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Monthly Archive:: June 2010

Qubes To Implement Disposable Virtual Machines

Now this is interesting. We only briefly touched upon Qubes two months ago, and now, the team behind the project have announced a very interesting feature: disposable virtual machines. The idea here is that you can tell your operating system to launch an application in a virtual machine that gets created specifically for opening that application. If you close the application, the VM is destroyed automatically - and this all in under one second.

Microsoft Shows Off Windows Embedded Compact 7 Tablet

I think that no matter which group you belong to - Apple, Linux, Windows, BeOS - we can all agree on one thing: original equipment manufacturers are terrible at writing or pre-loading software. Whether it be adding pre-exisiting software to Windows OEM installs, or software they write on their own, it is universally bad. As such, I just can't understand why Microsoft would leave creating tablet user experiences to OEMs.

HP CEO: “We Didn’t Buy Palm to Be in the Smartphone Business”

Not too long ago, a lot of people were pleasantly surprised when HP announced it would buy smartphone maker Palm. While Palm launched a very well-received mobile operating system, the hardware it ran on was of questionable quality, leading to lower-than-expected sales and thus financial problems. Now that HP has bought Palm, we're certainly going to see the webOS running on top-notch smartphones, right? Well, not if it's up to HP CEO Mark Hurd. Update: This gives a slightly different angle.

Smokescreen: Flash in HTML5 & JavaScript

Unless you've been under a rock, you're probably familiar with the fact that Flash doesn't run on any mobile Apple device. Moreover, it looks like Apple is never going to let Flash onto the iPhone/iPod/iPad empire. Rather than just whinge about the fact, the ad network company RevShock decided to do something about it by creating Smokescreen, an open source product that converts Flash to HTML5 & Javascript. While mainly designed for ads, and still very much in the testing stages, the demos certainly look very promising, and it ticks all the boxes for those who want everything to be open and free.

India To Forge Coalition to Fight ACTA

We've talked about ACTA before. ACTA is an anti-capitalistic treaty which implements several measures that will seriously hurt people's freedoms, rights, and privacy, all to, among other things, support a failing business model from an industry which has failed time and time again to adapt to a changing market. In any working free market, business models are allowed to fail, but the US/EU governments clearly don't see it that way. India has now announced that it is going to forge its own anti-ACTA coalition in an effort to undermine the new treaty.

Google’s Chrome Computing System To Debut in Autumn

Google said Wednesday it is planning to release its Chrome operating system, seen as a rival to Microsoft's Windows system, for free in the autumn. "We are working on bringing the device later this fall," said Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai at CompuTex Taipei, Asia's biggest IT trade show. "It's something which we are very excited by ... We expect it to reach millions of users on day one," he said.

PixelQi Shows Off Its Tech at Computex

You have these products and/or technologies that everybody expects to go mainstream, yet never really do. You know, things like desktop Linux (+14 troll), ARM-based netbooks, and... PixelQi screens. Yes, these wonder displays are supposed to take over the world, yet, we've only ever seen them on demonstration devices - never on shipping products we can, you know, buy. At Computex, PixelQi once again showed off its display technology on demonstration devices.

Adobe Premiere Pro & After Effects CS5

With the explosion of (mostly Canon's) video HD dSLRs in the last few months, purchase decisions for video editors have shifted, depending on which editor can deal with h.264 the best way. Until recently, users had to either use "proxy" files, or transcode to an intermediate format. Then, Adobe's Premiere Pro CS5 came in to change this by being the first video editor to fully utilize nVidia's CUDA technology and achieve real-time playback for Quicktime dSLR, and AVCHD footage.

Google: Android Fragmentation a Non-Issue

Fragmentation. You'll often hear people say this is a major problem with Google's Android platform; there are many devices running multiple different versions of the mobile operating system, leading to fragmentation. Dan Morrill, Android's open source and compatibility program manager, addresses this issue in a blog post, and details what Google is doing to fight it. The gist: it's a non-issue - according to Google, that is.

Intel Fashions Supercomputing Phoenix from Ashes of Larrabee

"In an announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference, Intel provided further details on the many-core chip that it hinted at earlier in the month. The first product based on the new design will be codenamed Knight's Corner, and will debut at 22nm with around 50 x86 cores on the same die. Developer kits, which include a prototype of the design called Knight's Ferry, have been shipping to select partners for a while now, and will ship more broadly in the second half of the year. When Intel moves to 22nm in 2011, Knight's Corner will make its official debut."

Microsoft Launches Windows Embedded Compact 7 CTP

And the award for Most Boring And Non-descriptive Press Release Title 2010 goes to Microsoft for "Microsoft Outlines Business Opportunities for Hardware Makers Across Windows Platform". The press release itself appears to be about as interesting as watching paint dry, until you reach that small part where it says Microsoft has released the first community technology preview of Windows Embedded Compact 7 (1).

Review: Windows 7’s Built-in Speech Recognition

"Microsoft has pumped out voice recognition software for years, but the company has a curious aversion to publicizing the fact. With Windows 7, Microsoft's speech recognition has become a decent productivity tool and one that the company should be proud to proclaim as an OS feature. For the casual speech recognition user, nothing beats free - especially when one considers the $100+ price points for third-party software. But is it powerful enough for serious users?"