Monthly Archive:: January 2009

Windows Vista introduced the Windows Experience Index, a method of comparing relative performance of several key hardware components in your system. Users who installed the Windows 7 beta on machines that previouslt ran Vista, will notice that their WEI figures have changed. In the latest post on the Engineering 7 weblog, Microsoft explains what has changed between Vista and 7 when it comes to the Windows Experience Index.

Linux and flexibility go hand in hand, and the options for virtualization are no different. KVM supports the virtualization of Linux guest operating systems - even Windows with hardware that is virtualization-aware. This article explores the architecture of the Linux KVM as well as why its tight integration with the kernel may change the way you use Linux.

Those up top (the Presidential Inaugural Committee) chose to utilize Microsoft's Silverlight technology to stream the upcoming inaugural events for the new president of the United States. Though Microsoft certainly likes this idea, this leaves out thousands of people in the US and elsewhere who still cannot run Silverlight or an open source alternative on their systems from viewing the streamed video online. Update by Thom: Linux and PowerPC Mac fans rejoice, as they can watch the inauguration as well using Moonlight. Migel De Icaza wrote: "Microsoft worked late last night to get us access to the code that will be used during the inauguration so we could test it with Moonlight." Microsoft and the Moonlight team fixed this issue in one afternoon, so it might be a little rough.

Apart from well-known editions such as the normal Ubuntu and Kubuntu, the Ubuntu project includes several other variations as well. One of those is Ubuntu Mobile, which targets Mobile Internet Devices and netbooks. While this release currently uses GNOME Mobile, Canonical's David Mandala has stated that they may look at Qt 4.5, which will be released under the LGPL, as a development environment.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the imminent demise of the print media. With the economy in the toilet, subscriber bases shrinking, advertising rates declining, and demographic shift moving many publications' readers ever-older with no younger readers to replace them, it's looking grim. Some cities will be losing their only daily newspaper. Even the New York Times is in danger of going bankrupt. Even with advertising rates putting pressure on net-based publications, online publishing is here to stay. Is there room in this world for printed tech publications?

Last week, news got out that Microsoft had been charged with breaking competition laws by the European Commission. The EU stated that Microsoft has broken competition laws because it bundles its Internet Explorer browser with Windows, which gives the browser an unfair advantage over competing browsers such as Firefox and Opera. OSNews readers debated this topic lively, and it seems we can use this story to continue the discussion: Opera Software's CEO Jon von Tetzchner joined in on the fun.

Speculation about Steve Jobs' health situation has been a hot topic for a while now, and Bloomberg is jumping on the bandwagon as well - but you have to wonder if there's a limit as to how far journalists should go in order to gain insight into Jobs' health. While his position as CEO of a large publicly traded company puts him on a pedestal, I do believe there are limits to the hight of this pedestal. Bloomberg grossly crossed the line in my book, and Jobs seems to agree with me. "Why don't you guys leave me alone?"

"Ars takes a close look at Seed, a new framework that allows software developers to build GTK+ applications with JavaScript. The popular web scripting language could soon become the dominant application extension language on the Linux desktop."

Current and former executives from LG, Chunghwa, and Sharp have all agreed to plead guilty to various charges of fixing the prices of TFT-LCD screens. The executives will face six to nine months in jail, pay $20,000-$50,000 fines, and have also agreed to help the United States government in other LCD price fixing investigations. The companies themselves are ending up having to pay criminal fines to the government of $585 million, collectively. It was mentioned that Sharp was fixing the prices of LCDs sold to Apple, Dell, and Motorola. Hopefully this means that the prices of technology utilizing LCD screens is going to drop from this point onwards, but in times like these, you never do know.

Remember those lovely laser discs that education systems seemed to so lovingly embrace back in the 80s and 90s? The discs resembled what today's children would probably call a giant DVD, and these would be placed upon a massive tray to be sucked into a player twice the size of your VCR (VCR? What's that?). All of the memories associated with these players may bring tears to the surface, but you're going to have to face the truth sooner or later: Pioneer just ended production of its last three laser disc players, meaning that replacements for the said players, assuming you own one, will now be gone... forever. Stock up and buy a couple, and you'll be able to enjoy those massive discs for years to come instead of using them as frisbees. Honestly, though-- how did the laser disc player last this long?

The past week wasn't as packed with events and shows as the previous one, but luckily for us, that didn't mean there wasn't enough to report on. This week focussed on netbooks, Steve Jobs' health, and KDE/Qt. This week's My Take is a shameless plug for one of the best television shows we've seen in a while.

Protothreads are a type of extremely lightweight threads - each protothread requires only two bytes of memory - that are usually used for embedded firmware programming, where memory is at a premium. Protothreads combine the low overhead with event-driven programming with the algorithmic clarity of threaded programming.

After successfully battling Microsoft over the company's bundling of Windows Media Player, the European Union is now ready for more. The European Commission has charged Microsoft with violating competition laws because of the Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.

Using an Mini-ITX motherboard and some spare parts lying around my study, I was able to put together an extremely powerful internet filtering appliance that is not only powerful but fast, reliable, and darn near impossible to circumvent by computer savvy teens. Most parents do not want to bother becoming the internet police of the household but today's internet is a very hostile place with many different opportunities for trouble.