As Nvidia falters, Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit is on the rise, spurred by "radical" shifts in the market, according to Mercury Research, which tracks the market for GPUs or graphics processing units.

Microsoft had its annual financial analyst meeting on Thursday, and Steve Ballmer answered questions about what the company's answer to the iPad was going to be, and whether Windows Phone 7 was going to be a part of that product strategy. He said, "We're coming . . . We're coming full guns. The operating system is called Windows." Ballmer and Microsoft so don't get it. I can't believe Steve Ballmer is making me feel sorry for Microsoft.

Several talks at the Black Hat security conference this week in Las Vegas will focus on tools that could make software safer by automatically searching for bugs--and pinpointing the ones that could be most dangerous.

Richard Stallman, who's still taking on the role of the extremist who says extreme things so other Free Software advocates can look moderate in comparison, answers Reddit readers' questions. But there's some good stuff in there, and it seems he's dialed back the nutty a bit.

Oracle has announced that rival hardware vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard intend to certify and resell its Solaris and Enterprise Linux operating systems as well as Oracle VM on their x86 servers. The announcement "demonstrates Oracle's commitment to openness," company co-president Charles Phillips said in a statement.

It was just two weeks ago that Wine 1.2.0 was released as the second major stable release of Wine in the nearly two decades that this free software project has been around, but the developers are now out today with their first development release of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.0 release already pulls in a great deal of new code...

While Amazon announced a smaller, lighter version of its Kindle e-reader today, the device still has a monochrome-only screen. Color E Ink displays are on the way, however, as today's announcement of a relevant controller chip -- the Epson S1D13524 -- made clear....

I've been out of the loop for a little while, so I almost forgot about our Thank You Award (which will be a little late). I haven't had any submissions for candidates, so please leave yours here with a short blurb on how they've contributed to Haiku please! 

KDE SC 4.5 is about to be released and KDE SC 4.6 is being discussed. However, Martin Graesslin has revealed some details about what they are planning for KDE 4.7. According to Martin's blog post, they are looking at OpenGL 3.0 to provide the compositing effects in KDE SC 4.7. OpenGL 3.0 provides support for frame buffer objects, hardware instancing, vertex array objects, and sRGB framebuffers. Read more here

The latest panic in desktop Linux lad was that Dell would no longer be selling Ubuntu pre-installed on laptops and netbooks. Alas, for those who love drama, it wasn't true. In fact, Dell is expanding its Ubuntu desktop Linux offerings.

Back in May there was the initial Alien Arena 2010 (v7.40) open-source game release of this year, but now John Diamond has come about with another update that continues to offer up a number of new features and other improvements. The previous update introduced five new game levels and rendering improvements while this newest update offers:..

We're just days away from the release of KDE SC 4.5, but details are now surfacing from Martin Graesslin about his planned KWin compositing changes in the KDE SC 4.6 and 4.7 releases. Compositing in KDE SC 4.6 should be much faster, support mobile rendering using OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, and potentially offer a stable ABI. With KDE SC 4.7 is where we're looking at the KDE world to potentially begin tapping OpenGL 3.0 for a better compositing experience...

Google has upgraded Android Market with a security tool to prevent the illegal use of paid Android applications, says eWEEK. The move follows an announcement earlier this week that Google will add a new carrier billing option to Android Market, according to another eWEEK. report....

Marvell announced the availability of an open source installer, simplifying software deployment on its Linux-based Plug Computer reference design. The Easy Plug Computer Installer (EPI) is the first wizard-based installation tool for Marvell's Plug Computer, which is being supported by more than 20,000 developers worldwide, says Marvell....

Wine 1.2 was released earlier this month with more than 23,000 changes since the release of Wine 1.0 some two years ago. This stable update to this major free software project is impressive and many more Windows applications now have life under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. CodeWeavers, which is the primary corporate backer of the open-source Wine project, has now released CrossOver (Office) 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1 to their customers...

Kmart has begun touting a seven-inch & Gentouch78& Android 2.1 tablet for $150, as well as a Linux-based seven-inch color e-reader called & TheBook eReader,& both from Augen. Meanwhile, TheStreet quotes analyst Ashok Kumar as saying Motorola will release a 10-inch tablet this November running Android 3.0....

ZFS is often looked upon as an advanced, superior file-system and one of the strong points of the Solaris/OpenSolaris platform while most feel that only recently has Linux been able to catch-up on the file-system front with EXT4 and the still-experimental Btrfs. ZFS is copy-on-write, self-healing with 256-bit checksums, supports compression, online pool growth, scales much better than the UFS file-system commonly used on BSD operating systems, supports snapshots, supports deduplication, and the list goes on for the features of this file-system developed by Sun Microsystems. In this article we are seeing how well the performance of the ZFS file-system under PC-BSD/FreeBSD 8.1 stacks up to UFS (including UFS+J and UFS+S) and on the Linux side with EXT4 and Btrfs.

Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary programs such as Adobe Flash or Skype or the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats such as MP3 or commercial DVDs to your Linux desktop. Here's how to do it.

