Monthly Archive:: October 2009

In what is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning, Michael Dell has started talking down netbooks. Dell made his comments about netbooks at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, and considering the impact of netbooks on manufacturers' bottom lines, it's really not that surprising.

We missed this one when it was announced, but since there's not much VMS news these days, I thought "better late than never." Dying to get your hands on the upcoming OpenVMS 8.4? HP is inviting participants for the field test of the next version of OpenVMS. As a field test site, you have the opportunity of trying the latest version of OpenVMS early.

So, we have Apple who is paranoid about people installing legally purchased copies of its operating system on non-Apple labelled machines. Just when you thought it couldn't get any more ridiculous than that, we have a hardware company trying to prevent people from installing operating systems on its hardware. Wait, what?

Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will include private cloud capabilities, thanks to support for the open source Eucalyptus project, InfoWorld reports. Available for free download on Oct. 29, Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will introduce Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an open source cloud computing environment based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2. Users will be able to set up 10 to 15 private servers, leveraging the same capabilities they would use with Amazon, thereby allowing them to take their applications off the Amazon cloud and put them instead into a private cloud, or vice versa

I barely finished and published my MorphOS 2.3 review for OSNews, and here we have the release of MorphOS 2.4. The biggest improvement, if you could call it that, is the one thing a lot of people have been waiting for: MorphOS 2.4 includes support for the entire range of PowerPC G4 Mac Mini computers from Apple.

Aspects of the mouth-watering Eee Keyboard have been mysterious since we first heard about it at the beginning of this year. Now that the FCC has had a go at the device and has released its documents, we have sweet description in full. "Several of the documents hidden from our anxious eyes during the FCC filing have now gone public. Not only can you visually inspect its innards, the feds have also laid bare the full spec sheet for the ASUS Eee Keyboard model EK1542. Beneath the 5-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touch panel (with stylus) we'll be getting Windows XP Home running on an Intel Atom N270, 945GSE / ICH7-M chipset with Broadcom AV-VD905 video decoder, 1GB of DDR2 memory, either 16GB or 32GB of flash storage, 4-hour battery, Bluetooth, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI and VGA outputs, integrated stereo speakers and mic, 3x USB, headphone and mic jacks, and external WiFi / UWB antenna. The Eee Keyboard's on-board Ultra-Wideband (UWB) throws 720p content to your TV within a 5-meter range (10-meters for non-video transmissions) via a UWB receiver packing 2x USB ports, another mini-USB port, audio out, and HDMI. You can even connect to two external monitors at the same time using UWB and either VGA or HDMI cable. Now all we need is a final date and price... ASUS?"

Now that all the nastiness of the discovery phase is behind us in the Apple vs. Psystar case, both parties are trying to get the case settled before it goes to court, much like the recent Vernor vs. Autodesk case. Both Apple and Psystar have filed motions asking for a summary judgement.

Bad news for Cloud Computing boosters. A massive screw-up on the part of the Microsoft subsidiary that runs the Sidekick service has resulted in all data stored on the service's servers being lost. Data stored locally on the Sidekick devices is still intact, and T-Mobile will be figuring out a way to facilitate the upload of that local data onto the servers at some point. It's a hard lesson to learn when we rely on someone else to safeguard our precious data. I'm afraid this will be the nail in the coffin for "Pink," the Microsoft mobile device hardware project reported to be based on Sidekick tech.

And another week passed by, another Week in Review. Lots of different stuff this past week, there's no theme or recurring subject, though. My item of the week is Palm's announcements regarding freeing up webOS development. What's yours?

Way back, when we were recovering from our hangovers from the millennium parties, Apple introduced, for the first time, Mac OS X and the Aqua user interface. This was still a preview, so it wasn't quite as polished and finished, of course. It also contained a feature that never made it into the final releases: single-window mode. Or did it...?

"Imad Sousou is the director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, which is behind the Moblin project aimed at providing optimized Linux technology for netbooks and mobile Internet devices. ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK caught up with Sousou at the Open Source In Mobile 09 event in Amsterdam last month to discuss the nature of Moblin and the hardware on which it will run." The interview also covers Intel's views on the netbook and MID market, Windows 7, ARM as a competitor, and Google's Chrome OS and how Intel is working with Google.

Not that we haven't known that this would one day happen, but it's still an exciting development nonetheless. Some folks over at the University of Missouri have whipped up nuclear batteries small enough to run the typical mobile device of today. They don't quite specify if has enough voltage to power something like a phone or a laptop as the batteries are being designed with MEMS and NEMS technology in mind, but they claim that these penny-sized batteries hold one million times the charge of "regular batteries." Whether a "regular battery" by their definition is the standard AA, the typical laptop battery, or a watch battery is unbeknownst to us peasants. It's being designed for MEMS and NEMS technology, but why not have it power my lappy if it's got the voltage? Imagine running one's computer for seven hundred years, and imagine all of that delicious space saved from the curse of conventional laptop batteries. Perhaps we don't need wireless electricity after all.

"The Technology Preview of the Flash 10 Plugin wrapper for eComStation is intended to show the progress of this product and to give you an early experience of being able to use websites implementing the latest Flash content. The development team is working hard to resolve the last outstanding bugs before we release a real test version. With this new release of Flash 10 we have up-to-date Flash support for eComStation. The release also supports proper rendering of Flash 10 text elements and Flash keyboard input works." It's only available for subscription members.

Hulu has finally released a Linux client, in both .rpm and .deb, 32bit and 64bit. "Hulu Desktop for Linux is currently built on Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04. The packages should also work on any Linux distribution with glib2.16 (such as Ubuntu 8.04+ and Fedora 9+). Other configurations have not been tested." Only useful inside the US, us peasants in the rest of the world will have to resort to torrents.