Monthly Archive:: February 2009

"Has the era of the 1GHz smartphone arrived? It has for Toshiba, which has tapped Qualcomm's new Snapdragon silicon. The Toshiba TG01 Windows Mobile phone was unveiled Tuesday, according to reports. Based on Windows Mobile 6.1, it is designed to take on the iPhone 3G. Only 9.9mm thick, it uses a 4.1-inch WVGA 800 x 480 384k pixel resistive touch screen and comes with support for 3G HSPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and assisted-GPS. The TG01 is slated to be available in Europe this summer. The price, at this time, has not been disclosed (Acer and Asus are also expected to bring out Snapdragon-based products)."

With Linux traditionally coming in many, many flavours, a common call among some Linux fans - but mostly among people who actually do not use Linux - is to standardise all the various distributions, and work from a single "one-distribution-to-rule-them-all". In a recent interview, Linus Tovalds discarded the idea, stating that he thinks "it's something absolutely required!"

"Scrotwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast."

Windows 7 was causing quite a bit of hype months before its release, and now that it's finally out into the void, you'd think people would be contentedly beta-ing the system and be happy to wait until the wrinkles are smoothed, right? Apparently not, at least for a certain Kelly Poe and now over 2,500 Windows 7 enthusiasts.

Yes, actually. The old-school, inefficient, heat-generating incandescent bulbs are all but history, CFL (compact florescent) bulbs taking the pedestal what with how relatively inexpensive and efficient they are when it comes to both electricity consumption and overhead cost. However, even these may have a short-lived supremacy as British scientists developed a new way of "growing" the material needed for LEDs on silicon instead of sapphire wafers, which was the original and somewhat expensive way of doing it. Because of this, household-grade lights of LED nature can be produced for under $5.00 and last up to sixty years. LEDs are three times more efficient than CFLs, last substantially longer, and contain no mercury, so they're even more environmentally friendly. These wonder-bulbs are supposed to be available to consumers within two years. It is estimated that if these new bulbs were to be installed in every home and office, it would cut electricity used on lighting by 75%. I'll take twenty of those, please.

"The first public demonstration of OpenCL functionality was given by AMD at Siggraph Asia 2008. OpenCL is the new vendor-independent standard designed to extract high performance parallel computing out of GPUs, DSPs and multicore CPUs. Basically the idea is that you can write your core computational code in OpenCL and voila! - your code scales to whatever processors are available. OpenCL will greatly improve speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications from entertainment to scientific and 3D visualization."

"Next Monday, Amazon will likely unveil the next version of its Kindle e-book reader at a press conference in New York. But how did the gadget do last year before it sold out in November? Pretty well! Via a research note, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney now thinks Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles last year, more than his previous estimate of 380,000 (and if Amazon hadn't run out of Kindles in November, it could have potentially sold 750,000, Mahaney estimates). Mahaney now thinks Amazon's all-in Kindle revenue could reach $1.4 billion in 2010, or an impressive 4% of Amazon's revenue that year. This assumes that Amazon will sell 1 million Kindles in 2009 and 3.5 million in 2010; that Kindle owners buy one book per month, etc. It's an admittedly rough estimate, but not necessarily an unbelievable one."

If you were to break into my network, getting to the contents of the right computer would be easy. I facilitate digital burglars by naming my computers according to what they actually are; my main desktop machine carries the label "Desktop", my Aspire One is imaginatively named "One", and this trend continues down to "PowerMac G4", "Ultra 5", and "T2". I always found giving computers real names was a tad bit wacky, but as it turns out, it can actually be very useful to give your servers and computers whimsical but meaningful names.

Python 3 is the latest version of Guido van Rossum's powerful general-purpose programming language. It breaks backwards compatibility with the 2.x line but has cleaned up some syntax issues. This second article builds on the previous article, which focused on changes that affect the language and backwards compatibility issues. In Part 2 of this two-part series, discover more new Python features and details on more advanced topics such as changes in abstract base classes, metaclasses, and decorators.

Microsoft on Feb. 2 released the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Ecosystem Readiness Program as part of its effort to prepare its partners for the availability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The new program provides tools and resources partners need to begin testing their existing applications, devices and systems to ensure compatibility with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

There are many tools available that allow you to synchronize files across UNIX directories, but doing it effectively, and securely, takes a little bit more effort. This article looks at solutions for synchronizing files across UNIX filesystems and different computer systems securely, and at solutions that allow you to synchronize encrypted versions of your files for the purposes of backup.

Windows Vista has never exactly been a favourite subject among company IT people. Migrating from Windows XP to Windows Vista isn't exactly a worry-free process, and machines that run Windows XP comfortably may have trouble powering Windows vista. As such, adoption of Vista has been slow. Two years after Vista's release, the OS is still struggling in the enterprise sector, according to a Forrester report.

A long time ago, we asked everyone to show their desktops, and we figured it would be nice, on this (for me) cold and dreary Monday to do that all over again, over two years later. The questions remain the same: cluttered or clean? Icons or no icons? Dual or single panel layout in GNOME? How free-form is your Plasma desktop? Are there any real computer users in here (as in, using CDE)? Read on for my own two desktops.

As noted in Hubert Feyrer's blog, the upcoming Sidekick LX 2009/Blade is rumored to be running NetBSD instead of Microsoft CE, causing Microsoft's recruiters to look for NetBSD engineers.