Monthly Archive:: September 2006

openSUSE 10.2 Alpha4 has been released. It features GNOME 2.15.92 with Novell's Slab menu, KDE with the Kickoff menu, Xorg 7.1, kernel 2.6.18rc5, lots of improvements on the package management (if it was as bad as SLED 10's, they'd better), and other improvements.

"In July, Intel released the dual-core Itanium 2 processor, formerly code-named Montecito, and announced that the new chip is capable of double the performance of its predecessor while consuming 20 percent less electrical power. eWEEK Labs' tests of a server based on the newest Itanium 2 platform show promise but also limitations."

Ars is taking a look at the new Vista audio enhancements, like system wide loudness equalization, diferent volume level adjustments for different audio sources, reverse bass management, speaker fill, room correction, speaker phantoming, HRTF, and microphone arrays. Combined together with Vista's new audio engine architecture, audiophiles should find plenty to rejoice about.

"Want to run best of breed apps under both Windows and Unix? Eric Hall tells you about an option for doing this: Microsoft's Posix subsystem. It lets Unix apps think they are using regular Unix, but they are actually using Windows instead."

"To be frank you do not need a full source tree in order to just compile or build module against the running kernel; i.e. an exploded source tree is not required to build kernel drivers or modules. Developers and power users will benefit immensely from the instructions outlined below."

Syllable 0.6.1 is the latest incarnation of the operating system that "will be a reliable and easy-to-use GPLed operating system for the home and small office user" as their website states. That's quite a noble cause most other alternative operating systems never claim to be able to market to non-technical audience one day. Even getting Syllable up and running is pretty easy: fully-working VMWare images and a LiveCD images are provided for free download. Apparently, Danes are the primary downloader of the Syllable LiveCD, given the primary language in which the LiveCD page is by default.

The GNOME team has released version 2.16 of its desktop environment. The release notes detail many improvements in this new version. Ars reviews this new release (ok, a pre-release), and concludes: "Overall, I think that GNOME 2.16 is a good release with some nice additions, but I don't think it has any killer features that justify an immediate upgrade. I'm going to wait for the official Ubuntu Edgy release in October rather than upgrading early. Of the new features included in GNOME 2.16, I think that the vertical view mode for Evolution is probably the one that will benefit me the most." Update: On a related note, Monodevelop 0.12 is out, with lots of changes in it.

Two negative reviews of Vista RC1. First off, CRN says: "Microsoft is making its first Vista release candidate and pricing information more broadly available to partners and consumers this week. Solution providers who have seen it say it's not yet ready for prime time." Our favourite Microsoft Apple Microsoft zealot Paul Thurrot posted the 2nd part of his RC1 review: "Overall, Windows Vista is a stunning bit of work. But the devil is in the details, as they say, and Microsoft has never been very good at consistency and that final bit of polish that separates something competent from something wonderful." In the meantime, one of Vista's lead developers has left Microsoft.

IBM has won a bid to build a supercomputer called Roadrunner that will include not just conventional Opteron chips but also the Cell processor used in the Sony PlayStation. The supercomputer, for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, will be the world's fastest machine and is designed to sustain a performance level of a 'petaflop', or 1 quadrillion calculations per second, said US Senator Pete Domenici earlier this year. I'd like to play Solitaire on that.

UNIX provides hundreds, if not thousands, of commands with which you can manipulate a large variety of resources available in the kernel and user space. Martin Streicher, Editor-in-Chief, Linux Magazine, looks at three essential UNIX utilities that deliver the entire Internet to your command line.

"Is Michael Robertson afraid of anything? The entrepreneur has a made a career - and a fortune - playing rough with giants. Now, though, he's turning up the volume: predicting an end to Apple's hold on digital music, shaking up the Linux community by looking to marry open source smarts with proprietary know-how, and talking trash about Microsoft's new Zune. Pay attention, because this is a guy who finds a way to win every time he mixes it up."

"IronPython is about bringing together two worlds. The key value in IronPython is that it is both a true implementation of Python and is seamlessly integrated with the .NET platform. Most features were easy and natural choices where the language and the platform fit together with almost no work. However, there were challenges from the obvious cases like exception type hierarchies to the somewhat esoteric challenges concerning different methods on strings." More here.

Intel announced plans Tuesday to lay off thousands of workers over the next year after a strategic review designed to prepare the company for life with a smaller share of the chip market. The layoffs primarily hit the marketing and information technology departments. The company said it will have 10500 fewer employees by the middle of 2007, as compared to its headcount at the end of this year's 2nd quarter.

Microsoft researchers are experimenting with an automatic code zapper for the company's Internet Explorer Web browser. Researchers at the company have completed work on a prototype framework called BrowserShield that promises to allow IE to intercept and remove, on the fly, malicious code hidden on Web pages, instead showing users safe equivalents of those pages.