Monthly Archive:: April 2011

Technical Overview of VP8

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-21 Multimedia, AV 10 Comments

"VP8 is an open source video compression format supported by a consortium of technology companies. This paper provides a technical overview of the format, with an emphasis on its unique features. The paper also discusses how these features benefit VP8 in achieving high compression efficiency and low decoding complexity at the same time."

Guest post by fran 2011-04-21 Intel 18 Comments

"Intel has confirmed that it has received the Android 3.0 Honeycomb code from Google, and that it is 'actively' working on porting the tablet-centric platform to run on x86 chips like its Atom processors."

Nokia Market Share Falls But Microsoft Deal Confirmed

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-21 Wireless 3 Comments

"Mobile phone maker Nokia has posted better-than-expected profits for the first three months of 2011, down 1% to 344m euros. But its market share fell 4% to 29% as cheaper rivals and the popularity of competitors' smartphones ate into Nokia's dominance. Nokia also said that it had struck a long-awaited deal to develop smartphone technology with Microsoft. Investors welcomed the news, sending Nokia shares up almost 3%."

iOS Collects Location Data, But it’s Not Sent to Apple

Submitted by Martin 2011-04-21 Apple 55 Comments

There's a bit of a stink going on - even in major media - about something iOS 4's been doing. Apparently, iOS 4 has been storing a list of locations and timestamps to a hidden, but readable file in a standard database format. The locations are triangulated using cell towers, and generally aren't as accurate as for instance GPS. Still, the file is stored without any form of protection on both your iPhone as well as your desktop.

Apple Reports Second Quarter Results

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-20 Apple 8 Comments

"Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2011 second quarter ended March 26, 2011. The Company posted record second quarter revenue of $24.67 billion and record second quarter net profit of $5.99 billion, or $6.40 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.4 percent compared to 41.7 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 59 percent of the quarter's revenue."

Guest post by fran 2011-04-20 Microsoft 11 Comments

"Microsoft has released its free Microsoft Safety Scanner. This scans for and removes malware from Windows systems without requiring prior installation. According to AV-Test's Andreas Marx, the on-demand anti-virus scanner appears to be based on the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), but with the addition of a complete signature database. MSRT used a mini database of widely distributed threats and is distributed monthly via the automatic update function."

Guest post by fran 2011-04-20 Legal 4 Comments

"Facebook, HP, Rackspace, Juniper, Fujitsu and dozens of other organizations have joined a group building a defensive patent portfolio to protect Linux-using members from potential lawsuits. Seeking to boost membership, the patent group said Wednesday it has added 74 new licensees in the first quarter of this year, bringing its total number of corporate supporters to 334."

All New YouTube Uploads Transcoded to WebM

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-20 Google 83 Comments

The revolution has begun! Web video will be freed from the shackles of the MPEG-LA and the dreaded claws of patents and incomprehensible licenses! Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Anywho, YouTube has announced all new videos uploaded to the site will be transcoded into WebM, and that the most important part of the site's catalogue is already available in WebM.

Submitted by Laurence 2011-04-19 Legal 12 Comments

"US patent law will be put in the dock later today (18 April) when the highest court in the land considers a case brought by the world's biggest software company, Microsoft. But at stake is more than just the $290m judgement that a small Canadian firm, i4i, secured against Microsoft for patent infringement. Legal experts have said that the outcome of the US Supreme Court hearing will decide how patent laws protect exclusive technology and impact innovation."

Guest post by snydeq 2011-04-18 General Development 16 Comments

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at 13 open source development projects making waves in the enterprise. From Git to Hadoop to build management tools, "even in the deepest corners of proprietary stacks, open source tools can be found, often dominating. The reason is clear: Open source licenses are designed to allow users to revise, fix, and extend their code. The barber or cop may not be familiar enough with code to contribute, but programmers sure know how to fiddle with their tools. The result is a fertile ecology of ideas and source code, fed by the enthusiasm of application developers who know how to 'scratch an itch'."

FVWM 2.6 Released

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-18 Desktop environments 12 Comments

FVWM 2.6 has been released. "It's been almost five years since the last stable release of FVWM (2006) and almost ten years since the development version of FVWM (2.5.X) which became this latest stable release was started! A lot of hard work from many talented individuals has made this release possible."

