Monthly Archive:: February 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 Details Announced

Submitted by John Mills 2009-02-21 Ubuntu 97 Comments

Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth has announced the plans for Ubuntu 9.10, named Karmic Koala. Jaunty Jackalope isn't out of its cage yet (April 2009), but the Ubuntu team is already planning for 9.10, which will see the light of day in October 2009. The desktop side will focus on beautification and an improved boot-up experience; the server side will target cloud computing.

Reports: 8.9″ Netbooks Out, Android in at Asus

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-20 Hardware 15 Comments

Asustek is going to start shipping only 10-inch and 7-inch Eee PCs, reports have claimed. Separate reports have also revealed how the manufacturer is contemplating putting the Android operating system onto netbooks.

Review: Mophie JuicePack – iPhone Battery Boost

David Adams 2009-02-20 Wireless 8 Comments

Oh, batteries -- technology's weakest link. Back when we mostly needed them to run pocket calculators and wristwatches, things were good. The future was now, and the world was electrical. Now that the world really is electrical, and gadgets the size of those pocket calculators are sporting the computing power of yesterdays Crays, we're in trouble. Please excuse the fanboyism, but I'm a big fan of the iPhone, for all its flaws. With all battery-powered computing devices, you have to make some tradeoffs between processor power and battery life, but I think Apple did a pretty good job. Nevertheless, if you sit down for a protracted web browsing session, the combination of the screen and the radio really drain that battery. After an hour, you're pretty much dead. What to do?

Psion Defends “Netbook” Trademark

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-20 Legal 43 Comments

I recently joked that we might want to rename OSNews to CourtNews, and with each passing day that silly joke seems to become less silly. This week, it became clear that Psion Teklogix, the company behind various small computing devices back in the '90s, has started an all-out legal offensive to prohibit other companies from using the term "netbook".

Sun Studio 12 vs. GCC3 vs. GCC4 Benchmarks

Submitted by Michael 2009-02-20 Benchmarks 15 Comments

"Earlier this month we published an article looking at the Linux versus OpenSolaris performance when using the new AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs. Ubuntu Linux was faster than OpenSolaris 2008.11 in nearly all of the tests, but as mentioned in that article, OpenSolaris is still dependent upon GCC 3.4 where as Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions are now shipping with the newer and much-improved GCC 4 series. Following that article being published, Sun Microsystems had requested some compiler tests since they were confident the results would be different had their Sun Studio compiler been used. Well, in this article we now have some OpenSolaris benchmarks from the same AMD setup using GCC 3.4, GCC 4.0, and Sun Studio 12."

Nokia To Hand Over Qt Jambi Development to Community

Submitted by Jarle Anfinsen 2009-02-20 Qt 9 Comments

According to a recent announcement, Nokia/Qt Software has decided to discontinue the development of Qt Jambi after the March 2009 release of version 4.5. Jambi is a Java version of the popular Qt toolkit. The library will be made available under the LGPL license, and Qt Software will host and facilitate a community driven continuation of Jambi.

Can Your Cat Agree to an EULA?

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-20 Legal 41 Comments

An interesting story is making it rounds across the internet the past few days about someone who made a system to get his cat to agree to the EULAs she was presented with. While that's just a funny joke, it does raise a very interesting point: if person A agrees to an EULA, does its power extend to person B?

Lack of Test Releases Disgruntles Windows Testers

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-20 Windows 20 Comments

With the recent news that Microsoft will not release a second beta but will instead move Windows 7 directly into release candidate stage, several Windows testers have become a tad bit disgruntled. They claim that due to a lack of test builds, they cannot properly test Windows 7 to see if the bugs they submitted have been fixed. As a result, Steven Sinofsky simply replied: email me your concerns.

First Look at Android Cupcake

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-19 Google 16 Comments

"Last night we had a geek outing with our favorite hacker, Brian Jepson, who you may remember from our feature on Hacking the XO laptop. This time around Brian got a hold of a development G1 and hacked around with cupcake. Included in the video is a demonstration of the on-screen keyboard, prettier transitions, some fun in the Linux shell, and more. We also have some photos (the video was a little blurry) of the skateboarding androidsâ€“which come up as you hackâ€“and the obligatory Snake game on the Android OS."

Apple, ASUS, Acer Rank High in Customer Satisfaction

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-19 Hardware 53 Comments

We may have reported earlier that Apple might finally face the headwind from the economic downturn, but that's not everything there's to this story. Recent data suggests - once again - that Apple customers are very, very satisfied with their Apple purchases. In other words, most current Apple customers are very likely to buy Apple again. Interestingly, ASUS and Acer did very well in the survey as well.

