Monthly Archive:: September 2009

Firefox To Include Flash Version Checker

Earlier this week, news got out that Apple was shipping an outdated version of Adobe's Flash Player with Snow Leopard; if you updated to a more recent version before the upgrade to Snow Leopard, you would receive a downgrade. This older version had security holes in it, so Adobe advised everyone to upgrade. The Mozilla team has now announced that Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 will include a Flash version checker.

Seven Samurai Chipmakers Set to Take on Intel

"You know, it's been nearly forty years since Intel introduced the first microprocessor, and even at this late date the company comprises a whopping eighty percent of the global market for CPUs. But not so fast! Like an electronics industry remake of The Magnificent Seven (which is, of course, an American remake of The Seven Samurai) NEC and Renesas have teamed up with a stalwart band of companies, including Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Panasonic, and Canon, to develop a new CPU that is compatible with Waseda University professor Hironori Kasahara's "innovative energy-saving software." The goal is to create a commercial processor that runs on solar cells, moderates power use according to the amount of data being processed (a current prototype runs on 30% the power of a standard CPU), remains on even when mains power is cut, and, of course, upsets the apple cart over at Intel."

Exploit Real-Time Java’s Unique Features

Real-time Java combines ease of programming in the Java language with the performance required by applications that must conform to real-time constraints. Extensions to the Java language provide features for real-time environments that are lacking in the traditional Java runtime environment. This article, the first in a three-part series, describes some of these features and explains how you can apply them to enable real-time performance in your own applications.

Installing 32bit Support Into 64bit Fedora

"If you're running newer hardware, there are some definite advantages to installing a 64-bit operating system. But, if you still need to run any 32-bit applications, you'll need to have the 32-bit support libraries installed. Different Linux distros handle this in different ways. For 64-bit Ubuntu, finding the proper 32-bit support packages is a simple matter of opening up the Synaptic Package Manager, and searching for the string 'ia32'. With 64-bit openSuSE, 32-bit support is already built-in, so you don't have to do anything. With Fedora, though, it's a whole different story. Not only are the 32-bit packages not already installed, the Fedora folk don't provide any documentation on how to install them. The directions I found via Google were outdated, and wouldn't work. I finally resolved the problem by sking a Red Hat employee in my local Linux Users Group."

Apple Accuses Psystar of Leaking Privileged Info

And the Apple vs. Psystar case continues to roll onwards. A lot of mud is going back and forth between the two companies: Apple has accused Psystar of making information public which was under a protective order, and obviously, Psystar denied. In addition, Groklaw's Pamela Jones continues to suspect that this Psystar case is related to the SCO case, and is part of a concentrated effort to destroy the GPL. Update: I've just been emailed (on behalf of Psystar's lawyers, actually) the outcome (in the form of a court order) of the hearing held this morning. Sadly, it's very late here, so I won't be able to analyse it properly until tomorrow.

Microsoft Granted Stay of Word Injunction

Microsoft has been granted a stay of a landmark injunction in a patent infringement case that would have required the software giant to stop selling its popular Word in its current form by next month. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday granted Microsoft's motion for a stay, pending appeal, of an injunction issued in August by a federal judge that bars sales of Word that include a custom XML code found to infringe on patents held by i4i - the plaintiff.

Apple Already Testing Mac OS X 10.6.1 Update

"Apple is moving quickly to patch holes and repair incompatibilities within Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, having already providing some developers with betas of the first maintenance and security update planned for the new operating system. Three people familiar with the matter say the Mac maker issued the first external builds of Mac OS X 10.6.1 to a select group of developers on Monday, September 1st. The move comes just four days after Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard hit retail shelves."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Released

The fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family is released. From the press release: this version includes kernel-based virtual machine virtualization, alongside of Xen virtualization technology. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages. Other updates including GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(), clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Also, support for technologies such as FCoE for storage environments and SR-IOV to improve virtual I/O performance and management included. On a side note, this article covers the upgrade procedure to RHEL v5.4 from the previous version.

GNOME 3 Launchers Change Behaviour

Have you ever been bitten by accidentally loading multiple instances of the same application in GNOME? When you click on the launcher of an already-running application in GNOME, it will load up another instance of the same application, instead of switching to the already running one. This can lead to bugs and other unforeseen behaviour, which of course isn't desirable. In GNOME 3, this issue has been resolved.

Review: The Video Mode on the Canon SX200 IS

I had no plans to write a mini-review for the Canon SX200 IS which I bought recently, but I can't contain my excitement about its video mode, so I had to share. The story behind it is that after testing various digicams in its class, I concluded that this is the best HD video P&S digicam in the sub-$500 price range (not counting digi-recorders like the Sanyo Xacti). Read on for more info, and for some directly-out-of-the-camera samples to download and scrutinize yourselves.

Genode Live CD Featuring Qt4, Linux, More

The Genode project has published its second ready-to-boot Live CD featuring a bunch of graphical demonstrations such as Qt4 applications and Linux running on top of Genode. Immediatly after the latest release of the Genode OS framework the new Live CD demonstrates some of the framework's features. The Qt4 demo utilizes the freshly integrated dynamic linker in order to reduce the size of applications. Another scenario demonstrates Genode's ability to launch Linux. Beside these new features, the portability properties of Genode are demonstrated by an application scenario that can be executed on top of different microkernels, namely OKL4, Pistachio, and Fiasco.