Archive for March, 2009

OS X 10.6 Release Rumored in August

The Apple rumor mill is stirring once again with rumors that Apple’s new version of OS X, “Snow Leopard”, will be in August. Apple is expected to release 3 “key builds” before a full release in August.

Back in February, Apple released a pre-release version of Snow Leopard and asked developers to begin testing of applications to ensure compatibility. Snow Leopard has been named by Apple as mostly a maintenance release after plain ‘ol Leopard last year, however they have added a few new features. New features include built-in Exchange support as well as support for OpenCL which will allow applications to utilize GPUs in systems as well as CPUs for a performance boost.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 31st, 2009

Skype for the iPhone Arrives

Skype has released a client for the newest member of its mobile platforms today. The app is now available for download in Japan and will be available on Tuesday for US customers. According to early screenshots, contact management, chat, Skype-to-Skype calls, as well as Skype-to-phone calls are supported so far. A Blackberry version of Skype is expected to become available in May as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 30th, 2009

Why Windows Needs ‘the Cloud’ To Fail

Buzzwords and hype aside, the world is moving towards a web-based future. This future inevitably means that our workstations are no longer our “application servers”, but we are starting to shift that responsibility and that management into the data center. It just makes sense. Bandwidth has become drastically more available and we have become increasingly mobile, leaving traditional desktop applications in the dust. This shift in paradigms, however, causes one of two things to happen. Either we a) build plugins into existing desktop applications such as Microsoft Office to accommodate these changes, or b) we stop using desktop applications altogether (or mostly). While “option a” is definitely a viable option, we would really be using a workaround to allow old technologies to work with new techniques for accessing information.

As this shift away from dependence on traditional desktop applications happens, we become increasingly dependent upon browsers. Since a majority of browsers are fairly cross-platform, the dependence upon the platform of the operating system is suddenly stripped away as well. A vast majority of Linux haters’ complaints about Linux revolve around file sharing, permissions, and application compatibility. If we start to depend upon web-based applications, suddenly those issues are no longer issues that the desktop operating system has to handle, thus Linux becomes a much more viable, cheaper option for users. Shares and permissions issues will be handled through their respective web applications. Application dependencies and compatibility will become the responsibility of the server administrators, not the end user. That makes even a $122.99 (from Newegg) price tag on a Windows Vista Upgrade license look pretty steep.

If this paradigm should come to completion (or at least completion for most users), the world’s dependence upon the Windows platform will be no more. We won’t need to have our PCs on a domain with Windows Group Policy. We won’t need to depend upon Windows-only libraries or applications. We even don’t have to depend upon media players (assuming all the web multimedia vendors play fairly).

This, of course, is all hypothetical, but it has to be in the back of the mind of Microsoft executives. Linux and Apple don’t currently control a very large market share, however, they pose a huge threat indirectly through ‘cloud computing’ to the traditional software licensing software used by Microsoft. Red Hat has all but conceded victory to Microsoft in the traditional desktop world where we depend upon desktop-based applications. However, they are working towards meeting Microsoft where the battle is moving.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Mar 26th, 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 Beta Released

The beta for the next version of Ubuntu, 9.04 was released today. Version 9.04 alpha 1 was released in November of 2008 and has gone through 6 alphas and now in the beta phase of the release. This release focuses mostly on boot speed and the integration of local applications with web applications.

The new version also includes an upgrade to X.org 1.6, the Linux kernel version 2.6.28 as well as support for ext4.

The .iso’s can be downloaded from their downloads site.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Mar 26th, 2009

Red Hat CEO: Significant Barriers in Switching to Linux on the Desktop

Yesterday at the Open Source Business Conference, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst shared his thoughts on why Linux on the desktop is irrelevant to Red Hat. Whitehurst says that financial reasons as well as practical reasons are barriers to the market for Linux. For one, he says, that he’s not quite sure how one would make money doing it. An interesting point, indeed. One of the biggest advantages of running a distribution of Linux such as, say Ubuntu, is the cost. If you can eliminate the “Windows tax” by building a machine, the cost of the OS is free. That cost is what drives quite a few people to the platform. There is, of course, significant value in the software as well. The freedom to choose an operating system is really what Linux is all about, but trying to sell Linux on the desktop, Whitehurst says, is not even being considered. He also notes that a lot of Linux developers prefer to have Macs as their workstations.

The other reason the CEO says that it’s pointless is the fact that the desktop is, in effect, going away. Quoting the famous Wayne Gretzky, he says that he’d “rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.” If the netbook market, cloud computing, and virtualization is where we’re headed, then it is certainly not worth it to Red Hat or any other Linux distribution to try to compete with Microsoft on the game that’s almost over, but rather getting a head start on the game that’s just beginning.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Mar 26th, 2009

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