Musings About Modern Gtk+ Theming

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-19 GTK+ 31 Comments

"GTK+ may be called many things. I would call it 'simple' and sometimes even 'elegant', refering to its foundation of pure, elegant C. But not everyone is compelled to use those terms, using terms like 'clumsy' and 'unwieldy' instead. Yes, there is a lot disagreement. But there's one thing almost everyone would agree to: that GTK+ isn't pretty." This is about to change.

Intel, Nvidia Take Nehalem Dispute to Court

Submitted by adkilla 2009-02-19 Legal 6 Comments

Intel has filed suit against NVIDIA seeking a declaratory judgment over rights associated with two agreements between the companies. The suit seeks to have the court declare that NVIDIA is not licensed to produce chipsets that are compatible with any Intel processor that has integrated memory controller functionality, such as Intel’s Nehalem microprocessors and that NVIDIA has breached the agreement with Intel by falsely claiming that it is licensed. Intel claims that it has been in discussions with NVIDIA for more than a year attempting to resolve the matter but were unsuccessful. As a result Intel is asking the court to resolve this dispute. Shall we rename OSNews to CourtNews?

Awk and Sed One-Liners Explained

Guest post by pkrumins 2009-02-19 General Development 32 Comments

If you have ever been interested in awk and sed Unix utilities, then you probably know about the awk1line.txt and sed1line.txt files that are floating around the Internet. Each file contains around 80 idiomatic sed and awk one-liners for performing various text modification tasks.

‘Vista Capable’ Suit Loses Class Action Status

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-19 Legal 19 Comments

Microsoft has achieved a major win in the "Vista Capable" class action lawsuit against the company. The suit, which is about if Microsoft knew the PCs it labelled as "Vista capable" weren't actually capable of running Vista's more advanced features, has lost its class action status.

Resorting to FUD Hurts the Alternatives to Microsoft

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-18 Editorial 94 Comments

Does Windows 7 contain more DRM than Windows Vista? Does Windows 7 limit you from running cracked applications, and will it open the firewall specifically for applications that want to check if they're cracked or not? Does it limit the audio recording capabilities? According to a skimp and badly written post on Slashdot, it does. The Slashdot crowd tore the front page item apart - and rightfully so.

Palm Pulls Back the Curtain on webOS Technical Details

Submitted by poundsmack 2009-02-18 Wireless 6 Comments

Palm has released the first chapter of a book that details its new webOS. It answers some of the questions people had about developing applications for the new platform. "You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you'd use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that gives standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. WebOS is designed around multi-tasking, and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context." Ars has more.

Apple To Face First Mac Sales Slowdown in Six Years?

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-18 Apple 40 Comments

With the economy in decline, many fear that the one company to take the financial blow would be Apple. The company focusses on the higher end of the market (at least in price), and with many people having less and less money to spend, as well as facing insecure financial prospects, people may decide to choose for a cheaper, non-Apple computer. Piper Jaffray, an Apple-friendly analyst firm, has projected that the Cupertino company is about to face a decline in year-over-year Mac sales; for the first time in six years.

Netbook Sales Rise Sharply in Europe

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-18 Hardware 14 Comments

We already knew netbooks were popular, but according to new data by research firm IDC, they are even more popular in Europe than we anticipated. The firm says that in 2008, netbooks sales accounted for 30% of total consumer portable sales in Europe, the Middle-East, and Africa. A big contributing factor are the telecommunication providers in Europe who subsidise netbooks.

DragonFly BSD 2.2 Released

Thom Holwerda 2009-02-18 BSD & Darwin 7 Comments

Th DragonFly BSD team has released DragonFly BSD 2.2. The biggest improvement in this release is that the HAMMER filesystem is considered production ready, but there is a whole boatload of other improvements as well.

‘Does Kindle 2’s Text-to-Speech Infringe Authors’ Copyrights?’

weildish 2009-02-18 Legal 28 Comments

The Author's Guild has been having some trouble coping with the Kindle 2's Read to Me feature because it supposedly undermines author's rights. Their argument? "They don't have the right to read a book out loud." It sounds ridiculous; we've been reading out loud since we were wee little children, and text-to-speech has been in use since before the Google Empire (by hundreds of years technically, and by decades literally). However, after explanation by Engadget's very own pretentious ex-copyright attorney, the blurred lines of law and lawlessness gets even blurrier. Does the Author's Guild have a valid point, or are they splitting hairs?

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