Monthly Archive:: November 2009

"After several Web sites today claimed to having seen a possibly inadvertent notice from Microsoft claiming June as the release month for its forthcoming Office 2010 (we looked hard and couldn't find it ourselves), a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that June is indeed the ship month."

Yesterday (today if you're in the US), Sun released the latest version of its virtualisation solution, VirtualBox 3.1. Among speed improvements and other smaller features, the biggest news is that Virtualox 3.1 introduces something called teleportation: you can move running VMs between machines - servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn't matter to VirtualBox. Coincidentally, this reminded me of an idea I once had about moving running applications between machines.

The MorphOS team seems to be on a roll. Recently, they added support for the PowerPC G4 Mac mini models from Apple, meaning it suddenly became a lot easier to get your hands on a computer capable of running MorphOS. As expected, the team has now announced that a release with PowerMac G4 support is coming as well.

Michael Arrington's promising CrunchPad Tablet PC device was due for imminent launch, but, due to what Arrington claims was an attempt by his business partner to cut him out of the deal because of "pressure from shareholders," the ownership of the intellectual property is now in dispute. As a result, the project will almost certainly move into a the lawsuit and recrimination phase, and the CrunchPad will likely never be released.

This holiday season it seems that everyone has forgotten the recession and has just decided to pretend to not be broke. In the US, somehow the retail industry has hoodwinked everyone into celebrating a shopping holiday the weekend after Thanksgiving, with the recent addition of "cyber monday" to encourage both irresponsible spending and doing personal shopping on company time while at work. Far be it from us to stand in the way of this Juggernaut. I personally do most of my shopping online, and much of it at Amazon.com, who over the years have proven a dedication to low prices and excellent service. Cyber Monday or not, if you're planning on shopping online this holiday season (or anytime), please consider using OSNews' shopping page, which gives you a good launching point to browse for products and compare prices, and supports OSNews by kicking back a small percentage of your purchase price. It doesn't cost you anything, but makes a big difference for us. So bookmark the page, and show the love all year round. We'd like to make some improvements to the OSNews Shopping launchpad. Please include your recommendations and suggestions in the comments.

"Intel's plans to overhaul its desktop processors early next year have been detailed almost entirely in a roadmap published today. The lineup is now believed to be headlined by low-powered S versions of the Core i5-750 and i7-860 that will run all four cores at 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz respectively; they should use just 82W of power versus 95W or more and fit into tighter spaces. Each will have 8MB of Level 2 cache, though the Core i7 chips will scale up to 3.46GHz where the Core i5 will stop at 3.2GHz."

From Free Software Magazine: "Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead."

"IBM likes to go on and on about the transaction processing power and I/O bandwidth of its System z mainframes, but now there is a new and much bigger kid on the block. Its name is the Power Systems IH supercomputing node, based on the company's forthcoming Power7 processors and a new homegrown switching system that blends optical and copper interconnects. The Power7 IH node was on display at the SC09 supercomputer trade show last week in Portland, Oregon, and El Reg was on hand to get the scoop from the techies who designed the iron. This server node is the heart of the 20 petaflop 'Blue Waters' supercomputer being installed at the University of Illinois."

Now this is an interesting case. Late last week news got out that Apple is refusing to repair machines still under AppleCare from customers who smoke, citing health risks from second-hand smoke. Wait, what?

We've got some progress in the other legal case Apple is involved in. The California case, Apple vs. Psystar, is more or less a done deal, but the Florida case, Psystar vs. Apple, is only just beginning. As it promised it would do, Apple has now asked the court in California to either dismiss the Florida case, or transfer it to California. Apple is also asking for a permanent injuction against Psystar. Through this motion, we also gain some juicy insight into Psystar's sales projections - and more interestingly, how many machines the clone maker actually sold.

Distrowatch takes a first look at Fedora 12 and concludes that it is an excellent release with faster package management including yum with the Presto plugin that pulls in delta updates by default, improved security such as a smooth SELinux configuration and hardware support. "After spending several days with Fedora, I find that I'm happy with this release. The live CD by itself was a bit underwhelming, but the distribution as a whole has been excellent. This is probably the most stable and most polished release the Fedora team has put together to date."

A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content. Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, which took place last week, it was announced that the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, version 10.04, will no longer carry the GIMP in its default installation. This actually touches upon somethin I've been wanting to talk about, a problem that plagues both Linux and Mac OS X: Paint.NET is Windows-only.

Genode is a framework for creating custom microkernel-based operating systems, currently supporting four different kernels. With the new 9.11 release, the project moves beyond the x86 architecture by adding initial support for ARM CPUs. Among the long list of further improvements, there is added support for USB storage, a light-weight IP stack, Qt/Webkit, a zero-footprint runtime for Ada programs, and the addition of a paravirtualized Linux kernel to the mainline distribution. These and more changes are described in full detail in the release notes for version 9.11.