Monthly Archive:: November 2010

Apple’s Tablet Computer History

Apple 8 Comments
The iPad has been a long time coming. Apple has produced innumerable tablet computer prototypes and of course developed and released the much-maligned and much-beloved iPad precursor, the Messagepad2000/2001 a decade ago. There are some nifty designs outlined in this retrospective of Apple tablets but sadly, lack of advancement in flat screen technology made them largely a pipe dream at the time. Steve Jobs, however, was very interesting in putting Apple's R&D fully behind developing LCD monitors back in the 80s, and if the board had let him, it may have changed the mobile computing timeline substantially.
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Intel’s Former ARM Team Hits Chipzilla with New Server Chip

Hardware 3 Comments
The gloves are off in the ARM vs. Intel battle, now that Marvell has announced a full-blown ARM server chip for cloud datacenters. The 40nm, 1.6GHz, quad-core ARMADA XP is aimed squarely at a market segment that Intel has seen strong performance from in the past few quarters, and Marvell's co-founder, Weili Dai, is clear about that, saying, "Marvell's introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution."
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Released

Red Hat 8 Comments
"Red Hat, Inc. today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest major release of the company's flagship operating platform, setting the scene for its server operating systems for the next decade. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat defines new standards for commercial open source operating environments. Designed to support today's flexible and varied enterprise architectures, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers the comprehensive foundation customers need for physical, virtualized and cloud deployments."
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The Coming War Over the Future of Java

Java 19 Comments
Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about what could be the end of the Java Community Process as we know it. With the Apache Software Foundation declaring war on Oracle over Java, the next likely step would be a vote of no confidence in the JCP, which, if the ASF can convince enough members to follow suit, "could effectively unravel the Java community as a whole", McAllister writes, with educators, academics, and researchers having little incentive to remain loyal to an Oracle-controlled platform. "Independent developers could face the toughest decisions of all. Even if the JCP dissolves, many developers will be left with few alternatives", with .Net offering little advantage, and Perl, Python, and Ruby unable to match Java's performance. The dark horse? Google Go - a language Google might just fast-track in light of its patent suit with Oracle over Android.
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Commissioner Kroes: Copyright Reform Needed

In the News 52 Comments
Wait, what - let me get this straight. A powerful politician, a politician who managed to bring even the largest companies to their knees, is on the side of reason in the copyright debate? Yes, Neelie Kroes, in her capacity as European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, has openly expressed her support for copyright reform. Her argumentation is incredibly lucid and clear, and pretty much echoes everything I've written about copyright here on OSNews.
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Mac OS X 10.6.5 Released

macOS 27 Comments
"As expected, Apple has released Mac OS X 10.6.5, the fifth update to its Snow Leopard operating system. The update brings a number of fixes for a wide variety of issues, including printing problems, Exchange compatibility, and improved graphics drivers that 'address stability and performance of graphics applications and games'." For the first time in a long time, I get to install a new Mac OS X update. My new MacBook Air 11.6" arrived two days ago!
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Gosu Brings Fresh Language Skills to Java Virtual Platform

  Submitted by fran Java 35 Comments
"Programmers in the Java environment have another tool in their box, following the launch of a new programming language called Gosu. Publicly released by Guidewire Software, Gosu is a general purpose programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. According to the developers, Gosu is an object-oriented language that is 100% compatible with Java and has a promising set of attributes compared to other JVM languages. For example, Gosu boasts solid IDE tooling and static typing (meaning variables don't have to be defined before they're used), which remain rare in the world of JVMs."
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Xfce 4.8pre1 Released

  Submitted by poundsmack Xfce 20 Comments
"This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular) from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop. The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4."
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Apache Declares War on Oracle over Java

  Submitted by fran Java 29 Comments
"Charging that Oracle has willfully disregarded the licensing terms for its own Java technology, the Apache Software Foundation has called upon other members of the Java Community Process (JCP) to vote against the next proposed version of the language, should Oracle continue to impose restrictions on open-source Java use. The nonprofit organization has also indicated that it could end its involvement in the JCP if the licensing restrictions stay in place."
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BeRTOS 2.6 Released

  Submitted by poundsmack OS News 1 Comment
"This release builds upon the work done for the 2.5 series, and delivers many new drivers for internal MCU peripherals, USB support, Atmel SAM3N support, and a new API for block devices. New supported CPU: Atmel SAM3N Cortex-M3. Atmel ATmega1280 and Arduino Mega code. New module: USB support for STM32. New drivers: usb-serial, USB keyboard, and USB mouse. A new interface for block devices: KBlock. A new module: generic event completion infrastructure. A new and more flexible I2C API."
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FSFLA: Linux Kernel Is Torvalds’ ‘Bait and Switch’

  Submitted by koki Open Source 102 Comments
Now this is interesting. We see what is at its core a very valid concern, in practice not a problem to anyone, and, thanks to the tone of the press release, close to trolling. The Free Software Foundation Latin America is complaining about something that has been known for a while - there is some non-Free code stuck in the Linux kernel (mostly firmware). A valid issue of concern from an idealogical viewpoint, but sadly, the tone of the press release turns this valid concern into something close to trolling.
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Compiler Benchmarks of GCC, LLVM-GCC, DragonEgg, Clang

  Submitted by Michael Benchmarks 24 Comments
"LLVM 2.8 was released last month with the Clang compiler having feature-complete C++ support, enhancements to the DragonEgg GCC plug-in, a near feature-complete alternative to libstdc++, a drop-in system assembler, ARM code-generation improvements, and many other changes. With there being great interest in the Low-Level Virtual Machine, we have conducted a large LLVM-focused compiler comparison at Phoronix of GCC with versions 4.2.1 through 4.6-20101030, GCC 4.5.1 using the DragonEgg 2.8 plug-in, LLVM-GCC with LLVM 2.8 and GCC 4.2, and lastly with Clang on LLVM 2.8."
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Adobe CTO on MacBook Air, HTML5

Internet 49 Comments
"Last week, critics hammered Adobe over a report showing that Flash drained the new MacBook Air's battery life by several hours. It's not the first time Adobe has been in fisticuffs with Apple: the companies have been duking it out ever since Steve Jobs began ridiculing Flash and touting its alleged-killer, HTML5. Today, in an interview with Fast Company, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch answered critics who might say HTML5 is somehow more efficient than Flash."
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Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoft’s War Room

  Submitted by S. Akers Windows 13 Comments
In an industry dependent on intellectual property, Microsoft's fight against "theft" has implications beyond the bottom line. "Intellectual property is a critical engine of economic growth," says Microsoft's anti-piracy chief, "That's not just for large companies, but also for small businesses and entire countries. We work with governments that are realizing this is in their best interests."
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