Monthly Archive:: May 2010

"The first truly successful Microsoft Windows operating system is twenty years old today; Windows 3.0 was launched on the 22nd of May 1990 and was the successor to Windows 2.1x. The Graphics User interface (technically it was not an operating system) sat on top of MS-DOS and could run applications for the operating system from within a Window and many might fondly remember that it was available on 5.25-inch high density floppy disks. More significantly, it proved to be the perfect partner for Intel's then-new range of 386 processor, which bought protected mode and extended memory capabilities to the market."

This issue kind of fell by the wayside in all the WebM and Android violence, but apart from the cool things Google did this past week, they've also done something really bad. They claim it's a mistake, but the company has collected 600GB of data from open personal wireless networks in 33 countries through its Street View cars, prompting several countries to initiate official investigations into the search giant.

After god knows how many years, it's finally here: the final release of eComStation 2.0. We first reported on eComStation 2.0 back in December 2005, when the first beta was released, and between then and now, we've seen countless betas and release candidates come and go, but the wait is finally over.

Good news from the AROS world. Thanks to a bounty, they've been working on Gallium3D for a while, and the fruit of this work is starting to taste good. Part of this effort included a 3D driver for NVIDIA cards, and now a 2D driver, based on Nouveau, is being developed as well. This driver has reached beta status, and testers are needed.

There's an incredible amount of momentum behind Google's WebM Project. Opera, Mozilla, and of course Google will all include it in their browsers by default, meaning about 35% of web users will be able to use it with a minimal amount of fuss. On top of that, Microsoft has changed its previously announced plans to make HTML5 video in Internet Explorer 9 H264-only to include VP8 as well. Only Apple's opinion was unclear - until now.

Lightspark, the project that aims to create an LLVM-based Free Flash payer, has reached beta status. "JIT compilation of ActionScript to native x86 bytecode using LLVM; hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL Shaders (GLSL); very good and robust support for current-generation ActionScript 3; a new, clean codebase exploiting multithreading and optimized for modern hardware. Designed from scratch after the official Flash documentation was released."

"Google has finally announced its long-rumored TV efforts at Google I/O. Senior product manager Rishi Chandra said during the Thursday keynote that 'video should be consumed on the biggest, best, and brightest screen in your house, and that's the TV', and that it hoped to combine the Web and TV-viewing experience in ways that others have yet to do."

At the Google I/O conference, Google just held its second keynote address, which focussed on Android. The talk was held by Vic Gundotra, and he unveiled a number of new features coming in Android 2.2 "Froyo", as well as some features coming in Froyo+1. The main theme of the entire keynote? Openness and choice, and a whole bucketload of not-so-subtle jabs at Apple. I'd like to apologise upfront for a possible lack of critical notes in this article - I'm still handing out the brownie points to Google for yesterday.

European antitrust regulators have fined nine semiconductor manufacturers more than USD 404 million following a years-long investigation into price fixing in the market for DRAM memory chips. The European Commission said all of the companies submitted settlements admitting their liability for infringement. The companies fined are Samsung Electronics, Infineon, Hynix Semiconductor, Elpida Memory, NEC Electronics, Hitachi, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric and Nanya Technology. A tenth company, Micron, escaped a fine since it told the Commission about the cartel in 2002.

OpenBSD 4.7 is the newest installment in the proactively secure UNIX-like operating system. With 4.7 comes a range of new features including support for the Loongson 2E and 2F MIPS-compatible processors. See the release page for a complete list of new features.

IBM has updated its System x iDataPlex servers to include graphics processors from Nvidia. The new servers are aimed at organizations that want to run scientific and commercial applications on graphics processors.

Despite its recent feud with Apple over HTML5 and Flash, Adobe will add HTML5 and CSS3 support to its Dreamweaver HTML authoring tool. With the Adobe HTML5 Pack extension for Dreamweaver CS5, developers leveraging HTML5 and CSS3 gain such capabilities as code-hinting, in which the tool helps finish lines of code based on what already has been entered on the keyboard. HTML5 Pack extension also features WebKit engine updates and improvements to support video and audio in the Dreamweaver Live View capability for previewing designs. Also, HTML5 starter layouts are featured.

Remember MacOS 9, or Classic as Apple named it once Mac OS X was released? On PowerPC Macintosh machines, you can install a Classic environment which launches a virtualised instance of MacOS 9 whenever you launch a Classic application. This environment has been dropped from Intel releases of Mac OS X, but thanks to SheepShaver, you can still set it up yourself on Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and even BeOS if you want to. I decided to try SheepShaver on my Ubuntu machine, and discovered just how easy it really is.

Yes, I broke my own rules and used a "breaking" modifier for this story (let me have my fun for once). Here we have it, as the rumour mill suggested, Google has released the On2 VP8 video codec as open source (royalty free, BSD-style), while also launching the WebM container format which combines a VP8 video stream with Vorbis audio. Support for WebM has been enabled on YouTube's HTML5 beta, and you can download patches against ffmpeg as well as DirectShow filters for Windows (Gstreamer plugins are labelled as "coming soon"). Mac users are out of luck for now; no QuickTime plugins have been announced yet. Update: The WebM blog is now open - and the list of partners is pretty decent already. It includes ARM, NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, and many others. Update II: VP8 will be baked into Flash. Update III: The Opera labs version with WebM support has been released too, for Linux, Mac, and Windows.