MEN Micro announced a COM (computer-on-module) employing its own ESMexpress format along with Intel's Atom Z5xxP or PT processors. The XM1L has up to 2GB of soldered-on RAM plus a SATA port, uses less than seven watts, operates from -40 to 185 deg. F, and withstands shocks up to 15G, the company says....

Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it's the first OS deploying Nouveau's Gallium3D driver (there's benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

Haiku OS, the nine year old project to develop an open-source BeOS-compatible operating system, is hoping it will receive a new OpenGL stack this year. The Haiku project, like X.Org, will be participating in this year's Google Summer of Code project where the search engine giant pays many student developers to work on code for various open-source projects. There's a long list of ideas for where Haiku OS could use some help, and one of them includes a hardware 3D acceleration stack...

Palm has released the PDK for the webOS, which allows developers to code in C and C++, while also providing access to, for instance, the 3D chip. "The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit, letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app. The PDK enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing today, but distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update."

"Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JaegerMonkey."

"Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavor that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday's story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released."

Cisco Systems today introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform. "The Internet will scale faster than any of us anticipate," Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers said during a webcast announcing the product. At full scale, the CRS-3 has a capacity of 322Tbit/sec., roughly three times that of the CRS-1, which was introduced in 2004. It also has more than 12 times the capacity of its nearest competitor, Chambers said.

Portwell announced a network appliance using Freescale's PowerPC-based, 45nm-fabricated QorIQ system-on-chip. The Linux-ready, 1U rackmount & CAK-2000& offers a dual-core QorIQ P2020, clocked to 1.2 GHz and equipped with an integrated security engine, and also provides up to 4GB DDR3 RAM and six gigabit Ethernet ports....

In response to Apple's lawsuit against HTC, Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, has written a very intriguing blog post providing an insight into how major companies like Apple and Microsoft treat patents. He recounts two occasions on which Apple and Microsoft threatened to sue Sun - and how Sun retorted.

GE Intelligent Platforms announced a rugged COM Express module with an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU. The Linux-ready bCOM2-L1100 offers soldered processors and memory, shock and vibration protection, an extended temperature version, RAID support, and an optional carrier board, the company says....

So have you actually read the iPhone Developer Program[me] License Agreement? The EFF, using a freedom of information act to shrewdly get a copy legally off of NASA, look into the details and don't like what they find. As well as trying to prevent anybody from so much as mentioning the existence of these terms, Apple owe you no more than $50 if they sink your company by removing your apps for any reason they so please. It makes for scary reading, that is--if you think the terms are enforceable in court. I hope to see this very thing challenged as soon as possible.

Through Phoromatic you can easily build a benchmarking test farm with minimal effort and combined with Phoromatic Tracker you can monitor the performance of a given software or hardware component over the course of time. We used our own tools to launch a Linux kernel tracker that monitors the performance of the very latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. We are also announcing another new, important public tracker coming soon, but first off, we needed a few more low-powered Intel Atom systems. We ended up purchasing two MSI Wind Box NetTops (the 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US) that are both based around an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor within a very low-profile enclosure. The MSI 6667BB-003US utilizes Intel GMA 950 graphics while the 6667BB-004US boasts an ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor. Here is our Linux look at these two Intel nettop computers.

Cisco Systems says it will make a major announcement on Tuesday, news that the technology giant says "will forever change the Internet". Shares of Cisco gained 3.65% to close at $26.13 Monday, hitting a new 52-week high of $26.36 intraday, as some analysts speculated that the tech giant is rolling out new gear to help wireless phone companies cope with rising video Web traffic. Cisco had sent out invitations to analysts and the media for a "significant announcement" that it says "will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments". Let the speculation begin!

You know what's fun? Making claims on the internet about how something or someone was first with something or someone - if you catch my drift. You know what's also a lot of fun? QNX, the microkernel realtime operating system that powers just about any possible piece of kit you can think of. As it turns out, QNX was the first operating system to support a hard drive on a PC. On a related note, a new pre-release has been released of QNX 6.5.0.

"Want better games on your Android phone? They may be coming sooner now, at least for Android 2.0 models. Google has let programmers tap directly into mobile phone graphics power by releasing a third version of its Android Native Developer Kit on Monday."

"It's officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday. The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time. The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads." The big thing: native! Native! No emulation! Great news for Mac fans, and hopefully, a Linux version is on the way too.

Back in December we shared that a dinosaur game is coming to Linux known as Primal Carnage and it's using the Unigine engine. The Unigine engine is the most advanced game engine that we have seen available for Linux that offers incredible OpenGL graphics now with their Unigine Sanctuary and Tropics tests and also coming soon with Heaven and its OpenGL 3.2 renderer...

Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop environments are often referenced as being lighter-eight Linux desktop environments than KDE and GNOME, but what are the measurable performance differences between them? Curious how much of a quantitative impact the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and LXDE desktops have on netbook systems, we carried out a small set of tests to look at the differences in memory usage, battery power consumption, and thermal performance.

There's a few months left until it's summertime in the northern hemisphere, but Google is already preparing for their annual Summer of Code (SoC) project as are their projects involved. X.Org will once again be part of the Summer of Code program where Google pays various student developers to work on different free software projects...

