Monthly Archive:: April 2010

Opera has released version 10.52 for the Mac. "The new Opera is designed with Mac in mind. This version boasts an improved user interface, Cocoa integration, multi-touch trackpad gestures and Growl support. This, combined with the unprecedented speed from the new JavaScript engine, Carakan, and the new graphic library, Vega, provides a faster and smoother browsing experience. The new Opera also features the latest in Web standards, including leading SVG support and HTML 5 video." Only Linux remains, now.

Well, this is unexpected. The iPhone 4G saga just got a whole lot crazier - dare I say it, a whole lot more ridiculous. Have you ever reported anything like a phone or something similarly small stolen to the police? What was their reaction? Did you ever get the device back? Did they send an army of officers to get your device back? No? Odd. They raided Jason Chen's house, and took four computers and two servers. Update: And thus our true colours reveal. "The raid that San Mateo area cops conducted last week on the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen came at the behest of a special multi-agency task force that was commissioned to work with the computer industry to tackle high-tech crimes. And Apple Inc. sits on the task force's steering committee." Update II: According to TechCrunch, the investigation has been put on hold while the DA ponders Gizmodo's shield defence. Update III: Some legal insight from a constitutional law and first amendment expert and a law professor. The gist? The DA has said no one has been charged with anything here, making this just an investigation - however, this makes the search and seizing of material worse. "If the police are literally just gathering information, with no suspect targeted yet, then a subpoena against a journalist would have probably been smarter than a search warranted that resulted in the front door of Chen's home being bashed in."

"Xandros is based, like Ubuntu, on Debian GNU/Linux, the ultimate community distribution of Linux, but lives by a very different ethos. Xandros has moved at its own pace, offering solutions from desktop to server, with the objective of 'selling Linux into a Windows world'. The latest release of the Xandros Linux desktop edition was in June 2006, which is several lifetimes in the history of Linux. Is this the end of the line for the Xandros desktop?" Hey, we even have a Xandros database category. Darn, we're awesome.

Invented by IBM, the death knell sounded by Apple. Sony has announced it is going to cease selling diskettes altogether, with the last bastion being Japan. Sales will be ceased there too, even though Sony still managed to sell 12 million of them there last year. While Memorex and Imation still produce and sell diskettes, this move by Sony surely means it won't take long for the rest of the market to vanish, too.

Over the weekend, a rumour spread like wildfire through Apple and Mac circles which stated that starting with Mac OS X 10.7, Apple would introduce the App Store model to the Mac, allowing only Apple-approved applications to run. It became apparent to me right away that this was a load of nonsense, and for once, I was right: Steve Jobs has personally dismissed the rumour.

Today Jeff Roberson committed his patches to FreeBSD 9 for adding journaling to UFS. No more background fsck after unclean shutdowns! This is a major landmark in the history of UFS, with 11000 new lines of code (and about 2000 removed). Much of the work was done in collaboration with Kirk McKusick, the original author of FFS and Softupdates, under sponsorship form Yahoo!, Juniper and iXsystems. Jeff's blog contains quite a lot of technical information of his work. There's also information on the FreeBSD mailing lists.

Haiku is aiming at a tentative May 10 release for R1 Alpha 2. Ingo Weinhold, one of the recently contracted developers, is the acting release coordinator. Testing of nightly pre-release builds is encouraged.

So, we have Microsoft slowly but surely trying to be a better citizen in the computing world - with the emphasis on trying. After years of dragging their feet, the company is finally implementing web standards in Internet Explorer, there's a boatload of interoperability information now, that sort of stuff. And then, just when you think they're starting to get it - they go behind our backs to do something incredibly insipid. It's small, you'll barely notice it, but dear lord, it's really, really annoying.

A lot is happening around Palm the past few weeks. The company put itself up for sale, with HTC and Lenovo being the most important candidates. HTC has now backed down, leaving only Lenovo as the major contender. In the meantime, Palm's CEO Jon Rubinstein continues to believe the company can go at it alone, but is nonetheless open to the idea of being bought - while also opening the door to licensing the webOS.

"After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which is held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16. We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments."

A version of the McAfee antivirus software used in the corporate and public sectors misidentified the svchost.exe file in Windows XP systems as malware, sending the affected machines into a loop of restarts. Only users of McAfee VirusScan Enterprise on Windows XP service pack 3 were affected, but the fallout was pretty severe, with hospital and police systems among those taken down.

Yesterday Phoronix showed proof of Steam's Linux client existence via its Mac OS X launcher that is currently in closed beta, then this morning they showed further signs of Linux support. Since 2008 it was known that Steam and the Source Engine would come to Linux. As an update, they even pointed out the download link for the Steam Linux binary from their store.

Well, this was about as inevitable as Apple not losing a super-secret iPhone prototype: Google and Adobe have pretty much formed an alliance against the iPhone, in true the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend style. The agreement between the two companies is clearly a big middle finger towards Apple and the iPhone. Update: Apple has finally added a framework to Mac OS X that will enable accelerated Flash video content - something Adobe has been asking for. This should enable Adobe to greatly improve Flash video performance on Mac OS X. Anyone know about Linux?

Let me take you by the hand and lead you into cell phone land. Dell - of all companies - has "leaked" its line-up of upcoming Android and Windows Phone 7 phones, and contrary to any common sense, they're stunning. On top of that, Android has been ported to the iPhone (dual-boot capable, baby), and a clever tool has been released that completely automates overclocking your Palm Pre (Plus).