Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Optimisation only makes sense if the code in question is used a lot – this seems to be the philosophy followed by the compilers of the latest incarnation of Google's free V8 JavaScript Engine. The new "Crankshaft" compilation infrastructure for V8 uses runtime information to see which parts of the code would benefit the most from optimisation. The developers say that the technique is mainly useful in large JavaScript programs; short scripts, such as those used by the SunSpider benchmark, do not benefit much.

You know the basics of how to find out what an errant process is doing. But what do you do when the basics aren't enough? But sometimes those methods aren't enough. What if the failed process is on a server, or a minimal system like a sheevaplug, and you don't have tools like gdb and strace installed? Or what if the runaway process is in Python, so your gdb stack trace isn't any help? What are your options then?

Because Chrome OS is open source, it has been available for people to explore for some time, which means that it's not really possible for any elements of it to be a surprise, rather deflating any attempt to launch it in the traditional sense. But in yesterday's, er, confirmation, there were a number of new announcements separate from the underlying operating system.

In an unexpected move, Matt Asay, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be leaving Ubuntu. In an e-mail to me, Asay, former VP of Business Development at Alfresco, the open-source enterprise Content Management System (CMS), told me that the news of his departure from Canonical would be be announced internally at Canonical today, December 8th.

Whether it was the uncertainty of openSUSE's future or in spite of it, there seems to have been a fire lit under openSUSE lately. On several fronts, the often controversial project has kicked into high gear.

The KDE community has announced that the KOffice project will in future be known as the Calligra Suite. According to the announcement, "The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications".

When Chrome launched their web store earlier today, the main question on a lot of minds was: "How are these apps any different from bookmarks?" Here's a look at five of our favorite exclusive apps for Chrome that stand out.

The long-awaited Chrome OS is finally here, and the first Chrome notebooks are winging their way to happy beta testers as you read this. So is it the operating system reinvented, or just a nifty way to squeeze more speed out of laptops? Here's what you need to know about Google's Chrome OS.

Google announced more details about its web-centric Chrome OS operating system, including a new 12.1-inch "Cr-48" reference notebook that will be provided to beta testers. The first commercial Chrome OS notebooks will ship in mid-2011 from Acer and Samsung, and will be available with free cellular connectivity provided by Verizon, the company added.

Let's forget the last few years ever happened — the last five, at least. Possibly 10. In the 1980s Sun Microsystems was on fire. Founded in 1982, Sun raked in so much money that it broke the psychologically important $1bn sales barrier in six years. It took Microsoft 15 years to hit $1bn — six if your starting point is the date Microsoft was incorporated. Oracle — up the road from Sun — took 14 years. Sun was the fastest growing US company between 1985 and 1989, according to Forbes, and supplied the entire US government with more than half its workstations nine years after starting.

Oracle is planning to take over the world. Or, at the very least, the server OS world. That's the logical conclusion to reach after hearing the recent comments of Larry Ellison, Oracle's bombastic CEO. "Solaris is clearly the No. 1 Unix, and we're working very hard at making Oracle Enterprise Linux the number one Linux," InfoWorld reported he said at a company event last week.

The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.

I have some important news for you. It's about those 882 Novell patents that are being sold to a Microsoft-organized consortium in connection with the sale of Novell to Attachmate. I've been worrying about those patents, and I was wondering what happens to Novell's license to the Open Invention Network after the sale. So I took the time to find out. And it's very good news. Here's how it works. The patents of OIN members are licensed to each other royalty-free in perpetuity. Even on a sale, the license remains in force for all pre-existing members. If you are a member of OIN prior to the closing on the Novell deal, then, you are covered. The proposed closing date is January 23rd, so you still have time to join OIN and get the benefit of the license to those patents.

Oracle will port its Enterprise Linux distribution to Sun's Sparc processor, a move that could help it compete better against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server business. CEO Larry Ellison made the disclosure in response to a question about Oracle's Linux strategy at the company's Sparc systems launch last Thursday. "We think Sparc will become clearly the best chip for running Oracle software. At that point we'd be nuts not to move Oracle Enterprise Linux there. We're a ways away, but I think that's definitely going to happen," Ellison said.

SME is not a three-letter acronym (TLA) for Simple Mature Enterprise but it could be. SME actually is a TLA for Small and Medium Enterprises. SME Server is a pre-configured, CentOS-based and free (GPLv2) enterprise-ready server. The web interface is complete and intuitive. The SME Server project offers a free alternative to expensive proprietary software. Is there a downside to SME Server? Yes, there is. You don’t have it yet.

Our final pattern in this series continues the theme of different ways to go wrong, and turns out to have a lot in common with the previous pattern of trying to "fix the unfixable". However it has a crucial difference which very much changes the way the pattern might be recognized and, so, the ways we must be on the look-out for it. This pattern we will refer to as a "high maintenance" design. Alternatively: "It seemed like a good idea at the time, but was it worth the cost?".

The Apache Software Foundation – one of tech's most influential open-source groups – is closer to quitting Java's governing body after losing a stand-off vote against Oracle on Java. The Reg has learned that with 75 per cent of qualifying Java Community Process (JCP) members having voted on whether to ratify Oracle's proposed roadmap for Java 7 and 8, Oracle's plan has been accepted.

Initially released in 1995, this is the most popular web server across the entire World Wide Web, currently used by around 60% of web domains. Its released under an Apache License, which requires preservation of the copyright notices and disclaimers, but doesn't require modified versions to be distributed using the same license. Though most prevalent on Unix-like operating system, it also runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and others.

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee voted a couple of weeks ago to create a new subcommittee, on “Advanced Document Collaboration”. Robin LaFontaine, from DeltaXML will chair the subcommittee. Since the entire ODF TC is quite large now (almost 20 active members attend each meeting) it is impossible to do a technical “deep dive” on every topic in our meetings. So when a particular specification domain requires sustained attention for a period of time, we can create a subcommittee, to allow interested TC members to study and draft specification enhancements. We’ve done this several times before. For example, the Accessibility SC developed the accessibility enhancements for ODF 1.1. And the Formula and Metadata subcommittees drafted those key parts of ODF 1.2. I hope that this new SC will be equally successful in their work.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced plans to provide minor patches and bug fixes only for the current Stable Series of the Linux kernel. Selected older kernel versions will, in future, be maintained as "Long-term" releases. The kernel developer said he hopes that this approach will help the community and developers focus on the current versions rather than waste their time with old kernel versions. The Long-term kernels are to follow the same rules as the Stable Series kernels.