(Credit:
Opera Software)
The Opera 10 browser is now ready to download for Windows, and Mac, and Linux, three months after the beta first emerged (hands-on Opera 10 beta review).
If you've been keeping up with the beta updates, the final build of the cross-platform browser shouldn't surprise you. Opera Turbo, the browser's much-publicized compression engine for slow-poke connections, remains a feature highlight. Opera claims that Opera Turbo runs the browser up to eight times faster on suffering connections than do competing browsers.
The refreshed user interface is also noteworthy. Joining the new default skin (changed from version 9.6), are changes to tab bar behavior. The conventional tabs double as thumbnail images. Double-click the thin gray bar below the tabs (indicated by dots) or click and drag to expand open tabs into preview windows that you can navigate by clicking among them.
Other enhancements include an expanded Speed Dial (a feature that has later been adopted and adapted in Google's Chrome browser) that shows more commonly visited Web pages than in previous Opera browsers. You're also able to customize it with a background picture. You'll see that spell check will be applicable to any text field (for 51 languages), and that Opera's incorporated e-mail client takes a page from Google's books by threading e-mail conversations.
Developers get access to a newer version of Opera Dragonfly, the publisher's online development tools, but everyone can benefit from the speedier rendering engine that, according to Opera, makes version 10 up to 40 percent faster than version 9.6--before switching on Turbo's compression.
Despite all the additions that Opera hopes will keep Opera 10 competitive, there are still two notable omissions for this final release. The first is Opera Unite, which uses your browser as a Web server for sharing your content with others. The second is the Carakan JavaScript engine that promises to process JavaScript about 2.5 times as fast as the engine used in Opera 10 alpha.
Related story: Opera 10 browser to emerge Tuesday
Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them.
From the announcement:
Extended Update Support allows a customer with a large mission-critical deployment to reduce server administration and management costs by standardizing on a single update release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for up to 18 months--all while preserving stability and data security.
As Red Hat explains, most software companies allow customers to standardize on a minor, "point" release for 6 to 9 months, or at most 12 months. Through its Extended Update Support program, however, Red Hat is letting customers pick a Red Hat Enterprise Linux build and stick with it for up to 18 months, up to three times the industry average. That means less downtime and less need to re-validate software stacks running on RHEL.
The Register provides some additional insight:
While Red Hat commits seven years of support for a major RHEL version, the dot releases within the versions change about every six months. Within those dot releases, the company ensures application compatibility because it doesn't change the runtime environment, the area where the Linux kernel interacts with applications. So even if there are patches for security or bugs and whatnot in the dot release, customers do not have to go through application testing and certification, which can take many months, as long as they stay within a RHEL version.
This is a great service to Red Hat's customers, and provides further evidence that Red Hat's subscription model helps it to be more attuned to customer needs. Red Hat isn't selling an upfront license: it's selling the continued value of an ongoing subscription. By tuning that value to actual customer needs--in this case, the need to disturb production systems as little as possible to reduce risk and save money--Red Hat ensures renewals.
Subscription models align vendor interests with customer interests. Red Hat's Extended Update Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is setting the pace. It will be interesting to see who follows.
Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer convicted in April of murdering his estranged wife, has led police to what is believed to be her body, authorities told the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday.
The remains were found Monday afternoon buried next to a deer trail in the hills of Oakland, Calif., Reiser's defense attorney, who accompanied his client to the site, told the newspaper. Police said the body has not been identified. A news conference is planned for Tuesday.
In April, following a drama-filled six-month trial, a jury found Reiser, 44, guilty of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of Nina Reiser, with whom he was undergoing a bitter divorce. Reiser is currently being held without bail pending his sentencing scheduled for Wednesday.
Hans Reiser
(Credit: via Stanford University)Throughout the trial, Reiser maintained his innocence. Arguing the so-called "geek defense," his attorney maintained that while Reiser may be strange, arrogant, even abnormal, his odd behavior following Nina's disappearance wasn't evidence of murder.
