Fedora 19 alpha offers a peek at what’s coming
It's been about three months since the release of Fedora 18 "Spherical Cow," but this week afforded the first glimpse at the next version of the popular Linux distribution.
Arriving just a week behind schedule, the alpha version of Fedora 19, code-named "Schrödinger's Cat," comes packed with several new features as well as an assortment of updated packages.
It's not intended for production use, of course. Rather, the alpha software is available purely for testing purposes. Still, if you want to take it for a whirl to see what's coming in the final release due in July, it's now available as a free download. Here are some of the highlights of what you'll find. Read more...
Developers find multiple changes in BlackBerry 10.1
The next update to BlackBerry’s latest operating system is expected to deliver a number of new features and changes. BlackBerry 10.1 made its way to developers this week ahead of a public launch with no fewer than 14 new features in tow according to fan site Crackberry.
The publication came up with the following list of changes in the update based on user feedback from their forum: Read more...
Firefox’s four release channels explained
By now, it should be easy to pick a browser. Most of you probably settled on a favorite ages ago, and it’s going to take some seriously cool new features — or a whole lot of crashing — to make you switch at this point. But even if you’re in love with your default you might be wondering if you’re running the right channel.
Opera offers up Opera Next to its users. Google Chrome and Firefox both have four versions being worked on at any given time. Fortunately for Firefox users, Mozilla’s got a handy new graphic that clearly shows what you can expect from each build — Stable, Beta, Aurora, and Nightly. To seasoned veterans of the web it’s a no brainer, but the image and a little explanation is handy for more casual users who want to know if the grass is greener on the other side. Read more...
Apple Said To Debut iCloud’s New Photo Sharing Features At WWDC
With Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference just weeks away, expect plenty of reports of new features to come crawling out of the woodwork. In fact, here’s one from the Wall Street Journal — they claim that Apple has been doing some major tinkering with their iCloud storage service, the fruits of which will be unveiled on June 11.
First up is the ability for users to share and comment on each other’s photos, a pretty dramatic shift away from iCloud’s current approach to photo storage. As it stands, each user has a single Photo Stream meant mostly to make sure images are on the devices they need to be on. This shift in sharing actually sounds a little reminiscent of Apple’s recently-killed MobileMe service, though how exactly the sharing process would play out within iCloud is still up in the air. Read more...
Opera 12 Beta Launches, Loses Voice, Unite and Widgets
Opera is launching the first official beta of the next version of its desktop browser today. As usual, the Opera 12 beta includes a number of new features and enhancements, but this release also marks the end of some of the company’s more ambitious projects. With Opera 12, the company is ending support for Unite, the browser’s built-in personal cloud/streaming media platform that made its debut in 2009, and Opera Widgets. Opera is also phasing out support for its built-in speech recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML technologies.
This release isn’t just about removing features, though. Far from it. Among the new features is a new engine for writing and displaying browser themes (Opera previously called these ‘skins’). Read more...
‘Siri, I have some some suggestions for you’
When Apple's new iPad was unveiled last week, one of the features users had hoped for didn't come with it. Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant that's been such a hit on the iPhone 4S, wasn't among the tablet's new features. (Apple did add a dictation feature, but it has none of Siri's interactivity; all you can do is one-way dictation.)
Despite the disappointment of Siri users, this is actually not a bad move on Apple's part. Siri is still in beta and could use a little polishing before being rolled out to the iPad. Even though I found in my first month of use that it is good enough to change users' habits, Apple clearly wants to make damn sure Siri works as billed. Even in beta, Siri's easy interaction, fast results and sometimes quirky responses produce an emotional reaction that has encouraged people to use it -- a lot. Read more...
Nimbula adds support for VMware hypervisor
Nimbula is hoping to better serve enterprises with version 2.0 of its operating system, which adds compatibility with VMware's hypervisor and other new features.
Nimbula Director 2.0, like its predecessor, is software used by businesses and service providers to build cloud infrastructure.
Now, enterprises using VMware's ESXi hypervisor can build clouds with Nimbula Director 2.0. Many businesses use VMware's hypervisor and other software products for running traditional enterprise applications. And some companies want to continue using the VMware hypervisor but they also want some of the standard functionality of cloud platforms like self-service that they aren't getting using VMware's cloud products. Read more...
Oracle whips out Solaris 11 system lasher
Oracle has duly announced the high availability clustering companion to the new Solaris 11 operating system, and as you might expect from a company that is pitching its own SPARC-based "engineered system" stacks, a whole bunch of third-party software and hardware that was supported with the prior Solaris Cluster 3.3 code has not made it into the 4.0 release.
