Monthly Archive:: May 2011

"Pinta, a 'lightweight' open source raster image editor, turned 1.0 on April 27, offering Linux users another choice for simple image editing. Pinta is intended to be a clone of Paint.NET, the Windows-only raster editor written in .NET. As such, it uses Mono under the hood, but it gains the ability to run equally well on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows. Is it a replacement for GIMP or Krita? That depends on what you need to do." What I like about Pinta is that I actually caused its creation in the first place.

"At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, Google said that Chrome OS notebooks, now called 'Chromebooks', will be available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain starting June 15, and that it will be offering a combined software and hardware subscription service for businesses, schools, and government customers. The pricing of Google's subscription plan is modest: For $28 per user per month, businesses will receive Chromebooks, Web-based administration controls, enterprise-level support, a warranty, and hardware replacement upon subscription renewal. Schools and governments have access to the subscription package for $20 per user per month." Look at the concept here.

" Gourdol confirmed tonight would get the full WebM support, which also includes the Vorbis audio encoding technology and a container to bundle the data together. 'We don't have a timetable for it,' Gourdol said of WebM support in Flash. Important factors include hardware support, just getting under way today, and broad use of the technology, he said."

"Representatives from Apple and Google faced hard questions about their location and privacy policies when testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law on Tuesday. Apple VP of Software Technology Guy 'Bud' Tribble and Google Director of Public Policy Alan Davidson both stood behind their companies' policies at the hearing, however, while continuing to insist that they take consumer privacy seriously."

So, the biggest acquisition in Microsoft's history. The Wall Street Journal reports - and it has been confirmed - that Microsoft and Skype will announce today that Redmond will buy Skype for $8.5 billion. That's a lot of money for a company that hasn't ever actually made any profits. Update: and it's official: yay on Skype on the Xbox360 and Windows Phone, and this: "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." Let's hope this includes Linux.

Apple has released the source code for WebKit in iOS 4.3, which it had been withholding for eight weeks. However, according yo Jay 'saurik' Freeman, they are still not, and never have been, in compliance with the LGPL. "Apple's provided source code (which /is/ heavily modified for the iPhone) isn't even complete enough to compile (it is missing a bunch of code for the WAK* classes), so Apple has simply never been in compliance with this license," Saurik writes. So, it would seem that Apple is still violating the LGPL, and has been doing so for a very long time. Funny how this never makes it to mainstream technology sites. I guess they find their pre-release review devices more important.

"Hyperion Entertainment CVBA is pleased to announce that all materials comprising the AmigaOS 4.1 distribution for Amiga 1200/3000/4000 equipped with the appropriate PowerPC based accelerator card (Cyberstorm PPC or BlizzardPPC) have now been completed. AmigaOS 4.1 brings Amiga1200/3000/4000 the wealth of new functionality which was made available to other supported platforms in August of 2008 - up to and including - Update 2 released on April 30th, 2010."

AMD Embedded Solutions has gained a great appreciation for the value of coreboot to our ecosystem and continues to build momentum by adding support for our existing products, adding new features, and introducing a roadmap for support going forward." Let's hope regular boards are next. BIOS needs to die.

Only a few weeks after Canonical, Ubuntu Linux's biggest change ever - the release of the Unity-based Ubuntu 11.04 Linux - the company's CTO, Matt Zimmerman is leaving the company.

The Apple/ARM rumor du jour is that Apple will transition its entire portable Mac line to ARM-based CPUs, dropping Intel altogether. Sources speaking to Semi Accurate claim this is a "done deal," and the move should happen by 2013, when a 64-bit ARM A15 core becomes available. While a future generation of Apple's A5 processor could make some sense for something akin to the MacBook Air, the claim that Apple will ditch Intel wholesale for ARM just doesn't add up.

"It all began when a young man named George Hotz began to work on the PlayStation 3, trying to gain access to the machine in a way that made Sony uncomfortable. In response, Sony removed the OtherOS functionality of the PlayStation 3 in a mandatory update, and the hacking community was not happy with this decision, resulting in a sort of cold war. PS3 hackers have once again gained the upper hand: Linux has been returned to the PlayStation 3."

Somebody has just added the Portal gun to Minecraft. Your argument? It is now invalid.

We've had an immense hubbub about the delay in the source code release of Honeycomb, which led to a storm of critique being sent Google's way. Turns out there's another company withholding source code, and this time it's Apple. They have stopped releasing the LGPL source code for WebKit in iOS since iOS 4.3.0, released about 8 weeks ago. Turns out - this isn't the first time Apple has refused to release (L)GPL'd code. It took them six months to release the required GPL source code for iOS 4.1.

The release of the first beta of version 9.1 of the open source PostgreSQL database has opened a new era in enterprise-class reliability and data integrity that can compete with the big names, say its developers. CIO recently interviewed Josh Berkus, Kevin Grittner, Dimitri Fontaine and Robert Haas about PostgreSQL 9.1 and its future.