Apple Sues Samsung for Patent Infringement

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-18 Legal 81 Comments

Well. Raise your hands if you didn't see this one coming. Nobody is safe from Apple's and Microsoft's legal crusade against Android, not even Samsung, which supplies a lot of chips to Apple. Apple has sued Samsung for copying Cupertino's look and feel in various Samsung devices. This is about as surprising as the tides rolling in. Update: And Samsung's going to strike back. Hit 'm hard, Samsung. I don't like you anymore than any of these other patent trolls, but maybe we'll finally see it all crash and burn.

Rock, Paper, Community: Oracle Gives up on OpenOffice

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-18 Office 120 Comments

Over the weekend, Oracle basically announced its defeat in the competition with the community-created fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle will cease all commercial development of OpenOffice, and will turn it into a purely community-based project.

GeoHot Donates Leftover $10000 to EFF

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-17 Legal 20 Comments

After news of the settlement between Sony and George Hotz came out, we had a few unhappy people complaining about how Hotz would now keep all the money donated to him, that he would run off to some tropical island, never to be heard from again. Well, as it turns out, Hotz has actually kept his word: he donated all the leftover donated money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Guest post by diegocg 2011-04-17 Linux 4 Comments

systemd, the new init system created by Lennart Poettering, has added a couple of interesting features. First, he has added support for chroot-style isolation capabilities, but instead of chroot he used the powerful per-process filesystem and PID namespaces supported by the Linux kernel. Second, he has added a new tool, systemd-analyze, which shows how much time took each service to start, so you can optimize your bootup time easily. It can even create simple bootchart-style graphs.

FTP Turns 40

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-16 Internet 12 Comments

"File Transfer Protocol (FTP) marks its 40th anniversary on Saturday (April 16). The venerable network protocol was first proposed by Abhay Bhushan of MIT in April 1971 as a means to transfer large files between disparate systems that made up ARPANet, the celebrated forerunner to the modern interweb. The protocol required a minimum of handshaking, and even more crucially was tolerant of temporary interruptions during long file transfer sessions, making it far more suitable for the job than anything available at the time or HTTP, which came years later."

Google “Disgusted” with Music Labels

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-16 Google 68 Comments

So, Google has been working on setting up an internet music service for a while now, and we even know some of the details about what Google wants it to look like. Sadly, however, rumour has it the negotiations with the music industry have been so frustrating, Google is contemplating abandoning the entire project altogether. This has led some to wonder - why doesn't Google, or a consortium of technology companies, just buy the music industry outright?

RIM Said Weighing Bid to Top Google Offer for Nortel Patents

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-16 In the News 7 Comments

"Research In Motion Ltd. is considering a bid for Nortel Networks Corp.'s portfolio of wireless technology patents that would top Google Inc.'s $900 million offer, two people familiar with the plans said. RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, is weighing an offer that would keep Google from gaining control of about 6,000 Nortel patents and patent applications, said the people, who couldn't be identified because the plans aren't public. A group of technology companies, including mobile-phone makers, may also bid on the patents to stop Google, two people said. RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, is considering joining the group, one person said. Nortel's patents would allow buyers to control and license technology used in BlackBerrys, Apple Inc.'s iPhone, and devices that run on Google's Android operating system."

Windows 8 Can Finally Run off an USB Drive

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-15 Windows 34 Comments

"Windows 8 build 7850.0.winmain_win8m1.100922-1508 contains a number of references to a brand new feature in Windows: Portable Workspaces. Microsoft will allow Enterprise customers to create USB storage driven copies of Windows. 'Portable Workspace is a Windows feature that allows you to run Windows from a USB storage device', notes Microsoft in its description of the feature inside Windows 8." So, yeah, something we've been waiting for in Windows since, well, forever. Also, push notifications, a screenshot tool and a new webcam application have been discovered as well.

Virtual Security: Release of the First Beta Qubes OS

Submitted by Dirge 2011-04-15 Linux 14 Comments

"The team led by security expert Joanna Rutkowska has released the first beta version of the Qubes OS Linux distribution. The operating system can also be installed on a USB stick thanks to its new installer. Qubes aims to provide security through virtualisation. It uses a Xen hypervisor to run applications in separate virtual machines based on Fedora 14. As a result, online banking data are not at risk when a game running in its own VM turns out to be a trojan."