Sure, Samsung’s laptops of late have borne more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s MacBook line. The skinny, shiny Series 7 Ultra is no exception. But so what? In the Age of Windows 8, that just means you get basically the same pretty package with the added bonus of a touchscreen and some spec improvements. Not bad! More »
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Samsung’s Series 7 Ultra: Your MacBook Air Might Get Jealous
Today Canonical announced Ubuntu for phones. The new operating system is designed to provide easier access to apps and content than is provided by current mobile OSes. They do this by relying on swipe gestures from the edges of the phone’s screen. “Every edge of the phone is used, letting you move faster between apps, settings and content. A short swipe from the left edge of the screen is all it takes to reveal your favourite apps. Page either left or right from the home screen to see the content you use most. A full left-to-right swipe reveals a screen showing all your open apps, while a swipe from the right brings you instantly to the last app you were using. … A swipe from the right edge takes you back to the last app you were using; another swipe takes you back to the app you used before that. It’s natural to keep many apps open at once, which is why Ubuntu was designed for multi-tasking. … Swiping up from the bottom edge of the phone reveals app controls.” The Ubuntu phone OS is built to work well on low-powered devices. Canonical will be at CES next week working on raising interest from manufacturers. As far as software goes, they have this to say: “Web apps are first class citizens on Ubuntu, with APIs that provide deep integration into the interface. HTML5 apps written for other platforms can be adapted to Ubuntu with ease, and we’re targeting standard cross-platform web app development frameworks like PhoneGap to make Ubuntu ‘just work’ for apps that use them.” (In the attached video, the phone OS discussion starts at about 6:37.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled
ezabi writes “After announcing a 43 Million USD license agreement with Microsoft, the Egyptian government was faced with a protest from FOSS enthusiasts staging a stand before the cabinet http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/activists-protest-microsoft-deal Later, representatives from the community had a meeting with the minister of communications and information technology, such a meeting led to the ministry issuing a press release (in Arabic) stating its commitment to gradually move to open source (Google Translate to English) as a strategic option for future projects. It’s worth mentioning that all governmental websites used in the elections and constitution referendum were all based on open source solutions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Egyptian Government To Adopt Free Software On Larger Scale
Mac: You know what’s boring? The little “Verizon” or “AT&T” logo in the left-hand corner of your iPhone. You know what would be way more awesome? The Batman logo, or an image of Pac-Man chomping down on pellets. CarrierEditor lets you change your carrier logo to whatever you want, with no jailbreaking required. More »
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CarrierEditor Customizes Your iPhone’s Carrier Logo, No Jailbreak Required
If you prefer to use Internet Explorer or must use it in your enterprise environment you should be aware of a new exploit that takes advantage of the way IE accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or not properly allocated. More »
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Internet Explorer 8 and Earlier Vulnerable to New Exploit
ndverdo writes “Cree just announced production power LEDs reaching 200 lumen/watt. Approximately doubling the previous peak LED light efficiency, the new LEDs will require less cooling. This should enable the MK-R series to finally provide direct no-hassle replacements to popular form-factors such as MR-16 spots and incandescent lighting in general. The LEDs are sampling and it is stated that ‘production quantities are available with standard lead times.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Cree Introduces 200 Lumen/Watt Production Power LEDs
An anonymous reader points out just how thick a skin it takes to be a kernel developer sometimes, linking to a chain of emails on the Linux Kernel Mailing List in which Linus lets loose on a kernel developer for introducing a change that breaks userspace apps (in this case, PulseAudio). “Shut up, Mauro. And I don’t _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously. I’d wait for Rafael’s patch to go through you, but I have another error report in my mailbox of all KDE media applications being broken by v3.8-rc1, and I bet it’s the same kernel bug. And you’ve shown yourself to not be competent in this issue, so I’ll apply it directly and immediately myself. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE! Seriously. How hard is this rule to understand? We particularly don’t break user space with TOTAL CRAP. I’m angry, because your whole email was so _horribly_ wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap. … The fact that you then try to make *excuses* for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that *used* to work, is just shameful. It’s not how we work,” writes Linus, and that’s just the part we can print. Maybe it’s a good thing, but there’s certainly no handholding when it comes to changes to the heart of Linux. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linus Chews Up Kernel Maintainer For Introducing Userspace Bug
Robots are so commonplace now that we use them to entertain kids at amusement parks. But even though modern technology has given us artificial lifeforms that can walk, talk, and even fly, there’s still something utterly fascinating about pre-electronic mechanical automatons like this Vers de Soie caterpillar dating back to 1820. More »
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This 200-Year-Old Mechanical Caterpillar Does Everything But Turn Into a Butterfly
GhostX9 writes “Tom’s Hardware just published a detailed look at the Intel Atom Z2760 in the Acer Iconia W510 and compared it to the NVIDIA Tegra 3 in the Microsoft Surface. They break it down and demonstrate how the full Windows 8 tablet outperforms the Windows RT machine in power consumption. They break down power consumption to include the role of the CPU, GPU, memory controller and display. Anandtech is also reporting similar findings, but only reports CPU and GPU utilization.” Despite repeated claims that x86 is beating ARM here, they look neck in neck. Assuming you can make a meaningful comparison. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Challenges ARM On Power Consumption… And Ties
An anonymous reader writes “A Metro version of VLC, the popular free and open-source media player, is coming to Windows 8. On Sunday, the VideoLAN organization reached its funding goal on Kickstarter for its Windows 8-specific app. There are also plans to port it afterwards to Windows Phone 8. The project has now been funded by over 2,500 backers, who have pledged more than the £40,000 ($65,000) goal.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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VLC For Windows 8 Reaches $65,000 Funding Goal On Kickstarter