Monthly Archive:: January 2011

KDE 4.6.0 Released

Before we get underway: I'm sorry, we don't have enough headline space to write 'KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.6.0'. Then again, do any non-anal people every refer to it that way? No? I thought so. In any case, there's a new KDE version out with lots of new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements.

Obama Nominates Former RIAA Lawyer For Solicitor General

"President Barack Obama on Monday nominated former Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Donald Verrilli Jr. to serve as the nation's solicitor general. The solicitor general is charged with defending the government before the Supreme Court, and files friend-of-the court briefs in cases in which the government believes there is a significant legal issue. The office also determines which cases it would bring to the Supreme Court for review. Verrilli is best known for leading the recording industry's legal charge against music- and movie-sharing site Grokster. That 2003 case ultimately led to Grokster's demise when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the RIAA's verdict." Cough.

Microsoft’s eMIPS Port Now Part of NetBSD

A month ago Microsoft released a NetBSD port for their eMIPS ("Extensible MIPS") platform. Now the port found its way into the NetBSD source tree. "The 'extensible MIPS' is a dynamically extensible processor for general-purpose, multi-user systems. The reconfigurable logic (Extensions) dynamically load/unload application-specific circuits. Extensions add specialized instructions to the processor, security monitors, debuggers, new on-chip peripherals. Extended Instructions dramatically speedup application programs, just by patching their binaries." Besides the eMIPS port, Microsoft also contributed a machine independent framework for hardware accelerator scheduling, a scheduling policy for it, and a secure executable format.

Major Linux Distributions Collaborating on Application Store

Installing software on Linux has gotten progressively easier over the years, down to being downright foolproof in Ubuntu's Application Center. However, there is still the problem of each distribution relying on its own frontends and backends, and this needs to be addressed. Members from all the major Linux distributions have held several talks, and have come up with a solution which is already being implemented.

Microsoft To Work with Jailbreakers on Windows Phone 7

Right, it's good to be back. This is news from last week, but heck, it's relevant for me since I just got my HTC HD7 Windows Phone 7 device. Anyway, if you're running a very large company in the business of selling phones, gadgets, and so on, there are several ways to deal with jailbreakers. It seems like Microsoft is one of the few companies who knows what it needs to do.

Why Graphene Won’t Replace Silicon in Microprocessors

Over the last three years, we've seen a lot of impressive demonstrations of what the material graphene (a single-atom wide sheet of carbon with the atoms spread in an hexagonal mesh) can do. However, according to IBM, graphene does not have an energy gap, which means that graphene transistors can't be "switched on and off", and thus that they are unsuitable for use inside of microprocessors.

The Document Foundation Launches LibreOffice 3.3

"The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project."