Monthly Archive:: April 2012

OSNews sponsor Tradepub has a special offer for our readers: Normally $9.95, the "Scrappy Information Security Kit", containing: "Scrappy Information Security", "Best Practices and Applications of TLS/SSL," "A Window into Mobile Device Security", and "The Cloud: Promises and Realities" (registration required).

"When I started working on a no-DRM, open-standards-based solution for distributing high-definition video on fixed media ('Lib-Ray'), I naturally thought of Theora, because it was developed as a free software project. Several people have suggested, though, that the VP8 codec would be a better fit for my application. This month, I've finally gotten the necessary vpxtools and mkvtoolnix packages installed on my Debian system, and so I'm having a first-look at VP8. The results are very promising, though the tools are somewhat finicky."

"Microsoft beat Wall Street's profit forecast as personal computer sales held up better than expected, lifting its shares 2.5 percent after hours. The results buoyed optimism around the world's largest software maker, which is lining up a new tablet-friendly version of Windows for later this year and is looking to make a dent into Apple and Google's domination of the mobile market this holiday shopping season." Are Wall Street forecasts ever right?

"Florian Mueller has confessed - in the interests of being 'transparent', he says - that Oracle has hired him, for his analysis of FRAND issues. I know. You are shocked, shocked. Who'd have ever guessed? We did. Groklaw did. We get suspicious when someone's 'analysis' is uniformly that Google is doomed. It's my Spidey sense. And it's usually on the money, as they say." We've had a no-link policy in place for Mueller from back when everybody else was still citing him as a trustworthy, independent analyst. My own senses told me otherwise, and I was right. Paint me red, girl scout, etc. etc.

"Mark Shuttleworth has announced at the OpenStack conference that Canonical has received a ringing endorsement from HP in the form of certification for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on the ProLiant server systems. Responding to customer demand, HP has decided to officially support the popular flavor of Linux giving sysadmins another flexible software option to leverage their current and future hardware."

Nokia's results for the first quarter are in... And it's grim. Very grim. We're looking at a net loss of EUR 929 million, an almost complete collapse compared to last year's EUR 344 million profit. It's also almost double the loss analysts expected. Revenue dropped by 29%, too.

"The pitch is as simple as it is universal: you only need one account (with us!) and you'll have all your digital needs taken care of. That's the goal Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Sony - to varying degrees and using strikingly divergent strategies - are all trying to accomplish. As a group, they're just a selection of the vast hordes of service providers looking to expand their ecosystems and monopolize your time (see the efforts of Evernote, Spotify, and Zynga), but they're also the only ones big and influential enough to actually fulfill that aspiration. My aim today will be to compare, in terms of features and approach, the 'access-everything' accounts on offer from those six biggest companies. Does Google+ let you do more than Facebook? Can the Sony Entertainment Network match wits with Microsoft's Live services? Let's find out."

"Windows Phone is a rapidly growing market where indie developers can be successful. We are looking forward to an even better second year as indie game developers, and can't wait for Windows 8!" Great to see success stories like this. Since I run my own one-man business as well, I somehow feel kinship.

If you ever needed any proof it's anything but roses ans sunshine over at Microsoft's Windows Phone division, it's this. The next version of Windows Phone, WP8, will run on the NT kernel, which marks a pretty substantial departure from the current release. This raises the question: will current handsets be upgradeable to WP8? First, Microsoft indicated no. Then they said yes (interview retracted). And now, they're saying no again.

"GIMP 2.10's core will be 100% ported to GEGL, and all of the legacy pixel fiddling API for plug-ins is going to be deprecated." I'll honestly admit I have no idea what they're on about (I can't know everything about everything), but it appears to be quite a big deal.

"At the Microsoft Management Summit today in Las Vegas, Microsoft officially announced that the next version of Windows Server will officially be named Windows Server 2012 - and will be released this calendar year. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson told the audience that 'nothing Microsoft has ever done has ever been as ambitious' as the features being incorporated into Windows Server 2012. Microsoft Principal Product Manager Jeff Woolsey walked through a few of those features, including Server 2012's storage pooling and the boosted capabilities of the Hyper-V virtual machine hypervisor."

"Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said the software maker had considered building its own smartphone to compete with Apple and Google but decided it was a 'bad idea' after a weeks-long cost and market analysis. As part of that exhaustive internal analysis, he said, Oracle had pondered at one point buying Blackberry-maker RIM and Palm." So, Larry (likely after consulting with his best friend Jobs) decided to try to extort money from Google instead - which isn't working out either. Did you analyse that, too, Larry?

"Google treats its infrastructure like a state secret, so Holzle rarely speaks about it in public. Today is one of those rare days: at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California, Holzle is announcing that Google essentially has remade a major part of its massive internal network, providing the company a bonanza in savings and efficiency. Google has done this by brashly adopting a new and radical open-source technology called OpenFlow."

"Although the Transformer Prime is not a professional GPS device, as part of our unwavering commitment to customers we are offering all Transformer Prime owners a free external GPS extension kit, called a dongle, which may help improve signal reception and optimize the user experience. We are pleased to announce this offer as part of our commitment to customer service, but it does not replace, alter or amend any existing warranties you may have." Wait, wait, wait - this wasn't a joke? This is for real? Wait, what?