Adobe’s Flash Player (versions 9.0.159.0 and 10.0.22.87) had a bit of a security issue that could have allowed malicious individuals to crash Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems and run arbitrary code which could compromise a system.
In case you missed the veritable flood of news concerning the topic Mozilla’s Firefox version 3.5 final has been released. The latest version boasts improved performance and standards compliance which is always nice.
As far as the performance claim there is a marked improvement compared to the 3.0 releases which was evident even during the beta and release candidate phase so the final version should offer up the same great speed as it doesn’t appear to have changed much outside of some bug fixes.
He makes some fair points in that it can gain some traction but contradicts himself at certain points when he notes that:
Plus, those apps can be downloaded from the Web, so the need for a DVD drive in the netbook — a major complaint for Windows-based netbook users — won’t be so great. That will, once again, contribute heavily to the affordability of the netbook.
Then goes on to spout off the features Windows 7 Starter Edition won’t have including DVD Playback which doesn’t really matter as netbooks don’t have DVD drives and waxes poetic about the Android App Store when, I’m pretty sure, Windows has the largest software library around.
It’s nice to be excited about a new OS alternative but lets not get ahead of ourselves here. Otherwise it’s a nice OS to keep an eye on as competition is always good.
Netbooks have become an increasingly popular way to get your computing done and could have been a platform where the nimble Linux OS could have flourished, unfortunately that hasn’t been happening and you’re likely to see the bulk of new netbooks sold with some Windows OS.
Intel is hoping to improve on the user’s experience with Linux with its work on the Moblin v2 operating system. They’ve released a beta for it on their project site and, from the looks of things, it sports a slick looking interface with everything the normal user would neet to get the most out of their Atom powered netbook.
As for how popular it’ll be? Well people aren’t too keen on changing their computing habits so we’ll that the good old wait and see approach.
OpenOffice.org has released the latest version of its popular, and free, office suite bringing it up to version 3.1. The most notable changes, aside from bug fixes, are performance improvements to their Calc spreadsheet application which according to them:
Performance bottlenecks in Calc have been removed, resulting in dramatic performance improvements in the two test cases: from 24 seconds to 1.2 seconds in the first case; and from one hour to approx 12 minutes in the second case.
Speedy! You can also expect anti aliasing support which will no-doubt improve graphics quality on your charts and graphs.
Adobe has announced that all currently shipping and supported versions (Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1, 8.1.4, and 7.1.1 and earlier versions) of its Adobe Reader and Acrobat PDF browsing applications are vulnerable to an exploit which may allow for malicious code to be executed on your PC. This issue affects Windows, Mac, and Unix versions of the software and their current plan to defend customers is to have them disable their application’s JavaScript functionality.
The process goes a little something like:
Launch Acrobat or Adobe Reader.
Select Edit>Preferences
Select the JavaScript Category
Uncheck the ‘Enable Acrobat JavaScript’ option
Click OK
There’s no current timetable for a fix so stay alert.
Intel’s Core i7 CPU is a beast when it comes to number crunching, far outpacing every other desktop chip known to man. Of course there are those odd circumstances where you’ll want to use it in something outside of its comfort zone. Phoronixhas a look at how the chip performs under Linux while running virtualization software. Some not so pretty results:
Ending out our testing, the KVM hypervisor had the worst performance when it came to the Intel IOMeter File Server Access Pattern option through the Flexible IO Tester. Sun xVM VirtualBox was twice as slow as the host, but KVM was five times slower than the host.
Linux’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine performed quite well in a number of tests when compared to the host OS speed and VirtualBox, but particularly when it came to the disk-related tests KVM did not fair well at all. As you can see from the graphs though, VirtualBox though also had a few areas where its performance was lackluster.
If you’re expecting performance that’s as close to a host OS install as possible you may have to wait a while.
Ye olde system desktop has been something of a pain for users for many years, It’s simple enough to keep track of things on it when you’ve got a handful of icons but when it starts to get cluttered you’ll spend more time picking out that single file than working on them.
Instead of dragging ambiguous little icons around on a flat,
two-dimensional canvas, files and folders in BumpTop can be scaled up
in size, stacked on top of each other, and pinned to 3D walls. Some of
the features and effects may seem like needless flair at first, but
after exploring BumpTop for a little while, the significant usability
shifts that it brings to the desktop become quite intriguing.
Just be sure to heed the warning and don’t install it on production machines. Otherwise, you’ll enjoy tons of updates from 8.10 like Linux kernel 2.6.28, X.Org server 1.6, dovecot-postfix turnkey mail server, Ext4 filesystem support and improved boot performance.
And if you’ve been casting a longing eye at cloud computing, Jackalope includes Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems), the open source cloud computing platform, as a technology preview.
There comes a time for most products to get the old heave from the regular driver update schedule, today AMD/ATI’s Radeon lineup gets a bit of pruning. The Radeon X1000 lineup and earlier aren’t going to be seeing much in the way of performance tuning on a monthly driver update basis but they should still see quarterly releases for bug fixes that might crop up for the older cards.
