make sure your Linux system is fully prepared for the future of disk storage.

A lot of our readers are still happily using Windows XP - 36% of our users use XP, 12% Vista, and 6% Windows 7. While Windows XP is showing its age in a lot of areas, there is at least something you can do to prettify the operating system at minimal cost. In Windows XP, and to a lesser extent Windows Vista, there are still a lot of old-style icons and graphics that should be updated to more modern variants. There are free tools that do just this (thanks to IStartedSomething).

The rumours and back-and-forths have been going on for as long as I can remember, but today, the deal was finally announced: Microsoft and Yahoo! have tied the knot - but only strictly related to internet search and advertising. The move is supposed to help both Yahoo! and Microsoft in their competition with Google.

Most mainstream distributions, like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva, have already adopted a time-based release schedule, meaning that releases are not done on a feature basis, but according to a pre-determined time schedule. The Debian project has announced that it has adopted a time-based release schedule too.