However, Wired reported in June that a deal was in the works in which Reiser would lead authorities to his wife's body in exchange for a reduced sentence. Wired writer David Kravets quotes an anonymous source familiar with the deal who says Reiser's cooperation could reduce his April conviction from first-degree murder to second degree. A second-degree conviction in California carries a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life, Kravets wrote.
Reiser is known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software, which is available for Linux. Nina Reiser, then 31, was last seen alive on September 3, 2006, in Oakland, as she was dropping off the couple's two children for the Labor Day weekend. Despite exhaustive searches by authorities, Nina's body was not found before the trial.
CNET News.com's Michelle Meyers contributed to this report.
Red Hat continues to impress with strong financial performance, delivering an impressive Q1 2009. Not bad when you consider the company gives away its products for free.
Red Hat pulled in $156.6 million in its Q1 (fiscal year 2009), a 32 percent increase over Q1 2008 and 11 percent growth over Q4 2008. Red Hat's operating income was also up 33 percent over the same quarter in 2008. But it's perhaps the deferred revenue (i.e., subscriptions and other services booked but not yet recognizable as revenue because they have yet to be delivered) that is most impressive: Up 36 percent to $491.8 million.
Clearly, Red Hat is doing something right. Many things right, in fact.
I asked the company specifically about JBoss performance, as rumors have swirled that JBoss has lagged under Red Hat's guidance. Quite the opposite. While there were initial hiccups in bringing the JBoss brand under the Red Hat umbrella, the unit is firing on all cylinders now, contributing a healthy amount to the Red Hat top and bottom lines. Red Hat wouldn't give specific numbers, but I heard the JBoss confidence from a range of different sources within Red Hat.
What about the cost side of the equation? Here there is perhaps even more cause for optimism, but also a creeping concern.
... Read moreCanonical on Tuesday released its first publicly available developer edition of Ubuntu for mobile Internet devices.
One option for Ubuntu MID's user interface.
(Credit: Canonical)
Ubuntu MID works on two devices at present, the Samsung Q1U and the Intel Crown Beach development station for building devices using the company's Atom processor. It also can be run on ordinary computers through the
"This release marks the start of a way for new users to experience Ubuntu and Open Source software and as the hardware becomes commonplace it will become a very exciting place to get users experiencing applications from our communities," said David Mandala, project manager of the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Group, in a blog posting.
Canonical will release new versions of the software on the same six-month cycle as it uses for the desktop version of the open-source operating system, the company said.
"Ubuntu MID Edition, a fully open-source project, gives the full Internet, with no compromise," boasts the project description said. "All unnecessary complexity in the user experience is eliminated."
Ubuntu MID can be used with a touch screen and has a specially designed Web browser.
The Linux Foundation is trying to push Nvidia to make its graphics drivers more accessible. The Foundation's beef: closed drivers make Linux look unstable to end users.
Though a statement issued Monday does not cite Nvidia by name, Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair James Bottomley cited Nvidia in a phone interview. "My intent is to point out the problems Nvidia has been causing themselves with their binary-only (drivers)," he said. "They are certainly one of the few companies sticking to a binary-only strategy." Binary-only means the drivers are essentially closed.
"We...consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable," the official statement begins. "Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors."
But Bottomley gets much more specific than this. "Their (Nvidia's) binary module is one of the top causes of kernel crashes, which makes Linux look bad," he said.
"Nvidia does a reasonable job of Q-and-A-ing (quality assurance) of a certain number of configurations but the problem is that their configurations (are) a lot less than what's actually out there on the market," Bottomley said.
In the past, Intel had been the target of open-source advocates, but the chipmaker is now a leading open-source code provider. And graphics-chip supplier ATI Technologies, acquired in 2006 by Advanced Micro Devices, is open source too, Bottomley said. He did, however, cite some outstanding problems with an ATI "FireGL" driver.
"It's basically a reflection of the fact that graphics is one of the most complex and most difficult areas of technology that sits in a computer nowadays," he added.
Nvidia says it provides a high-quality Linux driver. "Nvidia supports Linux, as well as the Linux community and has long been praised for the quality of the Nvidia Linux driver," Nvidia said in a response to an e-mail query.
