Monthly Archive:: July 2009

Microsoft presented its financial results for the past quarter, and Ars analyses them. "Redmond sees revenues drop both quarterly and year-over-year. But its earnings per share are up a bit from last quarter, suggesting it has found a way to manage the pain. Online Services and Entertainment both felt serious hurt."

Palm has released the first major update to its brand new webOS platform, version 1.1. It comes packed with a lot of bug fixes, speed improvements, and new features, mostly geared towards the enterprise, but there's also a lot of stuff in there for ordinary consumers. And iTunes sync? The game is on: Palm re-enabled iTunes syncing in webOS 1.1. Update: Palm isn't waiting for Apple to take the next step - Palm has reported Apple to the USB Implementers Forum. "Palm believes that openness and interoperability offer better experiences for users by allowing them the freedom to use the content they own without interference across devices and services, so on behalf of consumers, we have notified the USB Implementers Forum of what we believe is improper use of the Vendor ID number by another member." Update II: More on how Palm masquerades the Pre as an iPod.

"Windows Vista has been dragged through the IT industry mud for most of its life, in some cases for good reason. But Microsoft's OEM chief believes that Windows 7's success will help repair the damage to Vista's reputation and polish its legacy. Windows 7 and Windows Vista share much of the same code, and over time, this could cause Windows Vista bashers to soften their views, said Steve Guggenheimer, vice president of the OEM division at Microsoft. 'I think people will look back on Vista after the Windows 7 release and realize that there were actually a bunch of good things there,' Guggenheimer said in a recent interview. 'So it'll actually be interesting to see in two years what the perception is of Vista.'"

The iPhone's success with multitouch has been phenomenal, and not without good reason. Multitouch is a valuable asset to a friendly interface, a feature-rich environment, and to a myriad of apps that take advantage of that feature. Now Synaptics has unveiled the workings of touchscreens that are capable of registering up to ten touches at any given time. This will give "multitouch" an entire new level of complexity; entirely new apps, games, and system features will be able to take advantage of having up to ten touches at once, though on I think anything beyond five or maybe six touches is pushing humans' abilities to touch a screen and hold the device with the same hand. These beauties' sensors can be built in sizes up to eight inches, meaning that it can be implemented in phones and MIDs and even the smallest of netbooks. Synaptics has said to keep an eye out for these buggers in 2010-- not to far from now.

The KDE project has announced the third release candidate of KDE 4.3, set to be released August 4. "While 4.3 already feels very stable, there still have been quite some changes to the code-base since the second release candidate. In order to have the 4.3.0 release well-tested, the release team decided to put out another release candidate and postpone the final 4.3.0 release by one week. The most notable change is probably a fix for a performance problem in Plasma, where applets would shortly freeze after being resized. This bug has been resolved by delaying the caching of rendered SVG images until after the resizing has finished."

Sometimes, some things are just too good to be true. Earlier this week, Microsoft made a relatively stunning announcement that it would contribute some 20000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, licensed under the GPL. Microsoft isn't particularly fond of either Linux or the GPL, so this was pretty big news. As it turns out, the code drop was brought on by... A GPL violation.

In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, a spokesperson for Intel confirmed that the company has filed an appeal of last May's European Commission ruling, in which the company was fined the equivalent of $1.4 billion for what it found to be antitrust violations. According to spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, Intel's theory for its appeal is that the EC was prevented from seeing critical and possibly exculpatory documents, on account of an order of the court trying AMD's civil case against Intel in Delaware.

It's been a three year long ride. Windows Vista was released January 2007, and its reception by the press was very negative, which made sure public perception was very negative as well. Sales were slow, people wanted Windows XP, and businesses didn't care about Vista either. Microsoft needed something that would make the world forget about Vista, and it needed it fast. The journey is over: Windows 7 has gone RTM.

In honor of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, that adorable book some of you (or some of your kids) may be familiar with, we now have the If You Give Microsoft Toaster Tech episode. This isn't official Microsoft swag, but someone with spare time on his hands and a knack for tinkering designed this brave little toaster that brands bread with the Windows logo. Of course, I wouldn't buy one of these unless I had the Windows 7 upgrade coupon. This brings to mind: if Apple were to create a toaster, would you have to buy premium Apple bread for it to work? And would there be Psystar and Quo toasters for cheaper? How about a Linux toaster? Fill up the comments below with your wonderfully creative toaster/tech analogies. You could even bleed over into other kitchen appliances (an Ubuntu fridge, for instance, would be nearly good enough for anyone, but you'd have tinker and hack a bit before your ice would come out cubed).

The KDE project has announced that it has reached its one millionth commit to its Subversion repository, indicating that the KDE project is very healthy indeed. "This is a wonderful milestone for KDE," said Cornelius Schumacher, President of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors, "It is the result of years of hard work by a large, diverse, and talented team that has come together from all over the globe to develop one of the largest and most comprehensive software products in the world."

"I recognize this is an important question to have answered. Many of you have said you want to know exactly when you will be able to get your hands on RTM. Last Monday, I gave an update on RTM to close out some myths. In that update, I also gave a broad timeline on when different groups of people - or 'audiences' - would get the final RTM code. While I have nothing new to add regarding RTM today, I do however have more precise information to give on when you will be able to get RTM. Again, when you can get RTM depends on who you are."

Microsoft has made its second release under the General Public License in two days with software for the open-source online learning system Moodle. It comes on the heels of Redmond contributing drivers to the Linux community.

While Apple faced bad news today, it also faced some seriously good news. The company announced the financial results for the third quarter of the year, and they are - again - very good, despite the sorry state of the world economy and the PC industry. We can now also say who of the two analyst firms were correct.

With every new server processor generation, there is always the possibility that the chip and its associated chipsets and system components are so different that both the chip and the server platform have to change at the same time. This will not be the case for the Power7 processors due next year, says IBM.