Monthly Archive:: August 2011

How about we end this weekend on a happy note? Something we can all agree on is a good thing, so that we can all be happy and frolic and hand out hugs and kisses? I've got a video for you guys and girls. A production video of how a certain motherboard is being assembled. However, this is no ordinary board. This is the rev. 2.1 versions of the A-eon AmigaOne X1000 - which will be shipped out to beta testers next week.

There are two reasons for this news item. First, I want this issue resolved. Second, it allows me to post the most awesome picture ever and ever. The story is simple. Mojang, the company behind the immensely successful Minecraft, is working on a second game called 'Scrolls', which has been in development for a while now. As it turns out, Bethesda has sent a cease and desist notice to Mojang - they claim 'Scrolls' infringes on 'The Elder Scrolls' trademark. As a fan of both Minecraft and Bethesda, this is just silly.

"According to a new report, there are as many as 6,000 references to MinWin in an internal Windows 8 client build. This may provide more clues and validation of Microsoft's virtualization plans for the coming operating system release."

Mona OS 0.3.4 has been released. Screenshots (1 | (2 | (3 | (4). Added Facebook application written in Scheme, Ported w3m text browser. Now you can tweet and check Gmail from Mona OS., Ported mg (Emacs clone), Kernel and core components become more stable and faster, New simple shell written in Scheme. They're considering porting webkit on the next release.

Market research analyst firm VisionMobile says Google's Android smartphone operating system isn't very open at all. Google's open-source chief Chris DiBona strongly disagrees.

A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Stephen Ramsay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In it, he mentions that he has all but abandoned the GUI and finds the command line to be "faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps." I found this very thought-provoking, because, like Ramsay, I spend a lot of time thinking about "The Future of Computing," and I think that the CLI, an interface from the past, might have a place in the interface of the future.

Google and Mozilla are now working on adding file-/protocol-associations to webapps. So that when you want to select an image. You can browse your filesystem or use webapps that registered with your browser: One more item which is needed to make the web into an operating system.

In a blog post, John Luther, the Project Manager of Google's WebM Project, has announced that Skype now supports the VP8 codec. The VP8 support is already available for Windows users who are using Skype 5.5. VP8 will be used to encode and decode the Skype video call if both the caller and receiver have clients that support the codec.

"Much has been said about open source projects - and open source platforms are now powering an ever-increasing share of the mobile market. But what is 'open' and how can you measure openness? As part of our new research report, VisionMobile Research Partner Liz Laffan introduces the Open Governance Index - a new approach to measuring the 'openness' of software projects, from Android to WebKit."

This I didn't expect. While we've had individual people high up Google's chain of command speak out, there wasn't yet any form of official response to the patent shenanigans surrounding Android. For the first time, the company has posted on the official Google Blog about the issue, and the company is clear. Several companies, including Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, are working together to attack Android through patents. Google is not going to sit back and take it, though. Update: Stuff just got real. Popcorn! Or better yet, coffee!

Mozilla Firefox has been listening to recent memory complains, and as a side effect tested the browser's scalability to the extreme with memshrink's improvements. The results are shocking: For 150 tabs open using the test script, Firefox nightly takes 6 min 14 on the test system, uses 2GB and stays responsive. For the same test, Chrome takes 28 min 55 and is unusable during loading. An optimized version of the script has been made for Chrome as an attempt to work-around Chrome's limitations and got an improved loading time of 27 min 58, while using 5GB of memory.

Some highlights: PC-BSD 9 supports multiple DEs (GNOME2/XFCE4/LXDE) instead of being KDE4 only desktop, new revised PBI system that allows sharing of files and libraries between applications for reduced disk space, new AppCafe to allow easy browsing, installing and managing applications in PC-BSD system. Also the PC-BSD Control Panel has and one-stop access to a variety of system-configuration options.

Linus Torvalds piped up in the comments of a Google+ posting by Linux kernel hacker Dave Jones to air his true feelings about Gnome 3: "it's not that I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it's that the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable." People care what Linus thinks, and when he ditched KDE for Gnome a couple of years ago, people took note. Now he's using Xfce.

Even though most games wont run natively on Ubuntu there is still a sizeable number that run flawlessly on it thanks to the almighty Wine. The Wine app database lists a few games that run flawlessly on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution for that matter and assigns a rating for them based on precious metals.