Monthly Archive:: April 2010

Now this is something that I find really interesting. We all know and love Google Chrome/Chromium (and if you don't, you're demonstrably wrong), but Google recently made a change in the developer version that ruffled some feathers: the URL field will no longer show the "http://". This made a lot of people very upset.

"In summary, it's possible to play full-screen Ogg Theora videos on the N900 at full frame rates with low CPU use by off-loading video decoding to the DSP and colour-space conversion and painting to the GPU. There are opportunities for optimization left, tuning for battery life needs to be investigated, and the integration into Firefox still needs to be done."

"IBM has radically improved the bang for the buck on its Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blade servers this week, and is expected to soon deliver similarly priced entry rack and tower servers. And now it has a new, lower-cost AIX 6.1 Express Edition that will match the less expensive hardware and therefore help Big Blue's AIX platform better compete against Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris alternatives. The new AIX Express Edition takes the special low-cost pricing that was available only on JS series blade servers and now makes it available across the Power Systems line, including logical partitions on the largest Power 595 (and before too long Power 595) servers."

"Businesses will get their hands on web and desktop Office 2010 in just under two weeks. The company's Office team has released code for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 to manufacturing. Customers on Microsoft's volume licenses - 250 or more PCs - with Software Assurance can download from the Volume Licensing Service Center on April 27. Volume-licensing customers without SA can get the software May 1. Microsoft began accepting pre orders on April 15."

Dan Hon makes a thought-provoking assertion in his blog: remember all the ridiculous, unrealistic computer interfaces that Hollywood characters are always using, showing "hackers" infiltrating systems by flying through virtual reality worlds of strange codes, and cutesy animations accompanying every task? Hon's point is that instead of ridiculing these unrealistic interfaces, maybe we should try to emulate them. He makes a pretty good case.

One of the major problems Google is facing with its Chrome OS is printer support. It was reported earlier that Google is working with manufacturers on making printers act similar to for instance digital cameras, so you won't need to fiddle with drivers any longer. It turns out Google has indeed been working on this, but I don't think the solution they unveiled today is what everyone had in mind - despite that, I'm seeing the value here.

Learn how to use inotify functions for a simple monitoring app. Download the sample code and Use inotify when you need efficient, fine-grained, asynchronous monitoring of Linux file system events. Use it for user-space monitoring for security, performance, or other purposes.

I think we need to start a digital rights category or something (the next version of OSNews will have it, for sure), because we have yet another article about this subject. After Sony removed the Other OS feature from the PlayStation 3, a European PlayStation 3 owner successfully secured a partial refund from Amazon under the European Sale of Goods Act. Sony has now retaliated, stating it is not going to reimburse retailers

"Changes from GCC 4.4, which was released almost one year ago, include the use of the MPC library to evaluate complex arithmetic at compile time, C++0x improvements, automatic parallelization as part of Graphite, support for new ARM processors, Intel Atom optimizations and tuning support, and AMD Orochi optimizations too." See also the GCC 4.5 changelog.

While we were al busy getting knickers in twists over section 3.3.1 of the new iPhone developer agreement, Apple hoped to sneak another, possibly more far-reaching change past us. All Things Digital, however, got hold of section 3.3.9, which could effectively kill all third party ad networks - granting an insurmountable advantage to Apple's own iAd network.

This article describes a real-word software port, with examples of how various porting challenges are resolved. If you are a software developer porting software to UNIX, you will find these techniques invaluable in avoiding common pitfalls, resolving bugs, and improving your productivity.

Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

The international iPad launch has been postponed by a month, due to unexpected demand in the US. "Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10. We know that many international customers waiting to buy an iPad will be disappointed by this news, but we hope they will be pleased to learn the reason - the iPad is a runaway success in the US thus far."

The Beta release of Fedora 13 (codename "Goddard") blasts off today, true to its namesake, scientist and liquid-fueled rocketry pioneer Robert Hutchings Goddard. The Fedora 13 Beta release gives an early peek at free and open source technologies that reach new heights of functionality and usability. The Beta milestone is when the Fedora Project encourages users, developers, and administrators of all types to download and try out the release early. While generally the Beta is reasonably stable, this is the time for users to exercise their favorite parts of the system and report any lingering bugs before the final release.