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating...

There have been quite a few comments on people being excited about when these start addressing the Haiku API, so I'm going to speed things up a bit. I originally planned on calling this week a Buy One, Get One Free week, but that won't fit now. Why? I had planned on publishing review questions after Lesson #5, but I must have forgotten to upload them, so I'm making them available along with Lessons 8 and 9 and the questions for review after Lesson 9 has been completed. Here they are in order. Enjoy!

• Unit 1 Review - Lessons 1 - 5
• Learning to Program with Haiku, Lesson 8
• Learning to Program with Haiku, Lesson 9
• Unit 2 Review - Lessons 6 - 9

It's not just Stippi's project that's a huge success (see the
WebKit/Web+ progress documented in his
blog posts). Our call for donations for this kind of contractual
work is also doing very well!
In the two weeks since our announcement to hire developers for specific
projects, donations have picked up significantly. Since then we
received over $1,600USD and a few more people opting for small but
recurrent monthly funding.

Our thanks go out to all contributors! This shows that our Haiku
community is strong and effective when called upon!

read more

Following the very heated kernel DRM discussion that came about as the result of a major interface break in the Nouveau DRM code, David Airlie has asked on the Nouveau mailing list about potentially releasing Nouveau 1.0.0. Right now the Nouveau interface is at 0.0.16 and is wondering if developers will accept just renaming the current code to version 1.0.0. This proposal is being considered so that all old user-space compatibility is gone, there is no more user-space mode-setting to support (the code is already removed), and so that there can finally be an officially released version that Linux distributions can utilize and support...

PC-BSD 8.0 was released last week and while we have already delivered FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks including against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Fedora / Debian / OpenBSD / OpenSolaris for which PC-BSD is based, we took this opportunity to deliver a fresh set of *BSD benchmarks. In this article we have benchmarks of PC-BSD 8.0 x64 against Kubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

"Apple has allegedly been pressuring music labels to ditch Amazon MP3's 'Daily Deal' promotions, lest they be excluded from being promoted through the iTunes machine. According to anonymous executives speaking to Billboard, Apple has always been uncomfortable with the labels double dipping with both iTunes and Amazon, but the company has ramped up its complaints lately in an attempt to retain its lead in the online music market. Though Apple still remains in the number one spot among all music retailers, the move is indicative that Apple takes competition from Amazon very seriously." Apparently iTunes has a 70% market share... Doesn't that make this kind of, well, monopoly abuse? Reminds me of Intel's rebates for OEMs to not use AMD.

"In December 2008, Microsoft surprised a lot of people by releasing an iPhone app - Seadragon Mobile. A month later, they ensured the move wasn't taken as a joke or gimmick by launching another app, Tag, into Apple's App Store. Now, they have a few, including an app for Bing. And starting today, they're doing the same for Android."

BeOS came with a relatively straightforward browser called NetPositive, or Net+ in shorthand. Especially by today's standards, it can hardly do anything more complicated than rendering basic HTML, so it isn't of much use. Luckily, Haiku has a successor now, born out of the HaikuLauncher conceptbrowser we talked about earlier: WebPositive.

This is interesting: an 85 USD smartbook running Windows CE. "Inside the little guy packs a 624MHz Marvell PXA303 processor, 2GB of flash storage and runs Windows CE which all should be good enough for some light Web browsing and e-mail writing. There was actually a YouTube shortcut on the desktop, but the NBPC722 wasn't connected to try it out. Apparently this inexpensive laptop should be making its way stateside this spring."

From right to left: Scott, Bruno and myself (the three Haiku stooges?) at the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The Southern California Linux Expo – or the SCaLE show as it is also widely known – was the very first mainstream open source conference that Haiku exhibited at. This was back in February of 2007, when Michael Phipps, Axel Dorfler, Bruno G. Albuquerque and myself gathered in LA to show Haiku to the world for the first time (photos here). Following the once a year tradition that SCaLE has become since then, Bruno G. Albuquerque, Scott McCreary and myself gathered to represent Haiku at the SCaLE 2010 conference, recently held in Los Angeles on the weekend of February 20th and 21st.

On Saturday morning, the three of us gathered on the exhibit floor at around 9:00AM, one hour before the exhibition was scheduled to open to the public. This gave us plenty of time to prepare the booth, especially because we had already setup the projector screen on the backwall the evening before. We placed the HAIKU table runner over the 7 feet long table that we had at the booth, and then laid out – from left to right – Scott's AMD dual core laptop, my small cube-sized Intel dual core desktop hooked to a projector, and an 8-core laptop that belonged to Bruno's girlfriend. As handouts, we had the new Haiku flier as well as 50 alpha 1 CDs that Scott had burned on Lightscribe media.

read more

Archos announced two low-cost, WiFi-enabled tablets that run Android on a 600MHz ARM9 processor. The Archos 7 Home Tablet offers a seven-inch touchscreen and is designed for mobile use, while the eight-inch Archos 8 Home Tablet is designed for fixed kitchen-computer and digital picture frame (DPF) duties, says the company....