Monthly Archive:: September 2009

RMS: De Icaza Traitor to Free Software Community

Submitted by Hiev 2009-09-24 Mono 237 Comments

If you don't like personal, blog-style reporting, you might want to skip this item. A few days ago, during a speech at Software Freedom Day in Boston, Richard Stallman has, at least in my book, crossed a line that I thought he would never cross.

GNOME 2.28 Released

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-24 Gnome 32 Comments

Today, the GNOME team has released GNOME 2.28. It builds on the solid foundation laid out by all the previous releases, and adds in a number of new features and improvements, on top of all the bug fixes and performance improvements, of course.

Firefox 3.7’s UI: Who Littered All These Widgets All Over the Place?

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-23 Mozilla, Gecko 62 Comments

We've already talked about the proposed interface changes for Firefox 3.7 (and 4.0) which are coming to the Windows platform. However, those were anything-goes sketches, and now it seems as if the team has more or less settled on what Firefox 3.7 will look like on Windows. I'll reserve final judgement until I have used it, but my first thought was: who littered all these different widgets all over the place?

Submitted by poundsmack 2009-09-23 Intel 9 Comments

"USB 3.0 might be one of the big stories here at IDF, but Intel just showed off a glimpse of the future: Light Peak, an optical interconnect for mobile devices that can run as fast as 10Gbps. That's fast enough to do everything from storage to displays to networking, and it can maintain those speeds over 100-meter runs, which is pretty astounding. Intel says the idea is to drastically reduce the number of connectors on mobile devices, which should allow them to get even smaller - but the demo was on a huge Frankenrig, so don't expect to see Light Peak devices shipping any time soon."

Submitted by akaas 2009-09-23 Linux 1 Comment

"One of the downsides of working in security is that we seldom get to do cool things. The desktop engineers, VM engineers, even kernel engineers get to show off cool stuff. But security guys usually only ever get to show how we broke something, if that. Sometimes all we can do is say 'trust us, it's working'. But I think I have something cool to show off which I'm calling sandbox -X."

Submitted by diegocg 2009-09-23 Linux 16 Comments

Systemtap 1.0 has been released. There are a few features for this release, like experimental support for unprivileged users, cross-compiling for foreign architectures, matching C++ class and namespace scopes, reduced runtime memory consumption, but more importantly, this release means that Systemtap is finally considered stable and ready for user adoption.

Review: Microsoft Windows 7 RTM

Submitted by Bob Stein 2009-09-23 Windows 2 Comments

ActiveWin has published their usual in-depth review of the new Windows release, in this case, Windows 7. It's 70 pages long, and divided up into 26 sections. "Should you upgrade? Most certainly, there is no on the fence, if’s or buts about it. This is a major upgrade both Windows XP and Vista users will certainly see benefits from. Vista was of course a hard sell because of the major architectural changes it introduced, Windows 7 reaps the benefits."

CADNA Proposes Full-Scale Audit of ICANN

weildish 2009-09-23 Internet No Comments

"With just over a week left before the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Department of Commerce, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) urges the US government to closely re-examine ICANN's structure, governance, and oversight mechanisms before committing to any further long-term cooperation. Significant adjustments must be made to the JPA in order to remedy the egregious problems CADNA has found with ICANN." CADNA not only proposes that an audit be made of ICANN, but they also have released a "top-ten list" detailing the most prevalent problems they find in the non-profit organization.

Submitted by stonyandcher 2009-09-23 Linux 10 Comments

At the recent Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Oregon, there were hints of new Moblin-powered hardware being announced at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum. Normally, this would be moderately interesting news, but some of the ambitious comments made by Linux luminaries at Linuxcon merit further examination. People from the Linux Foundation, Intel, and IBM spoke at the conference, and it's evident that they see the netbook market as the epicenter of the movement to raise Linux's profile in the consumer space, and whittle away marketshare from Windows. Update: Intel has also announced Moblin 2.1 for phones.

Courier: Microsoft’s Take on the Tablet

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-23 Microsoft 26 Comments

While half the world is waiting for Apple's take on the tablet - pretty much guaranteed to arrive somewhere next year - Microsoft has come out with a very interesting new take on the tablet, the Courier. It's a dual-touchscreen device, shaped like a book, and is in the late prototype stage of development.

USB-IF Sides with Apple, Slaps Palm

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-23 Hardware 33 Comments

We have a new chapter in the Palm Pre and iTunes saga. We all remember that the Pre could sync with iTunes, but that Apple wasn't particularly keen on this. The Cupertino company issued an iTunes which intentionally broke Pre syncing, but Palm retorted by re-enabling it not long after. Palm also sent a complaint to the USB Implementers Forum about Apple's behaviour, but the USB-IF squarely sides with Apple.

