Monthly Archive:: October 2010

Ambition. Too little, and you stagnate. Too much, and you end up stumbling. Keep this in mind. KDE4 was, and is, a very brave and ambitious effort, and while in my personal opinion they've still got a long way to go, especially in the performance department (I regained some hope lately), they're getting there. Imagine my surprise that after the recently announced overhaul of Plasma, a rather wild idea has popped up that would mean Qt5 and KDE5 - assuming the idea gets enough support, of course.

Gutenprint has been ported to Haiku. "Michael Pfeiffer (wait, what?) intends on ironing out the configuration options and fixing any bugs that users experience. Please test out Gutenprint on Haiku with your supported printer and report back here, or file a bug report if you encounter problems. Anyone with a colour cartridge?"

Last week the openSUSE conference took place in Nuremberg, Germany. Instead of deciding to fork a major desktop, the conference focused on 'collaboration across borders' and the results are showing. Fedora visitors worked with openSUSE developers to integrate systemd and dracut in openSUSE 11.4, LibreOffice held their first conference track, project Bretzn (let's make developers' life easier) was announced and it became known that Mageia discusses use of the openSUSE Build Service.

The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details.

Yesterday, we discussed the claims made by Oracle about Google allegedly copying their code, and quickly enough, the web - I included - concluded that it looked like the code in question originally came from Apache's Harmony Project - although no one could find it in the current code repository. Earlier this morning, I contacted the Apache Software Foundation, and they cleared everything up: the contested class library does not, and did not, come from the Apache Harmony project.

The Army is 20 years and a half-billion dollars into a star-crossed effort to build custom communications and digital-mapping gadgets for its soldiers. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is taking a simpler approach: They’re planning to use Android phones.

The third version of the SCHED_DEADLINE patchset has been released to LKML: SCHED_DEADLINE is a real-time scheduling class for Linux with bandwidth isolation (a.k.a. 'resource reservation') capabilities based on the EDF algorithm. This version adds support for global/clustered multiprocessor scheduling through dynamic task migrations. This means that tasks can migrate among (a subset of) CPUs when this is needed, by means of pushes & pulls. Moreover, (c)group based task admission logic and bandwidth management has been removed, in favour of a per root_domain tasks bandwidth accounting mechanism." The code is being jointly developed by ReTiS Lab and Evidence S.r.l in the context of the ACTORS EU-funded project. Development takes place right here.

Cloud apps can be a godsend -- until they stop working, taking all your data with them. Google Docs users worldwide have learned this the hard way this week, locked out of their documents by a bug which Google says is currently its #1 priority to fix, but hasn't been able to resolve for six days and counting. The bug, associated with Google's new multiple account login feature, causes an endless redirect when people try to open a document. Microsoft has been quick to jump on the opportunity to promote its forthcoming Office 365 service, which caches files locally, as a better solution than the all-cloud solution Google is offering. Google has been apologetic about the bug but says since it is not actually an outage it will not honor its 99.9% uptime guarantee for Google Apps Premier users.

"Microsoft profit jumped 51 percent year over year and recorded record quarterly revenue during Q1 of its fiscal year 2011, the company said today, killing Wall Street estimates as skepticism surrounded Microsoft's cash cows. Net income skyrocketed from $3.57 billion in Q1FY10 to $5.41 billion in the quarter ending Sept. 30, launched by strong sales of Windows 7 and Office 2010. The year-ago period, however, was a low point as Microsoft weathered the poor economy. Earnings per share was 62 cents, eclipsing the Wall Street consensus estimate of 55 cents. And while analysts had expected revenue of $15.8 billion, Microsoft reported $16.2 billion - up 25 percent over the year-ago period."

"Even though its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by Web standards fans, Adobe has been building tools that embrace HTML5. The company recently released its own HTML5 video player, and Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 now contain a number of new HTML5 export tools. Now it seems Flash might be joining the party. At Adobe's MAX conference this week, Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier showed of a demo of tool that converts Flash animations to HTML5 (well, technically it looks like a combination of HTML5, CSS and images)."

Now, this is an interesting development in the ongoing war against Android. Oracle didn't just sue Google for allegedly infringing its Java patents; it also claimed copyright infringement. Oracle has amended its complaint, and, fair is fair, they've got the code to prove it: indeed, Android contains code that appears to be copied verbatim from Java - mind you, appears. However, the code in question comes straight from Apache's Harmony project, which raises the question - would a respected and long-established cornerstone of the open source world really accept tainted code in the first place?

If you can't compete, litigate. This train of thought has been quite prevalent among major technology companies as of late, most notably by Apple and Microsoft, who both cannot compete with Android on merit, so they have to resort to patent lawsuits and FUD. Both Asustek and Acer have revealed that Microsoft plans to impose royalty fees upon the two Taiwanese hardware makers to prevent them from shipping Android and/or Chrome OS devices.

"This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between July and September 2010. It is the third of the four reports planned for 2010. During this period, we were victims of one of the biggest BSD events of the year - EuroBSDCon. We hope that the ones of you who have been able to attend it have enjoyed your stay. Another good news is that work on the new minor versions of FreeBSD, 7.4 and 8.2, is progressing well."

Google has confirmed on the official Android Developer Twitter account that the Android Market has surpassed the milestone of 100000 applications. In perspective, Steve Jobs said last week that the Apple App Store now contains over 300000 applications. Having said that, the Android Market has now arguably reached a point where the difference becomes almost immaterial in a practical sense, because even with only 100000 applications it is unlikely anyone will be short-changed for choice.