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Software

Submission + - SourceForge Awards 2008: OpenOffice.org triumphs (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "The SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards 2008 have been finally published, and it seems OpenOffice.org has been the absolute winner with 3 out of 12 possible awards on Best Project, Best Project for the Enterprise and Best Project for Eductators categories. phpMyAdmin has won also on two categories, but the one I like the most is, of course, the "Most Likely to Change the World" award that Linux has won. Seems the 'Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government Agency' category has dissapeared, so we'll never know if Slashdot could have won that one."
Data Storage

Submission + - SSD, good or bad? (tomshardware.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "A couple of weeks ago Slashdot pointed out a theoretical problem with SSD technology: the review of several SSD units from Tom's Hardware Guide made them suggest that the power consumption, always considered to be lower than tradicional hard drive counterparts, was surprisingly bigger. These units reduced battery life on their tests, and make THG conclude that "our results are definitely correct". Several users and experts were doubtful about these conclusions, and in fact they were right. Tom's Hardware has apologized for that previous article, confirming that they "made a procedural mistake" and have tested again some new drives with new benchmarks and scenarios more suitable to these drives. The results are now quite logical: SSD technology allows to win (by a small margin) HDDs on battery life, and according to several reports and comments from industry leaders, the situation will improve in the near future."
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - A year of GPLv3 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "GPLv3 and LGPLv3 were released one year ago, on 29 June 2007. Palamida, who tracks Open Source projects, has made a study of the current situation of these licenses along with AGPLv3, which was released later, in November. The number of projects that have made the transition to these licenses has grown over the last months, and it seems than AGPLv3 has captured a great interest lately. Black Duck Software, a company that tracks Open Source projects too, has made its own study with similar results, and although GPLv3 and its variants have a good adoption rate, the interviews published on the Palamida site (Stallman, Chris Di Bona) show that the acceptance of GPLv3 has still a long way to walk."
Graphics

Submission + - NVIDIA unleashes GeForce Gtx 200 GPUs (nvidia.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "The beasts are here at last. With 1.4 billion transistors, the announced NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280 are the most ambitious and biggest graphic microprocessors available for consumers. The computing power of these GPUs is overwhelming, but its price/performance isn't good for most users. Gamers will be probably attracted by these monsters, but according to tests made on Anandtech or Tom's Hardware, the difference in performance isn't worth the price difference: "the GeForce GTX 280 is simply overpriced for the performance it delivers" (AnandTech). Anyway, there are good points on them, such as the bright future of CUDA and Ageia PhysX."
Intel

Submission + - Happy birthday! x86 turns 30 years old (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "On June 8th 1978 Intel introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086. Intel used then the "the dawn of a new era" slogan, and they probably didn't know how certain they were. Thirty years later we've seen the evolution of PC architectures based on the x86 instruction set that has been the core of Intel, AMD or VIA processors. Legendary chips such as Intel 80386, 80486, Pentiums or AMD Athlon have a great debt with that original processor, and as recently was pointed out on Slashdot, x86 evolution still leads the revolution. Happy birthday and long live, x86."
Media

Submission + - It's official: Toshiba quits HD DVD (reuters.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: ""We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," Toshiba President and CEO Atsutoshi Nishida said in a statement.Toshiba officially quits HD DVD and leaves Blu-ray Disc as the winner of a long and tedious war that will have an impact on HD DVD early adopters. Hopefully for now on we'll be able to enjoy the benefits of having only one format to enjoy, which should improve the technology development and, of course, reduce costs. Toshiba will not adopt BD inmediately, but it'll be interesting how this company and its partners (like Microsoft) will change now their strategies."
Unix

Submission + - Linus Torvalds on Why Users Aren't Flocking to Lin (wired.com) 1

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "On an two-part (1, 2) interview with Linux Torvalds, the creator of Linux clearly explains the limited success of Linux on the desktop. "The desktop is also the thing where people get really upset if something changes, so it's really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows.", says Torvalds, which thinks that most people are too lazy to face changes on the desktop. There's even one quote that probably will remain: "better is worse if it's different"."
KDE

Submission + - KDE 4.0 Released (kde.org)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "KDE 4.0, the first iteration in the new KDE 4 Series, has been released!: "The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era." Be careful, though: performance and functionality is not at 100%, and we'll see more and more features on future versions."
Red Hat Software

Submission + - Fedora 8 takes on the desktop (redhat.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "The new and improved Fedora 8 is available from today at 15:00 GMT. The last version of the community-supported Fedora Project will introduce some important changes related to improve the user experience in several categories. Pulse Audio will allow us to select different sound volumes per application, there is a new look for all the distro, and several new managers to control the firewall, printers or software installation. CodecBuddy will allow to install propietary codecs easily, and Compiz Fusion will be available as expected. Virtualization — a critical market for its 'mother', Red Hat — is improved through new versions of Xen, KVM and QEMU, but there are more and more features coming, and one of its developers has published his exciting views on one of Fedora's mailing lists."

Comment "People are", not "People is" (Score 1) 340

by javipas (#21197577) Attached to: The Uncertain Future of BitTorrent
Seems I wasn't wrong after all. Cambridge points out that people is the plural of person, so you must use the plural form of the cerb: "People live much longer than they used to". There's another example here with the sentence "People like to be made to feel important.", and AskOxford also confirms that. So I have better english skills than I thought :)
Networking

Submission + - The future of BitTorrent (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker is working on a new version of the BitTorrent protocol that could become the successor to the current one, maintained by BitTorrent Inc. The company founded by Bram Cohen — original author of this protocol — now has decided to close the source for several new features in the BitTorrent protocol, and this "gives them too much power and influence". The new file format would be called .p2p, and would maintain backwards compatibility with current .torrent files."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft on Excel 2007 calculation bug (msdn.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "A couple of days ago a weird Eccel 2007 bug — not present on previous versions — was discovered and commented on Slashdot. Now, Microsoft developers have written an article explaining the background of the problem. According to their explanation, "there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem". The bug has been issued by a patch that will soon be published on the download site, and that is currently on a testing phase."
Intel

Submission + - End of Moore's Law in 10-15 years? (wired.com) 1

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "In 1965 Gordon Moore — Intel's co-founder — predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. Moore's Law has been with us for over 40 years, but it seems that the limits of microelectronics are now not that far from us. Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows Updates without users' permission/knowledg (microsoft-watch.com) 1

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "A recent discovery on Windows Secrets and Microsoft Watch has revealed a new tactic used by Microsoft. The Windows Update component acts even when automatic updates are turned off, and without users' knowledge or permission. The study's conclusion: though the programs updated do not pose a risk for users, Microsoft behaviour shows a potential danger for IT professionals. But this is not the important fact. What about users rights? Windows' EULA doesn't reflect this, but Windows Update Privacy Statement gives explicit permission to such tasks."
Security

Submission + - Ophcrack, don't even think your password is secure (codinghorror.com)

Submitted by
javipas
javipas writes: "An insightful article at Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror reveals the power inside Ophcrack, an Open Source program that is capable of discover virtually any password in Windows operating systems. The article explains how passwords get stored on Windows using hash functions, and how Ophcrack is capable of generate inmense tables of words and letter combinations that are compared to the password we want to obtain. The program is available in Windows, Mac OS and Linux, but be careful: the generated tables that Ophcrack uses are really big, and you should need up to 15 Gbytes to store these tables."

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