Can Computers Win the Turing Test?

Guest post by Jitesh Dundas 2009-09-23 General Development 46 Comments

Can computers win the Turing Test? Imagine a day when a machine will say, "Move over Turing! You can no longer consider machines to be less smart than humans! After all, we can think too. We do all the thinking and processing and you take all the credit, just because you are our creator! ". That would be an awkward and exciting situation. To be honest, there is a valid argument here in this imaginary conversation. As naive as it may sound for now, let me assure you that such a scenario is not far away. Applications are becoming more and more logic-oriented and increasingly intelligent.

Intel Aims for World Domination, x86 Everywhere

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-22 Intel 45 Comments

The Intel Developer Forum is currently in full swing, but it kicked off with a speech by Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Well, there's bad news for those of us who long for a time where lots of different architectures compete with one another, ensuring that technology is moved forward. Otellini's plans for Intel basically come down to one thing: x86 everywhere.

How Intel’s Supercomputer Almost Used HP Chips

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-22 Intel 17 Comments

More than a decade ago, Intel ran into an issue trying to deliver what was to be the world's top-ranked supercomputer: it looked possible that its new Pentium Pro processors at the heart of the system might not arrive in time. As a result, the chipmaker made an unusual move by paying Hewlett-Packard $100,000 to evaluate building the system using its PA-RISC processors in the machine, said Paul Prince, now Dell's chief technology officer for enterprise products but then Intel's system architect for the supercomputer. Called ASCI Red and housed at Sandia National Laboratories, it was designed to be the first supercomputer to cross the threshold of a trillion math calculations per second.

Oracle: We Will Not Spin off MySQL

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-22 Oracle and SUN 13 Comments

When the news broke that Oracle wanted to buy Sun, a number of eyebrows were raised over what would happen to Sun's open source portfolio. While the US Department of Justice gave the green light for the deal to go through, the European Commission was among the eye brows raising crowd, and they were quite worried about the future of specifically MySQL.

Google Fixes IE For Microsoft, Adds HTML5, Fast JS and More

Kroc 2009-09-22 Google 36 Comments

Google Chrome Frame is an open-source plugin that adds HTML5, Canvas, a fast JavaScript engine and more to Internet Explorer; in fact it just swaps out Trident with Webkit! Developers can opt-in to the feature on their sites via a meta-tag / ~~HTTP-header~~ and prompt users to install Google Chrome Frame if they don't have it. Update: Correction, they don't support the HTTP Header.

Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 Released

Thom Holwerda 2009-09-22 Windows 7 Comments

Microsoft has announced the release to manufacturing of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3, the next-generation of the componentized, real-time Windows Embedded CE operating system that now features a rich immersive user experience provided by Microsoft's Silverlight Rich Internet Application platform. The company also delivers Windows 7 connectivity to the platform.

Submitted by iMil 2009-09-22 NetBSD 6 Comments

For a couple of months, the french speaking NetBSD advocacy group, NetBSDfr has started a series of interviews called "Discussing with a NetBSD developer". The first developer that has been interviewed was Soren Jacobsen, NetBSD 5.0 release engineer, shortly after NetBSD 5.0 was released. In July, we had the opportunity to talk to Adam Hamsik, known for porting LVM and ZFS to the NetBSD OS. S.P. Zeidler was our third victim, one of the Project's admins and member of the pkgsrc-releng team. This month, we had the chance to interview Alistair G. Crooks, actual president of The NetBSD Foundation. Alistair gave us a unique historical point of view as one of NetBSD's early hackers. He also shared with us his thought about the future of NetBSD and explained what makes this operating system so special. The interviews can be read in english at blog.NetBSD.org by clicking on the links above, and in french at www.NetBSDfr.org.

Reminiscence: Macintosh Plus, System 6, Beige Beauty

weildish 2009-09-22 Apple 25 Comments

We all have our most favored machines of yesteryear; in this I assume that most people are like me, anyway. Breaking away from the mundane every-day news of boring (I jest) new technologies such as touchscreens the size of a wall and upcoming operating systems that support graphics cards with 1.5 GB of vRAM, take a walk down memory lane-- or "Neurological Alley" as I like to call it-- and take a look inside, outside, and in all of the nooks and crannies in between the circuits of the Macintosh Plus and its accompanying System 6, fresh from the splendor of 1986.

Submitted by google_ninja 2009-09-22 Linux 84 Comments

During the roundtable discussion at LinuxCon this year, Linus Torvalds made some pretty harsh remarks about the current state of the Linux kernel, calling it "huge and bloated", and that there is no plan in sight to solve the problem. At the same time, he also explained that he is very happy with the current development process of the kernel, and that his job has become much easier.