A few months back we began publishing some open-source Windows benchmarks once the Phoronix Test Suite started picking up Microsoft Windows 7 x64 support to join Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Mac OS X as another supported testing platform. We had published Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks and then a benchmarking threesome of Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X. We had also benchmarked EXT4 vs. the NTFS file-system while the real loser throughout all of this testing was the Intel Linux graphics driver as being the really sore spot for Linux performance when compared to Windows throughout all of our tests. A new set of Windows vs. Linux benchmarks are to be carried out over the next week or two and we will be running even more tests this time around...

While browsing through dealextreme.com, a popular online shop for electronic products here in Asia, I was really surprised to see several iPad-like tablet computers that are sold for as low as $99 (US). Another surprising thing is that they are all powered by Android.

Blogger Kevin Bowling takes a look at the never-ending stream of benchmarks from Phoronix, with various Linux distros pitted against each other and even different operating systems, and he wonders, are they bullshit? . Case in point, this Debian vs FreeBSD benchmark that was submitted to OSNews yesterday.

It was just back in May that Google opened up the VP8 video format that they got their hands on through the acquisition of On2 and at the same time they created the WebM container format. VP8 has already received a lot of love by the open-source community -- both developers and end-users -- and support for it has already worked its way into FFmpeg, GStreamer, and other multimedia projects. Google released the libvpx library as their official VP8 decoder library, but now the FFmpeg developers have created their own decoder and it's shockingly faster than that of Google's own open-source library...

Just days ago we reported on the lack of progress with the ATI R600g driver that intends to provide Gallium3D support for ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards, but fortunately today there has been some activity in the Mesa Git repository for this open-source driver and a statement issued by the lead developer (Jerome Glisse) about its progress and he also has shared a TODO list...

HP has confirmed it plans to release multiple tablets, including some running Microsoft's Windows 7 and others running the Linux-based WebOS it acquired along with Palm. The announcement follows sightings on the web earlier this week of HP's & Slate 500,& a Windows tablet with an 8.9-inch touchscreen, dual cameras, and a 1.6GHz Atom processor....

The Indian government has unveiled a prototype of a Linux-based touchscreen tablet it hopes to sell next year for $35, with hopes to eventually lower the price to $10, according to several reports. Aimed at university students in India, the tablet is equipped with 2GB of memory, a memory card slot, Wi-Fi, camera, USB ports, and a web browser, say reports....

Yesterday we reported on Intel preparing to push its new GLSL compiler into Mesa by the end of next month so that it can be released with Mesa 7.9 by the end of this quarter. While Intel has developed this new compiler for the OpenGL Shading Language for their own needs and hardware, other Mesa drivers -- including those for Gallium3D -- will be using it once merged. After any initial bugs are addressed in the other drivers from this new GLSL compiler banging them in different ways, what good will this new shader compiler be for the end-user?..

Back in January, we published the first benchmarks of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: the spin of Debian that replaces the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD kernel while retaining most of the same GNU user-land and it uses the GNU C library. With those original tests comparing Debian GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Linux version ended up winning in 18 of the 27 tests. However, over the past six months, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has matured and it's also moved to using the FreeBSD 7.3 kernel by default (compared to 7.2 back in January) and the FreeBSD 8.0 kernel is also emerging as a viable option that can be obtained using Debian's package management system. Today we have updated test numbers looking at the performance of Debian with the FreeBSD kernel using two different notebooks where we ran the latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD packages with both the FreeBSD 7.3 and 8.0 kernels, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, and then finally we tested the pure FreeBSD 7.3 and FreeBSD 8.0 operating systems.

Originally set as a goal for the summer of 2009, it was not until late August of last year that the OpenCL state tracker for Mesa's Gallium3D driver architecture was finally published. However, the code was incomplete and a very early work-in-progress. Nearly a year later, this "Clover" branch of Mesa that contains the OpenCL over Mesa support is still largely incomplete and useless to end-users. Fortunately, however, a new developer has stepped up to the plate and is in the process of submitting patches...

The book is finally done! Getting through the proof copy took *so* much longer than I ever expected. Luckily, right now I'm out of town with a lot more time on my hands, so I had a lot more time to be able to sit down and get through it. It has been published through Lulu.com so that a great deal more of the profit from the book goes to me instead of the pockets of a book retailer. Here is the link to the book and e-book.

Learning to Program with Haiku at Lulu.com

The regular price is $25 USD, but as part of the launch of the book, it is on sale for 15% off the regular price through August 15 when you use the coupon code BEACHREAD305 at Lulu. It will also be available through online book retailers like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and others, but it will be a couple of months before it appears on those sites.

If you've been a fan of the lessons and want to show appreciation or to have a copy of it on your desk while you work your way through, now you have a chance to have a high quality copy, and if you've been sitting on the fence about it, read a lesson or two and then decide for yourself. Enjoy!

Mesa 7.9 is shaping up to be one hell of a release. Mesa 7.9 is already set to carry many ATI Gallium3D driver improvements along with enhancements to the LLVMpipe driver that uses the CPU for rendering, the early R600g driver, various Gallium3D architectural and state tracker improvements (MSAA, Stream Out, etc), more OpenGL 3.x functionality, and tons of other changes. But there's still more coming! Intel's Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa development list that they would like to merge their new GLSL compiler into Mesa in August...