Monthly Archive:: April 2011

Geeks.com sent us in an Android 2.2 tablet, the MID M80003W. They recently populated their store with a number of cheap tablets, so we thought it was a good idea to see what one could expect from these products that seem to have flooded the market recently.

Andy Rubin, the head of Android at Google, has responded to all the talk going on across the web over Android's openness. I would almost say he sounds a bit irritated, but that's probably my own imagination. In any case, his opinion is clear - "I think I'm having a Gene Amdahl moment", referring to the man who coined the term 'fear, uncertainty, and doubt'.

BareMetal Node is a HPC platform based off of BareMetal OS. The kernel binary on the nodes is 6KiB and mainly contains the network and disk drivers. A C or Assembly program can make use of all available CPU cores via the Orchestrator program that controls what the nodes are working on.

Ars has reviewed GNOME 3.0, and concludes: "The solid technical work that has been done under the hood really complements the new user experience features in GNOME 3.0. Despite some of the gaps in the feature set, I think that the environment and the new shell is a good starting point for building something even better. The GNOME contributors will be able to iterate on the design and move it forward in future updates."

"The netlabs.org project to port Java to OS/2 has released an RC2 build of OpenJDK 1.6.0-b22; both JRE and SDK packages are available, including versions marked as 'single processor only' to avoid SMP crashes. This release improves system tray support and has other fixes, and can compile and run Java applications, including GUI applications that use AWT and Swing. It uses the Odin32 runtime libraries; a GA release is scheduled for mid-April, and future updates should include browser plugins and OpenOffice support. The project is still short on funding; you can help by sponsoring units via Mensys. There is also a review with some screenshots showing some applications running with it." He didn't test Minecraft, though.

B Labs demonstrates Codezero Embedded Hypervisor virtualizing an Android instance on Pandaboard with a dual-core Cortex-A9 based TI OMAP4 SoC. Codezero Embedded Hypervisor is a hybrid L4 microkernel that also acts as a Linux virtualization solution (currently version 0.4.4 in the demo). Earlier versions of Codezero are open source B Labs also releases open API toolkits for the hypervisor enabling operating systems and baremetal software development on multicore ARM processors.

The day is finally here, the day that the GNOME team releases GNOME 3.0, the first major revision of the GNOME project since 2002. Little of GNOME 2.x is left in GNOME 3.0, and as such, you could call it GNOME's KDE4. We're living in fortunate times, what, with two wildly divergent open source desktops.

Is Android still open now that Google has postponed the source code release of Honeycomb, version 3.0 of the mobile operating system? I've been reading a whole boatload of articles and blog posts on the web claiming Android is no longer open, but it seems like very few people seem to actually understand what 'open' really means when it comes to the GPL and the Apache license. Here's a short primer.

"Tablets are the culmination of what Steve Jobs wanted to create at Apple from the beginning", Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has said. During a keynote session at Storage Networking World in Santa Clara, California, Wozniak was asked how tablets would change the computer industry. He compared them to TVs. "The tablet is not necessarily for the people in this room," Wozniak told the audience of enterprise storage engineers. "It's for the normal people in the world."

There's a fascinating post at the StormDriver blog comparing the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1, with today's hot-selling portable computing device, the iPad 2. The Osborne was launched 30 years ago this week, and of course the comparison with the iPad is about as stark as you would expect. The iPad is literally thousands of times better in some measurable aspects, costing about one eighth as much in inflation-adjusted dollars.

And yes, the stream of controlled Windows 8 leaks continues. This time around, Thurrot and Rivera have published a number of screenshots from Windows 8's brand-new tablet user interface, and surprise surprise, its built on Metro, the same design language that underpins Windows Phone 7. Windows 8 will also include its own PDF reader, Modern Reader, which also happens to be the first application packaged in Microsoft's new AppX format. Update: Long Zheng has some technical details on AppX, including this little tidbit: "The extensive list of properties signifies the comprehensive scope of this system to be the ideal deployment strategy for 'applications', in all essence of the word. In fact, the AppX format is universal enough so it appears to work for everything from native Win32 applications to framework-based applications and even *gasp* web applications. Games are also supported."

Considering the massive FUD-attack currently underway against Android vendors, this news doesn't come as a particular surprise: Google has announced plans to acquire Nortel's immense patent portfolio for defensive purposes. Google's blog post on the matter couldn't be more bitter and direct.

Nokia has just posted that it has completed putting the Symbian source code online at symbian.nokia.com. This means that both company-supported and independent developers can now access the Symbian source code again, after the effective closure of the Symbian Foundation. This follows the interim measure of FTP access to Symbian Foundation hosted content being given out on request.

The Register has posted a very unfavorable review of the new Ubuntu, focusing primarily on the new Unity Interface: "That's not to say there isn't much to love in Ubuntu 11.04 with the new Unity Interface being the primary news, but even for a beta this release is way too rough. Unity - regardless of what you think of it - isn't ready for prime time and it seems unlikely Canonical will iron out all its problems before the planned final release in April."