Solaris 11 made its debut last month after six years of development, and it runs only on modern SPARC T and SPARC M series processors sold by Oracle. Which is fair enough, given that Oracle is perfectly happy to sell the older Solaris 10 software and support it on older iron.
Similarly, Oracle will continue to sell and support Cluster 3.3 on Solaris 10 and earlier releases for those customers who want or need to stay on these earlier versions.
But if you want to cluster Solaris-based systems at the system level – not at the database level as Oracle does with its Real Application Clusters extensions to the 11g database – and you want to run Solaris 11, then you are going to have to move to Solaris Cluster 4.0. Read more...
Microsoft updates Exchange 2010
Microsoft has updated its Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, posting a service pack with a number of new features and bug fixes, the company announced Monday.
The new features in Microsoft Exchange Service Pack 2 were developed based on customer feedback, according to the company. They reflect the expanding use of enterprise e-mail, scheduling and associated functions across a wider range of devices and deployment scenarios. Read more...
OpenSUSE 12.1 delivers Fedora punch with GNOME 3
The big news in openSUSE 12.1, whose first beta has recently dropped, is the arrival of GNOME 3 – in this case GNOME 3.2.
Unlike Fedora, which is already into its second GNOME 3-based release, openSUSE had – thanks to its release schedule – stuck with GNOME 2 for its last release earlier this year.
OpenSUSE 12.1 embraces GNOME 3.2 and, like Fedora 16, drops support for the GNOME 2.x line.
This release marks a slight change to openSUSE's versioning convention. If you were thinking this should be openSUSE 12.0, you're correct. But the openSUSE project has decided to stop releasing .0 versions. Strange perhaps, but in the wacky world of software versioning that adjustment is fairly minor. OpenSUSE 12.1 it is. Read more...
Eucalyptus 3: Your own private Amazon cloud
Eucalytpus announced Version 3 of its open source IaaS (infrastructure as a service) software, which equips organizations with a way to build their own elastic, highly available AWS (Amazon Web Services)-compliant clouds. With new features like fault tolerance beneath the virtual machine layer, improved RAC (resource access control), and greater support for various cloud storage platforms, Eucalytpus 3 could well prove itself a go-to solution for companies seeking to reap the benefits of cloud computing.
Similar to OpenStack, Eucalyptus is open source, but it adheres to the AWS APIs, meaning organizations can leverage their AWS skills in-house, as well as third-party tools that integrate with AWS. For instance, a company might develop a large-scale application on AWS but decide to run the production version in-house for reasons of security, reliability, or cost. Eucalyptus eases that transition, while maintaining the ability to pool CPU and storage resources and dynamically allocate them to the application as the workload requires. Read more...
How to make Mac OS X Lion more like Snow Leopard
So you've downloaded Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store and updated your Mac. You're delighted by many of the new features, but there are some that rub you the wrong way. You may wish you could revert some of them to the behavior they had in OS X Snow Leopard. Maybe you just can't get used to the changes, or perhaps you simply don't find them appealing. Here's a look at some of the many new features that you can revert to the old way. While it may be a good idea to get used to the way Lion does certain things, it's certainly understandable that you might want to change some of them back -- I know I did.
(Note that when I mention preferences that can be changed, unless I name a specific application, all these preferences are found in the System Preferences application, which you can access from the Apple menu.)
General behavior
Scroll direction: The first thing you probably saw when launching Lion was a video informing you that the default scroll direction has changed. In the past -- since the advent of scrolling mice and trackpads -- when you scrolled up, the content of your window went down, and vice versa. Now, scroll up with either a scroll wheel or a mouse, or with two finders on a trackpad, and the window content follows your movement. Read more...
LiveChat Livens Up Its Features
LiveChat this week announced two new features for its real-time software and Web analytics tool for e-commerce sales and support teams, Intelligent Triggers and Conversion Meter.
With Intelligent Triggers, the LiveChat system identifies the best prospects visiting a Web site based on data gathered from the purchasing decisions of 65 million buyers. It initiates a chat invitation with a personalized, custom message. Triggers can also be set based on keywords, referring Web site, and location and can contain any combination of conditions as needed to reach the desired set of customers. LiveChat inviations are customizable. Read more...
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 – 5 Reasons to Upgrade
Stanley Kubrick once noted that editing is possibly the most important phase in the film-making process. In spite of the most spectacular directing, riveting performances, expert camera work and cutting edge special-effects (get over yourself, James Cameron), the simple fact remains that the quality of editing can easily make or break a film. That being said, even the most talented editor is only as good as the tools that he uses. Why then, would any video editor or post-production artist choose to use anything but the latest, most up-to-date video editing applications to edit their films? Read more...