Monthly Archive:: August 2009

Just when you thought the world couldn't get any crazier, something happens that makes you move your expectations of the world up a few nothces. We already have to deal with the browser ballot, but that's not the only ballot Microsoft will deliver. Hold on to your panties, as Microsoft will also offer a file format ballot in Microsoft Office 2010. On a happier note, Microsoft makes a whole load of promises to the EU about opening up technologies and file formats.

RadioShack will be taking a leaf out of Microsoft's book (remember that Bing thing?) by renaming itself to simply "The Shack" in the hopes that it will reach out to consumers to help them understand that the store isn't just a nuts-and-bolts (batteries-and-parts, anyone?) place for the electronic era. They want people to know that they're competing with those larger retail stores in selling computers, LCD televisions, and more, and I suppose they think "The Shack" will cause droves of people to suddenly forsake BestBuy and Wal-Mart's offerings of the common consumer electronics. In a way I couldn't rewrite better, a RadioShack veteran customer writes his feelings on the subject at hand and stresses that "you can change your look, even your name, but you are still just what you are--and people notice."

"Tuesday's piece on Ninjawords was really about two stories. The small story is that of a clever $2 iPhone dictionary app, the developers of which removed 'objectionable' words from its dictionary so as to get it published in the App Store. The big story is about the App Store itself, and whether Apple's management is attempting to correct its course. Yesterday afternoon I received a thoughtful email from Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller regarding Ninjawords and the App Store, and I think it bodes well for both stories."

The team behind MorphOS has just announced the release of MorphOS 2.3 for the PowerPC-based platforms, the Pegasos and the Efika. This new release comes with a lot of bug fixes and performance improvements, but also packs a number of new features.

Apple has released Mac OS X 10.5.8. "The Mac OS X v10.5.8 Update is recommended for Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard users and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac. For detailed information about the security content of this update, please visit this website." It's in Software Update, so update away!

Using his blue box, Steve Wozniak once called the Vatican (for free), and, imitating Henry Kissinger's voice, asked if he could speak with the pope. The pope turned out to be asleep. Wozniak pulled these pranks together with Steve Jobs, with whom he'd found Apple computer not long after. Oh, how the times have changed. How can a company with its roots in phreaking, pranks, and home-made computing end up the way it is today?

Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The move is an acknowledgment of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft's Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks.

Windows 7 RTM Build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds: "The bug in question - a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility - appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (i.e. not the boot partition) hard disk using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a 'showstopper' in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory," reports InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. Microsoft is claiming the bug is a chipset driver issue, but Kennedy's testing of the latest Intel INF Update Utility driver set and VMware virtualized chipset drivers suggests otherwise. "This is clearly a Microsoft bug - and the fact that it manifests itself via the chkdsk.exe utility makes me wonder if it isn't something intrinsic to the Windows 7 version of the New Technology File System (NTFS) driver stack." Worse still, user comments suggest that Windows Server 2008 R2 suffers from the same flaw.

"Well-informed individuals have known about the upcoming death of the S60 platform some time – unfortunately, some (influential) individuals had Yucca leaves in their ears during the announcement and continue to peddle dangerous and wrong information. The TamsS60 team sat down with its long-time friend and benefactor, David Wood. He talked openly about the next binary break."

Distributed version control systems (DVCSs) offer a number of advantages over centralized VCSs, and for Subversion users looking to explore this model, Git is a great place to start. Using Subversion as a baseline, this articles shows how to install Git, set up a remote repository, and begin using basic Git commands.

The KDE team has released KDE 4.3. This release comes packed with improvements and bug fixes - in fact, over the last six months, 10000 bugs were squashed, 2000 feature requests handled, and 63000 changes were checked in by 700 people. We've already talked about this new release in quite some detail last week, but let's take a look at the most important new features anyway.

A new version of the HelenOS operating system was released last night. It comes with improved support of several hardware platforms, file system and block device drivers enhancements, and user interface changes such as console inheritance or multibyte character support. Check the 0.4.1 release notes for more details or download it here.

Sony Pictures Imageworks has released five digital image-manipulation software tools under open source licenses. Imageworks (the unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions that handles visual effects and digital character animation) has contributed other open source software in the past. However, the release of five tools at once brings its involvement in open source to a new level. The new effort includes a Web site aimed at keeping open source developers up to date on the projects. All five of the tools are licensed under the new BSD license, and are hosted on Google Code.

SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.