News

Wednesday, October 31. 2007

Google Phone Plan Draws Interest

Google Inc. is in advanced talks with two top U.S. cellphone operators, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp., about selling handsets tailored to its new mobile-phone operating system, people familiar with the matter said.

Deals with the carriers would represent a major breakthrough for the Internet search giant, which until now has encountered wariness from some quarters of the wireless industry about its mobile-phone plans.

KDE 4.0 Beta 4 released

The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers.
As KDE has largely has been in bugfix mode, this latest Beta aims to encourage testers to have a look at it to help us find and solve the remaining problems and bugs. Besides the stabilization of the codebase, some minor features have been added, including but not limited to much work on Plasma, the KDE 4 desktop shell.
Sebastian Kügler notes: "The improvements have been huge, and plasma is much closer to what it needs to be before the release. I am confident we will be able to finish it and present a very usable plasma to our userbase with KDE 4.0. We will then be able to extend on that and present truly innovative desktop interfaces throughout the KDE 4 lifecycle.

Tuesday, October 30. 2007

Leopard Hacked to Run on PCs

The cat and mouse game between hackers and Apple takes another move, with news that Apple's new Leopard operating system has already been successfully installed on Windows PCs.

The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple's new OS, without investing in new hardware -- even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple's terms and conditions.

The forum is offering full instructions on how to install the system, including screenshots of the installation process.

Blu-ray BD+ cracked and ready to burn

COPY AND BURN FIRM, Slysoft reckons it has cracked the beefed-up copy protection on Blu-ray disks, BD+.

It reckons it has the routine cracked even though Sony reckons its protection will be good for ten years.

SlySoft boss, Giancarlo Bettini says he has wonders "when people will understand that the more restrictions, pressures and protection measures that are applied to limit the functionality of a thing, the fewer sales that will result, not more."

The Pirate Bay Sees a Future Without BitTorrent

The guys from The Pirate Bay are always working on interesting side-projects, but there is one in particular that’s so significant, it might be the future of filesharing. For a while now, they have been working on a brand new protocol - which may come to replace BitTorrent in the near future.

Monday, October 29. 2007

No credit card, no iPhone

People looking to walk into an Apple retailer and buy an iPhone with cash will be out of luck. The company is now accepting only credit or debit card payments for the devices so that it can track who purchases the phone, according to an employee at the Apple Store in New York's SoHo neighborhood.

The new policy is Apple's attempt to prevent people from purchasing and then unlocking and reselling iPhones, a situation that has been a problem for the company. Apple won't let anyone without a credit card or debit card in their name purchase iPhones, according to an unidentified Apple Store employee in a phone interview.

"We need to track the purchases of the iPhone [because] we have people buying the phones, unlocking the phones, and selling them," she said.

Appeals court rubber stamps FCC's DSL (de)regulation

Living in America? If you get your access to the internet through an independent ISP over DSL, your service might become more expensive soon. Or slow. Or disappear entirely.

The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling last week that approved the FCC's new order eliminating the requirement that large phone companies provide transmission services to independent ISPs at set, nondiscriminatory rates.

Sunday, October 28. 2007

Adobe makes Flex Builder free for students, faculty

Flex Builder is Adobe's development environment for building applications using Flash and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), two of the technologies integral to Adobe's strategy for making applications that use rich media available online and offline. Adobe hopes to woo some of the best of the crop of new developers at universities, which are just beginning to offer Flex courses as part of their curriculum.

Beginning next month, qualified education users can begin downloading Adobe Flex 2 at Adobe's Web site. The open source SDK for Flex is already available free and can be downloaded online. The SDK includes the Flex code compiler and libraries for ActionScript 3.0, which provide the language and programming model for RIAs deployed on Flash.

Six iTunes alternatives for Linux

Apple’s iPod has created a worldwide army of fans who sync their life with their music via a Windows PC or Mac computer. But what if you’re one of the growing numbers of users who are ready to ditch Windows Vista and dive head-first into the cup that is Linux?

Apple has no Linux version of iTunes but that doesn’t mean you should pout and stay with Windows. The demand for an iTunes-like tool to bring the Linux love to iPod has been growing steadily over the last couple of years. We’ve found five tools that could save your sanity and bring Linux and iPod together.

Saturday, October 27. 2007

All about Leopard: gallery, apps, impressions

We've been poring over Leopard since getting our copy, and no doubt about it, there's just way too much to say. The number of fixes, updates, and new features in this release is astounding. Granted, many aren't major (and some aren't even easily immediately noticeable), but the marquee apps like Spaces and Time Machine are instantly indispensable, while the finer details (like revamped Bluetooth and network connections preferences) leave little to be desired. Looking at Leopard's gestalt, it's plain to see that this by far the best version of OS X to date.

Read on for a long list of changes, updates, additions, and impressions, and don't forget to check out the gallery.