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LXer Feature: 26-Nov-2009

Here's a quick blog, because I'm really in hurry, so please forgive any mistakes.

Microsoft worked together with Apple to bring Silverlight video to the iPhone. What this solution basically does is take a video at the server side, cut it in parts and convert the parts to separate H.264 streams. Then stream those files to end users with IIS Media services. These have .ts extensions, a format mplayer understands.

About a half year after big technological changes, the KOffice project has released version 2.1 of its office suite, even if it's not quite ready for everyday use.

A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS. I won’t hide that I am one of them. Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead. I write this knowing full well that I am going to make a lot of people angry. This might be the first time a writer receives very angry responses from both camps — KDE and GNOME’s users might actually (finally?) join arms and fight just to show everybody how wrong I am! Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?

Are the fights that matter just the ones between giant companies? Doesn't the health of the Net and the Web matter more than any commercial battles? These questions came to mind when I read How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search in TechCrunch recently. In that piece Mike Arrington supported Jason Calacanis' suggestion that Murdoch stick it to Google by cutting an exclusive search deal with rival search engine Bing. Even Jay Rosen took the same side. (Though perhaps in jest.)

According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end.

Technological advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have opened up the possibility of determining how living things are related by analyzing the ways in which their genes have been rearranged on chromosomes. However, inferring such evolutionary relationships from rearrangement events is computationally intensive on even the most advanced computing systems available today.

As I explained in the previous post, replacing my notebook's hard disk with an SSD significantly improved the overall system performance -- even without any additional tweaking. But there are also a couple of simple tricks that can boost performance even further.

This article describes how you can upgrade your Fedora 11 system to Fedora 12. The upgrade procedure works for both desktop and server installations.

One of the articles on Phoronix last week was entitled Intel Linux Graphics Shine With Fedora 12, which showed off the nice state of Intel graphics on this latest Red Hat release when it came to kernel mode-setting and its 3D stack with it working well "out of the box" and offering some nice performance gains over the earlier Fedora 10 and Fedora 11 releases. While the Intel stack may be improved in Constantine, the ATI support has taken a hit, as users were quick to point out in response to last week's article. In particular, when using the ATI kernel mode-setting driver in Fedora 12 (which is the default for pre-R600 hardware), there is a large performance discrepancy compared to using the traditional user-space mode-setting for ATI Radeon hardware. Today we are looking at what exactly the performance cost is for using ATI KMS in this new release.

I had previously pointed out that the lack of supported platforms was a serious problem for Silverlight, especially when compared to Flash. The root of the problem was that Moonlight, the Linux version of Silverlight, is usually at least one release behind the Windows and mac versions of Silverlight. Rather than working to fix the problem it seems that Microsoft is making it worse by introducing Windows only features in Silverlight 4.

After 16 years of dogged work, Wine actually works pretty well. Part of its success is due to a remarkable cooperation between the Wine project and a commercial software house in St. Paul named Codeweavers. Codeweavers sells a $40 deployment, management utility for Wine called Crossover, which basically makes Wine noob friendly.

BURG stands for Brand-new Universal loadeR from GRUB. It's based on GRUB, and add features like new object format and configurable menu system.

Hey Windows fans, would you like to take Linux for a spin to see what everyone's buzzing about? It's easy to do in just five easy steps. You can test Linux for yourself without having to setup multibooting, worry about partitioning or installing over your current Windows system. That's right, you can. Try out that Linux power and coolness for yourself using these five easy steps. Don't worry, you'll never have to leave the comfort of Windows to do any of them--not even to a command line. Let's get started!

Bryce Harrington is agonizing over the nontrivial task of delivering a working X server for Ubuntu. On the Ubuntu desktop mailing list he speaks of a flood of bug reports and appeals to improving the situation.

Former MySQL boss Marten Mickos says there's still "more to develop and more territory to conquer", and predicts Microsoft will "become one of the biggest friends of open source". In an exclusive interview, former MySQL boss and silicon.com Agenda Setter, Marten Mickos talks to Tim Ferguson about the state of open source, Oracle's plans to buy Sun Microsystems and the value of working with people who are smarter than you. Marten Mickos is probably best known for his time as chief executive of open source database company MySQL, a position he held from 2001 until the beginning of 2009.

Alan Coopersmith on behalf of Sun Microsystems has announced this afternoon that they will be relicensing all of their past and present X server work under the canonical form of the X.Org license in its latest form. This is being done to reduce the number of MIT license variants within the X Server...

After talking about NVIDIA's forthcoming 64-bit FreeBSD driver we were alerted to the fact that the first 195.xx public beta driver is now available. Earlier this month we first talked about the NVIDIA Linux 195.xx driver series as Fermi GT 300 support was being worked on, but now a Fermi-less (or at least from their official change-log) driver has arrived...

Improved power management in the latest firmware revision for Amazon's Kindle ebook reader extends battery life from four to seven days, even with the wireless interface turned on, according to the company. With wireless turned off, battery life remains at two weeks. Another firmware change provides a PDF reader, allowing the reader to display files in the popular format. This means such files can be transferred directly to a Kindle via USB.