Monthly Archive:: April 2007

Jon Stokes writes over at Ars: "At some point, I'm going to write my very last e-paper/e-ink article for Ars. After almost a decade of thin, flexible, low-power displays being "three to five years away," I can finally see that the time for e-paper's mass-market debut is almost upon us. A case in point is Fujitsu's new FLEPia portable tablet, samples of which are now available in limited supply as of this past Friday."

"Stephan Binner, a well-known KDE and openSUSE developer, has released a set of live CDs featuring the latest development snapshot of KDE 4 (screenshots). Unlike the SLAX-based live CD called KLAX, which he used to develop in order to demonstrate new KDE releases, his 'KDE Four Live' images are based on openSUSE. After a large, uncompressed live DVD released earlier in the week, a set of smaller live CDs (compressed with Squashfs) is now also available for download. Don't expect trouble-free computing with these early KDE 4 snapshots, but as demonstration tools designed to give KDE users an early taste of things to come, they aren't too bad. The first alpha build of KDE 4 is scheduled for release early next week."

If you shout something loud enough and many people are saying it, does it become true? Some groups of people (include tech journalists and Linux advocates, such as Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols) have a psychological need to find Vista lacking. Mr. V-N has predicted that Vista will have all manner of problems, so his clear interest is to point out everything that is wrong with the OS. Who cares if he has to even make some stuff up?

They better check that thermostat down in hell, because, believe it or not, AmigaOS4 has found a computer to run on - a computer which we will actually be able to buy. I kid you not. "After months of designs and negotiations Amiga, Inc. and ACK Software Controls, Inc. are pleased to announce that new hardware is on its way for Amiga users. Initially, two systems will be produced that address two different market needs. The first is a consumer entry design that will offer a complete product with a target price point of USD 500, while the second will be of a power design that would have a target price point of USD 1500. The PowerPC architecture will continue to be the architecture of choice for these new systems. Manufacturing and final price information along with product launch schedules will be following in the next week." Sure they can fly.

"Full merge of 1.5 generics work. Bootstrappable with OpenJDK javac compiler. URLConnection timeout support. TimeZone can use platform zoneinfo file when available. The Collection classes, lang.management and util.spi have been updated to 1.6. Addition of 1.6 ServiceLoader. Speedup for cairo and freetype Graphics2D support. The ASM library is now included. Better detection of browser plugin mechanisms for gcjwebplugin applet support in mozilla, iceweasel and firefox." See also the full announcement and some nice screenshots.

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the 'Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler'. He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads."

Little-known intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation this week became the latest to claim that Apple had abused a patent they hold. Filed April 18th in a US district court in Marshall, Texas the four-page formal complaint purports that Apple has engaged in 'willful and deliberate' infringement of a computer control patent by selling its current Tiger operating system. On a related note, Microsoft has similar problems.

"Since its introduction iChat has become the de facto Instant Messaging client on Mac OS X, allowing users to communicate using text, audio, and even video chat. The new version of iChat in Leopard opens up these capabilities to other applications on the system, allowing those applications to provide content through an iChat session." My take: Now, if Apple would implement support for MSN and other protocols for those of us (especially in Europe) who do not use AIM/ICQ, this could be a whole lot more interesting.

All too often, source code spends a lot of time on basic housekeeping, monitoring the state of many objects. This is wasteful, and with C# it is unnecessary. Software expert Stephen Morris shows how C# provides a range of callback mechanisms that obviate the need for polling objects for state information.

"Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) arrived just a few days ago with promises of better hardware compatibility, included proprietary software and drivers, and more user friendliness. Was it wort the wait? And more importantly - Is it finally time to "Make the Switch"?" Read the review here. Elsewhere, "First thoughts on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn" was published at ZDNet. Update: A reply article to the two linked above.

Macaulay, a software engineer, was able to hack into a MacBook through a zero-day security hole in Apple's Safari browser. The computer was one of two offered as a prize in the 'PWN to Own' hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference. The successful attack on the second and final day of the contest required a conference organizer to surf to a malicious Web site using Safari on the MacBook - a type of attack familiar to Windows users.

Having Michael Dell back at the helm of his namesake company hasn't paid any quick dividends when it comes to market share. According to Gartner Research, Dell continued its slide both in the US and worldwide during the first quarter of 2007, while HP opened up an even-wider lead. Interesting in these results is that you can clearly see that Apple's strongest market is still the United States.

Apple on Thursday plugged over two dozen security exploits within the client and server versions of its Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther' and Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' operating systems that could potentially expose Mac users to a variety of malicious attacks.

Lots of Windows-related news today. Firstly, responding to customer demand, Dell has restarted selling new PCs with Windows XP installed on them. Secondly, Microsoft software will sell for just USD 3 in some parts of the world in an attempt to double the number of global PC users (probably not at all unrelated to this interesting figure). Lastly, Vista may only be three months old in the retail marketplace, but Microsoft is already seeking participants in the beta testing program for the next version of Windows Media Center, codenamed Fiji. Update: Microsoft denied the sales figures in China to News.com.