But the graphics chip maker defends its binary-only policy. "Nvidia's fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property Nvidia wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software," according to Nvidia.
"We try to make things open source whenever it makes sense," Nvidia said. The company cited examples here and here.
"To assume that customers won't have access to open-source updates from Linux kernel.org if they use closed source modules is not correct," Nvidia said. "Nvidia's Linux graphics driver kernel module is structured so that all the code that is Linux-specific is provided in source code as a 'kernel interface layer.' When customers upgrade their kernel to get the latest from kernel.org, they have everything they need to rebuild (and even patch, if necessary) the Nvidia's driver's kernel interface layer."
See: Linux developers petition for open Linux kernel drivers and ZDNet report here.
Hewlett Packard on Monday said it is making its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System available under the open-source General Public License, version 2.
The AdvFS file system, which was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corp. Alpha Unix machines, can be adopted to Linux, the company said.
HP chose version 2 of the General Public License so that it could be compatible with the Linux kernel. The system can improve the uptime time and performance of Linux file systems, the company said.
And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd...
Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.
Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.
The numbers don't get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That's a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?
Nor has Microsoft made it easy to develop Vista applications, according to an article in ITJungle.com:
... Read moreHavoc Pennington has long been one of the pioneers of the Linux desktop movement, and a primary GNOME developer. Once at Red Hat, now at Litl (cool name, by the way), Havoc should be the poster boy for Linux desktop advocacy.
Nope.
In a recent blog post, Havoc rubbished the idea of anyone needing a new (traditional) desktop:
GNOME 2.0 and KDE 4 are bad models for change. They rewrote and broke the code, but from a user-goals perspective, they are the same thing as before. We shouldn't feel bad; Windows Vista made the same mistake. Nobody cares about Vista, because XP allows users to accomplish all the same goals. Even if Vista didn't have a bunch of regressions, nobody would really care about it.
The fact is that people already have a desktop. They don't want a new desktop from GNOME, from Apple, or from Microsoft. Making another desktop does not add anything to the world. On average, people who have GNOME want to keep it, and the same for the other desktops.
I agree. I've long argued that what is needed is not Yet Another Desktop, but rather a novel conception of what "desktop" means. Microsoft won the desktop war. Time to move on to the next battle. It's not about Vista or GNOME. It's about what "office productivity" means and where I do it.
Hint: Not in Office.
It's looking like there could be a deal in the works in which Hans Reiser, the Linux programmer convicted in April of murdering his estranged wife, would lead authorities to her body in exchange for a reduced sentence. That's according a Wired report confirmed in part Friday by the prosecutor in the case, Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff.
"The defense has made overtures" to that effect, Orloff told CNET News.com Friday, declining to comment further because "it's still very preliminary."
In April, following a drama-filled six-month trial, a jury found Reiser, 44, guilty of first-degree murder in the 2006 killing of Nina Reiser, with whom he was undergoing a bitter divorce. Reiser is currently behind held without bail pending his sentencing scheduled for July 9.
Hans Reiser
(Credit: via Stanford University)Reiser is known to the technology world as the founder of the ReiserFS file system software, which is available for Linux. Nina Reiser, then 31, was last seen alive on September 3, 2006, in Oakland, Calif., as she was dropping off the couple's two children for the Labor Day weekend. Despite exhaustive searches by authorities, Nina's body has never been found.
Throughout the trial, Reiser maintained his innocence. Arguing the so-called "geek defense," his attorney maintained that while Reiser may be strange, arrogant, even abnormal, his odd behavior following Nina's disappearance wasn't evidence of murder.
A completely different story may unfold, however, if the potential deal in the works comes to fruition. Wired writer David Kravets quotes an anonymous source familiar with the deal who says Reiser's cooperation could reduce his April conviction from first-degree murder to second degree. A second-degree conviction in California carries a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life, Kravets wrote.
And the deal "would be off if an autopsy of the body somehow demonstrated that it was first-degree, premeditated murder with, for example, 'two bullet holes to the back of the head,'" Kravets wrote, quoting the source.
