Written by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Sep 2008 21:33 UTC
Windows A few weeks ago, I reviewed the Acer Aspire One notebook, the variant which came with an Acer-modified version of Linpus Linux. This version was locked-down and difficult to modify, so not too long after I installed Ubuntu, and was reasonably pleased - despite the amount of tweaking it took to get it working. A few days ago, however, I realised Linux wouldn't be ideal for me on my netbook. Due to pragmatic reasons, I'm now running Windows XP.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Sep 2008 19:01 UTC, submitted by michuk
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu The next Ubuntu release is already around the corner. Only two more months, and the next tidal wave of brown 2 paragraph reviews will be upon us. PolishLinux decided that they'd be ahead of the pack, by taking a look at what Ubuntu 8.10 looks like right now, and what new features it brings. Of course, many of these features come from upstream, and will find their way into other distributions as well - or are already there.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Sep 2008 16:52 UTC, submitted by BlueVoodoo
General Development Over at one of IBM's many developer websites, there's an article on new features of the Korn Shell. "New features of the Korn Shell provide system administrators and management with the ability to monitor, track, record, and audit every command executed by any user of a system. This is different from the normal shell history, and provides detailed information that includes date, time, tty, user, and the command. This information can be stored locally or transmitted in real time to a remote logging system."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Sep 2008 22:49 UTC
Google While Google's new Chrome web browser has been met with a lot of praise and positive responses (well, mostly, at least), there has been one nagging issue that arose quite quickly after people got their hands on Chrome: the End User License Agreement accompanying the browser. It more or less granted Google the rights to everything seen or transmitted through the browser. Google now changed the EULA, saying it was a big case of woopsiedoopsie.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Sep 2008 20:30 UTC, submitted by Jeremy
3D News, GL, DirectX With a preview version slated for November 2008 and beta versions as early as 2009, Microsoft's newest DirectX will be here sooner than you think. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case digs deep into DirectX 11 and discusses its new features and how it differs from DX10. While improved graphics are expected out of the new release, DX11 hopes to improve upon crunching complex graphics with the GPU through hardware tessellation, which many people hoped to see in DX10.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Sep 2008 20:22 UTC, submitted by amjith
Sun Solaris, OpenSolaris Hadoop is a software platform for processing huge amounts of data. It consists of the Hadoop Distributed FileSystem which is capable of storing petabytes of data across thousands of nodes. HDFS ensures that data is always available, even if underlying nodes get corrupted or fail. Hadoop also includes Map/Reduce, a programming model for breaking the data into smaller chunks of work and distributing that work across the nodes in the cluster.
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Written by Georgios Kasselakis on Wed 3rd Sep 2008 15:14 UTC
Google It appears that Google scored a PR success with their Chrome browser. In short, the promise is a web experience where web pages are allowed to behave more like desktop applications. This is done by boosting the abilities of common web pages in terms of performance, while also allowing 'plugins' to enrich the user experience of certain other pages. As it seems, the announcement shot at the heads of people who've been holding their breath for the fabled Google Operating System. However in the following text I will demonstrate that Chrome [based on what we are allowed to know] puts strain on the Designer and Developer communities, is not innovative (save for one feature), and copies ideas liberally from Google's worst enemy.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Sep 2008 09:36 UTC, submitted by vermaden
Window Managers Fluxbox 1.1.0 has been released. "Fluxbox is a windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience. It is built using C++ and licensed under the MIT-License." There's no official release announcement yet, but the code is on Sourceforge, as well as the release notes.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Sep 2008 16:46 UTC
Internet & Networking "In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, "What they [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that... Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?" The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit', and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll to take a look at the economics of peering of transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Sep 2008 16:38 UTC
Mac OS X "One of the most frequently used Cocoa classes is NSImage which, as the name suggests, is all about displaying and manipulating image data. The imageNamed: method of this class retrieves an image reference for you - provided that you know the name of the image you're after. Many of the images that can be retrieved via the imageNamed: method have well documented names, but there's a lot of stuff in there that's not well-known. It's those images - including some for Windows - that I'll be digging into here. I shall also give you source code to a little utility that uses an entirely different mechanism to retrieve images used by OS X."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Sep 2008 06:54 UTC, submitted by Renai LeMay
Google The browser wars may just become a little bit more interesting. Apart from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, another player is ready to join the field in what will most probably be released as a beta - you know, company policy - for the upcoming 23 years: Chrome. It's a webkit-based browser from Google. Update: It's out there, folks.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 1st Sep 2008 08:55 UTC, submitted by Dan Warne
Windows A common topic of discussion in the Windows world - in fact, in any operating system - is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft's Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 31st Aug 2008 16:15 UTC, submitted by cy
BeOS & Derivatives Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai, Haiku now has support for a swap file. "As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences. Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. [Ingo Weinhold] tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet." The swap implementation borrows heavily from that of FreeBSD.

 

Linked by David Adams on Sat 30th Aug 2008 16:47 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Consumers increasingly want more sophisticated handsets, and smartphone sales are expected to grow 52% this year compared to last year, according to Gartner. Overall, 190 million units will be sold this year, accounting for about 15% of the total handset market. In 2012, Gartner predicts, smartphone sales will reach over 700 million units, accounting for 65% of all handset sales. This will represent nearly $200 billion, Gartner said.

 

Linked by David Adams on Sat 30th Aug 2008 16:42 UTC
Windows Dell, Inc announced on Friday that it will offer Windows XP operating system to their personal computer customers after the June deadline. Microsoft has scheduled to pull the Windows XP operating system from store shelves on June 30 in an effort to upgrade customers to Windows Vista.

 

Linked by David Adams on Sat 30th Aug 2008 16:32 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless The day after Google announced its answer to Apple's iPhone App store, it has announced the winners of a contest wherein developers win $275,000 or $100,000 for developing a top app for Google's upcoming Android mobile phone OS. To get an idea of where the trend in mobile computing is heading, all of the top ten use location-based data via GPS. Check out the winners.

 

Linked by David Adams on Sat 30th Aug 2008 16:20 UTC, submitted by michuk
Law and Order Compulsory Windows purchasing by way of PC bundles is one of the biggest hurtles to alternative OS adoption. Some people have been able to fight it: "Reading the Slashdot article about Dave Mitchell from Great Britain, who got a 47 pounds refund from Dell for returning his copy of Windows was an inspiration for me to check, if it is possible in Poland, too. This is my success story."

 

Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Sat 30th Aug 2008 13:50 UTC
In the News Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th Aug 2008 20:59 UTC
Apple Quite often, Steve Jobs is given all the credit for the original Macintosh - but in reality, it wasn't Steve Jobs who made the largest contribution to the project; in fact, he didn't even come up with the idea. Jef Raskin envisioned an easy-to-use computer with a graphical user interface, and somewhere in 1979 he got the green light to start the Macintosh project, and together with Bill Atkinson he put together a team to develop the hard and software. It wasn't until much later that the project caught Steve Jobs' eye, who realised the Macintosh project had more potential than his own brainchild, the Lisa. One of the people on the Macintosh team was Andy Hertzfeld, and O'Reilly News interviewed him a few days ago.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 29th Aug 2008 19:44 UTC, submitted by irbis
KDE "If you follow technology trends, you have probably heard of the semantic desktop -- a data layer for annotating and sharing the information in your computer. But what you may not be aware of is that the semantic desktop is not a distant goal, but scheduled to arrive at the end of 2008. And, when it does, the idea will probably be implemented through the work done by the Nepomuk project, and, most likely, by KDE first."