24049340
submission
LWATCDR writes:
At IDF Intel and RealVNC demoed RealVNC integrated at the BIOS level. Using VNC one can now power down, power up, reboot, go into the BIOS, and even mount disk images on the network. All of this has been available for a while using IPMI but how it is can be done using the open standard VNC. It is available now on Q57 and Q67 motherboards. One can just imagine how useful this could be in a data center, school, or any other system with a large number of computers. Let's hope AMD joins in.
3208895
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Mozilla has given the Wikimedia foundation $100,000 to fund Ogg development. The reason is simple, "Open standards for audio and video are important because they can be used by anyone for any purpose without royalties, and can be inspected and improved by an open community. Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets."
While Vorbis is better standard than MP3 everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technical inferior to many other video codecs. I wonder if wouldn't be better if more effort directed to Dirac http://diracvideo.org/ and maybe even putting Dirac into an Ogg container.
No mention was made of FLAC or Speex funding. If more media players supported Speex it would be an ideal codec for many podcasts and audio books. It really is too bad that these codecs get over looked so often.
2448913
submission
LWATCDR writes:
The 64 bit march goes on. First we got 64 bit Flash now Sun is providing a 64 bit Java plugin.
Now for most people there is nothing to hold you back from running 64 bit Linux.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjkyOQ
752017
submission
LWATCDR writes:
Yes it looks like Microsoft is going to a rental program for Office.
From the article.
"The software bundle, which also includes Microsoft's Live OneCare computer security software, will be sold at nearly 700 Circuit City stores for $70 per year."
Well I for one will be happy to stick with OpenOffice for now. From Microsoft's point of view it means a constant flow of money. For the customer it means you only have to pay a little each year instead of a lot every few years. I don't think this will save the average user any money and I wonder about problems with "activation".
So will this fly or will it give a big push to OpenOffice.
Read more at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080702/ap_on_hi_te/microsoft_office_subscription;_ylt=Aglfs.0Rrm.XlMNYRXVQuI5Y.3QA
678552
submission
LWATCDR writes:
A company out of the UK has an Intel Atom based Mini-ITX mother board available. http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Motherboards.html
It has a riser for for two PCI cards , two SATA ports and an IDE ports so it could make a grate little NAS, firewall, mame box, or low power workstation.
To add to the fun it has a real parallel port "perfect for hardware hacking", a real RS-232 port "perfect for data acquisition", and two USB ports. The price is around $100 give or take so the price isn't bad and hopefully will come down over time. All in all a nice system to run Linux, WindowsXP, BSD, or maybe even OpenSolaris on.
155503
submission
LWATCDR writes:
It looks like more issues with Vista Vista drains notebook batteries. Using the Aero interface really eats into your notebooks battery life. Of course one of the new "features" of Vista is supposed to be better power management. Of course this provides a great opportunity for a showdown. How long until someone loads Vista on a MacBook and compares run time? It would provide a flat playing field now that Apple makes Intel powered notebooks.
For our next test how about Vista and Ubuntu on a Dell? What review site will step up to this challenge?
105576
submission
LWATCDR writes:
http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/linuxbios-with-x11- server-completely-in-flash-rom Has a great write up on putting combining LinuxBios + a Linux kernel, busybox, X, a window manager, and rxvt into a two meg flash chip. So what does get you? A six second boot time for one.
All sorts of uses come to mind. Terminals to use with the Linux Terminal server. A very fast booting embedded system like a Car computer. With every one pushing for multi-core cpus, mega gigabyte drives and many gigabytes of ram it is interesting to see how small you can go.
