Monthly Archive:: January 2009

Despite the success of the Windows 7 beta, which got leaked before it was officially released and had several deadline extensions, Microsoft isn't exactly sitting still. The beta build, with build number 7000, was built on December 12th, 2008, so that leaves enough room between then and now for several newer builds. One such build got leaked this weekend, and it contains some minor changes compared to the beta build.

Sometimes, as you're walking through a crowded street, or as you brush by people, you catch a glimpse of the conversations they're having - a few words, a single sentence at most. Whenever this happens, I can't help but extrapolate the rest of the conversation, the subject, what the people in it are like. It seems like I'm not the only one, as two Dutch film makers have used the accidentally leaked search query records of 2006 as inspiration for a series of short films. Tantalising voyeurism.

In a recent video, several hard core overclockers had a heyday just after CES lugging in the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium to provide themselves with enough coolant to perform such a feat-- and all for the public eye to see, no less. At nearly absolute zero temperatures of -232 degrees Celsius, these speed demons pushed their Phenom II X4s right into the record books, achieving a staggering clock of 6.5 GHz, not to mention shattering the hopes and dreams of thousands by stealing the 3DMark05 crown with 45,474 points. As a side note, liquid nitrogen is a bit tough to come by in most societies, so you may want to stifle that overclocking beast that has risen within you and keep your chips nice and un-fried as they were designed to be.

The Russian government is planning to build a new operating system (if you are fluent, here's the original), most likely to be derived from Linux, made especially for the country itself as a whole. This is being done to reduce Russia's reliance on foreign license agreements, particularly those of Microsoft it seems. The OS is expected to be open source and distributed at little or no cost, but it's uncertain just how successful this nationwide operating system will be, if indeed it ever comes to fruition. If it's anything like that Chinese Red Flag enforcement fiasco, count me out.

With Windows 7 having made its grand debut, and with KDE4's vision making leaps and bounds forward with every release, we have two major software projects that have decided to implement some fairly drastic interface changes. Such changes are bound to receive some harsh criticisms - but the funny thing is, these criticisms usually come from people you least expect it from.

In a possible legal showdown over multitouch patents between Apple and Palm, the Cupertino gadget maker has just looted a decent weapon off the dead body that is the US patent system: a patent on just about all multitouch gestures used in the iPhone and iPod Touch, such as swiping, pinching, and so on. Wielding this weapon, Apple suddenly has a pretty good case against Palm.

Adam Williamson, who was let go from Mandriva at the end of last year, has announced that he has been hired by Red Hat as a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer. I'm sure everyone who has benefited from Adam's patient support over the years will wish him success in his new role. A sincere congratulations from the OSNews team, Adam! Update: Adam mentions that Red Hat has also hired Mandriva alum Vincent Danen.

One of the reasons Windows 7 runs faster (faster start up, resume, shut down, less churn during user sessions) is due to the re-engineering of how Windows maintains and activates services running in the background. Microsoft's Channel 9 has an interesting video with a Windows kernel developer whose team designed a new trigger-based service controller that enables service developers to mark services as needing to run only when certain conditions are met. This means Windows 7 can more intelligently manage when to make resources avaiable for services that employ this trigger pattern for starting and stopping. Less code that runs at any given time means Windows 7 has more resources available for foreground processes that impact users interacting with the OS. The net effect of this for users is a snappier OS.

Even though the Androig G1 phone has touch screen capabilities, it doesn't support multithouch out-of-the-box. Luke Hutchison posted a blog entry over the weekend detailing how to get multitouch working on your G1, as well as a few demo applications he wrote. He also posted a video showing multitouch working on the G1.

Tom's Hardware reviews Apple's MacBook. "The MacBook offers an excellent design for the money. The unibody construction is second to none, and Apple has done its homework with component selection, choosing best-of-breed technologies such as the Nvidia GeForce 9400M. While the lack of FireWire is disappointing for those who already own external HDDs with IEEE-1394 connections, or own low-latency FireWire external audio boxes for multitrack audio recording, we would rather have seen eSATA as the option for high-speed external storage. Nonetheless, the MacBook offers a robust notebook in Apple's entry-level product category."

Let's combine the two most popular topics on the internet today into one: Windows 7 on netbooks. Microsoft has already confirmed that it will ship a version of Windows 7 designed for netbooks, the popular small laptops that appear to be the only bright spot in an otherwise abysmal PC industry climate. However, with various reports indicating that Windows 7 already runs fine on netbooks, this raises the question: what exactly is Microsoft planning?

Fosdem 2009 takes place in Brussels on the 7th and 8th of february. Just like in previous editions we have collected a list of interesting interviews with our main track speakers: Rob Savoye (Gnash), Martin Odersky (Scala), Pieter Hintjens (OpenAMQ), Victor Stinner (Fusil), Simo Sorce (FreeIPA v2), and Max Spevack (Fedora).

The incredible pagetable.com continues to erupt historical joy with the conversion of "Archimedes Operating System - A User's Guide" to PDF. This 320 page PDF of the book, originally published in 1991 "gives you a real insight into the micro's inner workings. The book is applicable to any model of Archimedes whether running the Arthur or RISC OS Operating Systems."

This week wasn't marked by any breaking news items, but there were a few tends to be spotted. This may be have been a new week, but netbooks were still all the rage, with several items on our front page. We also had lots of news on Windows 7, and OSNews' very first game review. An uneventful week, but some interesting discussion nonetheless. This week's My Take is about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release.