The FAT file system is the file system used by MS-DOS and earlier versions of Windows. It's a relatively simple and straightforward file system, supported by just about any operating system, making it the favoured file system on memory cards and the like. FAT is an
ECMA and
ISO standard, but these only apply for FAT12 and FAT16 without support for long file names, and therein lies a problem.
Whenever I use KDE, the part I dislike the most is the rendering engine used by Konqueror, called KHTML. KHTML just doesn't render pages as smooth and as well as Gecko and the KHTML fork WebKit, up to a point where I find Konqueror unusable as a web browser. However, work is underway to replace KHTML in Konqueror with WebKit, but according to KDE developer Adam Treat, this is a futile effort:
Konqueror is too KHTML API specific.
Slackware 13.0 RC1 has been released. Or tagged. Or whatever you'd call it in the Slackware world.
"The TODO isn't entirely empty here, but it's pretty much down to minor nits, and so we're going to call this release candidate #1 and (mostly) freeze further updates unless they happen to fix problems. Regarding the kernel, 2.6.29.x has been well tested with this userspace and seems like the best choice to ship for production use. Perhaps we can put something else (at least source and configs) in /testing, though."
Today's a slow news day, so I thought it would be a good day to bring up an idea I've been incubating. I've been contemplating launching an OSNews-like site on the topic of Enterprise Computing. Obviously, OSNews covers the OS-related aspects of heavy-duty business, scientific, and academic computing already, and sometimes news on databases, app servers, cloud computing and other related topics too, but a lot of the kind of news that is useful to enterprise IT people falls outside of OSNews' purview, and it's appropriate to keep it that way. But I think that the enterprise IT world could use an OSNews-like site to aggregate and examine the latest news in that sphere. So my question to you, dear OSNews readers, is this: Do you agree? Would you be interested in reading and participating in a site on that topic? Would you be interested in being involved? If so, I'd like to recruit a few editors to help me launch it. Read on for more details. Update: Are there any native Korean speakers who read OSNews? If you are one, and you'd be willing to help me out with a short project, please contact me.
The story around The Pirate Bay acquisition seems to be developing fast. The
torrent search engine was bought by Global Gaming Factory yesterday, and they promised to build a legal P2P distribution network where content providers and copyright holders get compensated. In an exclusive interview with the BBC,
GGF's Hans Pandeya detailed the business plan they have in mind for TPB.
Sun has released VirtualBox 3.0. The
major improvements are:
"Guest SMP with up to 32 virtual CPUs (VT-x and AMD-V only); Windows guests: ability to use Direct3D 8/9 applications/games (experimental); Support for OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests."
The Mono discussion may be tiring, but the fact of the matter is that thanks to this discussion, various major Linux distributions are now making official statements detailing their position in the Mono/C# debate. The latest to do this is Ubuntu, which reiterated their position yesterday.
"Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even though on a slightly smaller scale. In July 1974, exactly 35 years ago, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
published the first version of their seminal paper The UNIX Time-Sharing System in the Communications of the ACM."
"Red Hat today officially announced the
beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4. The most obvious change is the shift to the KVM hypervisor (as opposed to Xen). Xen is still in RHEL, but with RHEL 5.4, Red Hat is signaling its intention that KVM (eventually) is to be Red Hat's preferred Hypervisor. It's a preference that Red Hat execs have indicated at multiple points this year and should be no surprise since Red Hat now owns lead KVM vendor Qumranet."
"Snow days are great, but generally you still have to wake up to find out if it is a snow day. decided to
make a system to solve this problem. He made an alarm clock that would automatically de activate if school is cancelled. What a pleasant surprise it would be to just wake up and find that you had been allowed to sleep in. It is using an Arduino and a python script to control the state of the alarm based off of an online school closing announcement. You can download the software from the instructable."
Via Hack-a-Day
"The Pirate Bay has been urging users not to abandon ship following
yesterday's announcement that a Swedish internet cafe software firm planned to buy the BitTorrent site for $7.8m. The site has been
flooded with account deletion requests from angry users griping that TPB had sold out to Global Gaming Factory X."
"The open source PHP language is seeing its
first major update in two years courtesy of today's release of PHP 5.3, along with a long list of new features designed to expand its capabilities and accelerate performance. The PHP 5.3 release is a bigger release than developers first intended, and takes on some features that were originally intended for PHP 6. The new release also comes as the open source language continues to face competitive challenges from multiple technologies including Ruby, Java and .net."
The stream of news around the Palm Pre and its webOS just keeps on flowing. Since Palm's survival more or less depends on the success of the Pre and any possible future webOS phones, it's very interesting to know just how well the Pre is selling. According to an analyst,
Palm has already sold 370000 Pre phones in May and June; he also stated that the company will ship 1 million phones to Sprint in the first quarter of production. Not bad. We've also got news on the GSM version of the Pre.
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