Monthly Archive:: August 2009

In what some will undoubtedly call ironic, Microsoft has been declared guilty of wilfully infringing upon an XML patent held by the Canadian company i4i. The judge has ordered Microsoft to pay a fine of 290 million USD, and has barred Microsoft from selling Word in the United States if the company doesn't comply within 60 days (a detail omitted by many). Microsoft has already announced it will appeal the judge's decision.

"Sony has announced a new type of lithium ion rechargeable battery that combines high-power and long-life performance, using olivine-type lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material. The Olivine-type lithium iron phosphate used in this new battery is a perfect cathode material due to its robust crystal structure and stable performance, even at high temperatures. These bateries have a high power density of 1800W/kg, and extended life span of approximately 2,000 charge-discharge cycles. What’s most surprising is that the battery will keep an 80% charge retention after those 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, which is very impressive. This new battery is also able to charge rapidly (99% in 30 minutes)." These buckoes will debut in power tools originally, but they'll eventually cross over to be smiling up at you from your cell phone, lappy, and other consumer electronics.

The latest build of Snow Leopard, Apple's upcoming operating system, is rumored to be the "Golden Master", or final copy before the product will be released for duplication on optical media. Build 10A432 has been seeded to developers, and French Web site Mac 4 Ever has reported that the latest version is the final build, suggesting the product could be pressed onto discs very soon. The latest version of OS X is due to be released in September, but Apple has not announced an official date.

Brandon Walkin has just published a fascinating article on the topic of managing user interface complexity. "I've spent the past year redesigning a particularly complex application with my primary focus being on reducing complexity. In this article, I'll go over some of the issues surrounding complexity and techniques that can be used to manage it."

With OSNews really diving into the world of the Amiga as of late, with a review of AmigaOS 4.1 on ACube's sam440ep and an upcoming review of MorphOS 2.3 on an Efika, it was kind of coincidental that we have a set of benchmarks comparing MorphOS 2.3 and AmigaOS 4.1 to one another, both running on the Pegasos II machine.

Technologizer has an interesting article about why Windows Vista failed, and it provides 16 reasons why this is the case. A few of those reasons reveal a certain lack of understanding, but a more pressing issue is that while listing these reasons individually is interesting, Vista's failure in the marketplace can be explained in a much more compact fashion.

We here at OSNews haven't really been reporting on this, but if you're following other tech websites, you will undoubtedly know that Microsoft has been axing a number of products and initiatives lately. It seems as if Microsoft is doing what many companies do in economically dire times: cut the cruft, and focus on your core aspects.

G. Pascal Zachary has written a very interesting article about the importance of Google's Chrome OS announcement, and what the move to the cloud (internet!) could mean for Microsoft and the operating system in general. I do think he missed an important part of the possible consequences of the move towards the cloud: the hardware.

The web browser has been the dominant thin client, now rich client, for almost two decades, but can it compete with a new thin client that makes better technical choices and avoids the glacial standards process? I don't think so, as the current web technology stack of HTML/Javascript/Flash has accumulated so many bad decisions over the years that it's ripe for a clean sheet redesign to wipe it out.

While the tech media are all busy praising Windows 7, the operating system still obviously does have issues, it being Windows and all. Because we are talking about Windows, and not, say Ubuntu or Mac OS X, it comes with one big downside that will mostly hit new users of Windows 7 (meaning, everyone): the incredibly complicated upgrade paths.

We had a remarkably short week this past week, so this will probably be the shortest Week in Review yet. We talked about Apple's hardware design, GNOME's decision to drop icons from menus and buttons, KDE 4.3 was released, and more.

Earlier this year, the European Commission slammed Intel with a massive fine, penalising the chip maker for its anticompetitive practices. A report by the European Union's ombudsman has now criticised the EC for its conduct, as the EC did not perform proper record keeping, leading to the loss of some evidence. It won't turn the tide for Intel, but it does raise an important question: how fair are these EC antitrust proceedings?

A friend of OSNews asks: "You might have heard of our Open-PC project. The idea is to collaboratively build a completely open PC, with free software and free drivers. We prepare an operating system image, do online services and support and choose the hardware. Then we work together with hardware manufacturers who build and sell the PC. We already have one manufacturer in Germany who committed to work with us. We will sell the first version of the Open-PC this fall. The problem is that it is expensive to ship the PC from Germany to the United States, so we are looking for a second manufacturing partner in the US. Can you recommend a company? I think the ideal would be a mid-size PC manufacturer who has experience with assembling custom PCs, experience with Linux and is able to ship the PC economically within North America." This seems like a great candidate for crowdsourcing. So, OSNews readers, can you give our friend any leads?

"AMD has announced the release of the first OpenCL SDK for x86 CPUs, and it will enable developers to target x86 processors with the kind of OpenCL code that's normally written for GPUs. In a way, this is a reverse of the normal 'GPGPU' trend, in which programs that run on a CPU are modified to run in whole or in part on a GPU."