Monthly Archive:: March 2012

Woody Leonhard provides an in-depth, hands-on look at Windows 8 Consumer Preview, finding Microsoft's old Windows desktop and tablet-friendly Metro UI to be strange bedfellows. "In my experience, with rare exceptions, longtime Windows users don't like Windows 8. There's too much change, and it isn't at all clear that the adjustments benefit people who've grown accustomed to mice and 'legacy' programs. And though Windows 8 introduces some nice new features, they're minimal. If you're looking for a business desktop OS with revolutionary improvements comparable to Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows 95, or even Windows Vista, it has yet to be seen. But if you're considering a move to a Windows-based tablet, you'll want to dive into Windows 8 with both feet", Leonhard writes, offering a guide to some of the lesser-known nooks and crannies in Windows 8 and an extensive visual tour of features and hidden menus.

"After struggling with this issue for well over a year and really pushing hard to track it down in the last two months I was finally able to come up with a test case running 'cc1' from gcc-4.4 in a loop and get it to fail in less than 60 seconds. Prior to finding this case it would take anywhere up to 2 days with 48 cores fully loaded to reproduce the failure. AMD confirms. '...it isn't every day that a guy like me gets to find an honest-to-god hardware bug in a major cpu!'"

"Apple's iOS is starting to get a little long in the tooth. There, I said it. The overall look and feel of the operating system has not changed since its 2007 debut. Sure, Apple has piled in plenty of new features, but the core of the operating system is the same as it was five years ago. It needs a refresh. I'm not saying iOS is ugly or anything, but it's starting to look a little old."

"The Linux operating system for the Raspberry Pi bare-bones computer is ready to download. The Arch Linux ARM download is based on Arch Linux, which the Raspberry Pi Foundation says 'provides a lightweight base structure that allows you to shape the system to your needs'."

Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system is available in beta "Consumer Preview" edition as a free download, but that doesn’t mean you should stop using Windows 7 as your main OS just yet. Here’s a simple way to install the new beta operating while making sure that your computer still boots into Windows 7 by default.

Today MacMan updated Chimera to version 1.8. For Mac OS X developers, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion support has been added. This version will be included in the next MultiBeast release.

I ran across a business news story about Yahoo's impending layoffs today, and if you're a deep-into-the-internet person like me, it certainly comes as no surprise to read yet again that Yahoo is on the skids. In fact, you're more likely to be surprised to learn that Yahoo has more than 14,000 employees and made something like $6 billion in revenue last year. Yahoo ceased to be relevant a long time ago, and even the Yahoo services that still get some love, like Flickr, seem to be tainted by association. But the question I asked myself when I read the article was, "why didn't Yahoo become a technology leader?"

Sylvestre Ledru performed a study that rebuilt the Debian archive using clang, a new C/C++/Objective-C compiler. The goal was to evaluate the current capabilities of clang for compilation and C/C++/objective-C support. Results are available on the Debian clang web pages.

On the heels of yesterday's launch of Windows 8's preview, new statistics show that Microsoft's decade-old Windows XP again plummeted in usage share and will be surpassed by Windows 7 in June.

Are employees at Apple already using the so-called iPad 3—possibly running iOS 6—to surf the Web ahead of its expected announcement on March 7? We're not sure, but the Ars magic 8-ball says "signs point to yes."

When was the last time you reverse-engineered all the PCI devices on your motherboard?. . . Enters the game-changer: IOMMU (known as VT-d on Intel). With proper OS/VMM design, this technology can address the very problem of most of the hardware backdoors. A good example of a practical system that allows for that is Xen 3.3, which supports VT-d and allows you to move drivers into a separate, unprivileged driver domain(s). This way each PCI device can be limited to DMA only to the memory region occupied by its own driver.

By all early reports, Windows 8 is going to be a good operating system. Microsoft's hegemony may be crumbling in a mobile computing onslaught, but its core empire remains undimmed. However, whereas Windows 7 had three versions, Windows 8 will apparently be ballooning to 9 versions.

MINIX 3.2.0 stable is released. Major features include: Asynchronous, multithreaded virtual file system (VFS) server, Better reliability, Better virtualization support, and much more.

The Dutch LinuxMagazine translated an interview (direct PDF link) from their magazine with Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director Open Source Communities at Microsoft into English. Many of your readers are probably wondering, is Microsoft really involved in open source these days, or is there more to it? Fabrice Mous started his conversation with Mr. Rabellino to get to know him better, but also to ask him some pressing questions about Microsoft's policies towards open source and open standards. It turned out to be an interesting, but certainly quite critical conversation, that will probably lead to some discussion.

We would very much like to hear your opinion on the open source policy of Microsoft.