Bits of News site syndication http://www.bitsofnews.com Tue, 21 May 2013 07:37:51 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.bitsofnews.com/img/logo.png http://www.bitsofnews.com Bits of News site syndication http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/8940/ Apple has unveiled the latest version of its iPod Nano, featuring what it says are the thinnest measurements yet. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Hardware Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:22:50 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7860/ A popsci.com writer reports on a swimsuit whose wearers have already broken 11 world records in two months. Will the technology pave the way for a new era in swimming, or will FINA crack down? Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech General Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:34:07 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7578/ The attitude of global warming evangelists is akin to a new religion says sceptic Brian Durrant, editor of the Fleet Street Letter... Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech General Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:00:22 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7292/ Troux Technologies announced that Fiducia, the leading German IT services company for the financial services industry, will implement its software platform, Troux 7, to enable strategic IT planning and to ensure that its extensive SOA program is properly aligned with business and IT transformation initiatives. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:13:14 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7290/ Japan's Toshiba Corp waved the white flag in the high-definition home movie war on Tuesday, giving up on its HD DVD format after losing the support of key studios and retailers to the Blu-ray technology backed by Sony Corp. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Multimedia Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:38:47 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7280/ Last week was a busy one, for TuneTracker Systems. First, they released a new application for their package, named TuneBridge. And then they bought a famous BeOS sampling studio, which they will improve and expand. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:42:34 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7242/ This is a very important step towards an alpha release of the Haiku operating system, which I personally hope is not to far into the future… Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Thu, 14 Feb 2008 02:16:59 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/7227/ AppDNA, the leading developer of application testing software, today announced that its AppTitude product has been awarded “Approved” status by Broadband Testing, one of Europe’s foremost independent network testing facilities and consultancy organisations for enterprise IT solutions. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:04:56 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/6665/ According to a news post on the Haiku project website, a new port team is being formed to bring Java technologies to the Haiku platform. The goal of the Haiku Java Team is to port OpenJDK to Haiku, and they would like to see the port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Sat, 05 Jan 2008 07:31:05 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/6649/ Until very recently, the community of Haiku testers and developers, as well as those curious geeks who wanted to give Haiku a spin, relied on the services of HaikuHost.com to download nightly builds of hard disk raw and VMware images. Now Haiku Files is the new archive of nightly builds. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:57:02 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5982/ Six years has gone by since the birth of the Haiku operating system, Happy Birthday Haiku! Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Sat, 18 Aug 2007 21:34:16 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5945/ These days there are probably very few, even among the computer savvy, who have heard of the BeOS operating system. But once, not long ago, it was actually deemed to be a possible contender for the desktop. A small band of open source programmers are trying to revive the once and future hope of elegant computing. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Thu, 09 Aug 2007 04:40:05 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5933/ The iStation Traveller is available to purchase. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Hardware Sat, 04 Aug 2007 00:14:42 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5915/ The Haiku project recently canceled this year's Waltercon conference, leaving some of its supporters with non-refundable, non-transferable airplane tickets. In response to the last minute cancellation, the community is putting together an impromptu gathering for Haiku users and developers called FalterCon 2007. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:54:29 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5891/ Sadly Haiku's official developer and user community conference has been cancelled, but Haiku developer Michael Phipps will speak at the upcoming LinuxWorld conference. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:50:31 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5886/ Hewlett-Packard continues to gain market share over Dell in the global market. Worldwide PC shipments rise 12% Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Hardware Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:09:40 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5881/ The biggest revolution in TV viewing is about to hit us, and it's almost a secret. It has the potential to be one of the biggest consumer revolutions ever. Forget the much hyped single item mass hits like the Apple iPhone. When 3D TV becomes main stream, the impact on consumer spending will be huge. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech General Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:25:52 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5656/ The top five Linux distributions, or distros, are Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, PCLinuxOS and MEPIS. These rankings are courtesy of Distrowatch. You can go there and see which distros round out the top ten, hundred, and so on. There are literally hundreds of distros to choose from. Now I'd like to get into the nitty-gritty of choosing and testing a Linux distro that is right for you. I'll try to stay as impartial as possible in this, though I may inject a personal fave or two into the mix. Please don't hold that (too hard) against me. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Tue, 08 May 2007 22:53:16 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5611/ For the past few year robotics has become a more and more popular hobby among geeks, I’ve even built a few simple ones myself. Now Google, Intel and Microsoft have funded researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to create a new series of Internet-connected robots that almost anyone can build using off-the-shelf parts. As part of the Telepresence Robot Kit (TeRK), a joint effort unveiled last summer between the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute and Charmed Labs, associate professor of robotics Illah Nourbakhsh and members of his Community Robotics, Education, and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab have created a series of "recipes" for robot building. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech General Thu, 26 Apr 2007 17:21:49 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5596/ I bet most geeks out there get that fuzzy nostalgic feeling when they hear the name Amiga. But most of you probably not have a to close relationship with the Amiga. Development of the Amiga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga) started already in 1982 by Jay Miner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner) as the principal hardware designer. But even before the first Amiga’s hit the market, Amiga Inc was bought by Commodore International (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International) and they introduced the machine to the market in 1985. Commodore marketed it both as their intended successor to the Commodore 64 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64) and as their competitor against the Atari ST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST). It was later renamed the Commodore Amiga 1000. It could display up too 4096 colours and could run several applications concurrently, it was a superior machine and its qualities gave the Amiga 1000 a significant technical lead on its three main competitors, the Atari ST, Macintosh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh) and the IBM PC. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Tue, 24 Apr 2007 03:11:22 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5580/ Consider this a brief introduction to Linux. What exactly is Linux? Well, it's the F/OSS (free/open source software) alternative to both Windows and Mac OS X. Free as in beer, open source as in the source code being available for all to inspect and modify, i.e., not proprietary (like the Colonel's secret recipe). Why even consider Linux? Well, a couple of reasons: price, performance, and security. OK, three reasons (I didn't expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition..). Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Sat, 21 Apr 2007 18:30:40 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5576/ Users around the world can now get their hands on the latest version of Mozilla's open source e-mail client Thunderbird 2.0, which is designed to make it much easier to organise and find messages thanks to tags and advanced folder view functionality. In addition to enhanced tagging and search features, users can also make use of navigation akin to what they're used to from a browser so that they can move forward and backwards through their messages quickly and easily. What's more, hundreds of add-ons are available to make it even easier to customise Thunderbird, which is available as a free download for Linux, Mac and Windows in more than 30 languages, to their individual needs. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:55:29 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5554/ Huge hulking desktops may increasingly be a thing of the past. But they did have a couple of advantages. One was that to knock them over you almost had to slam your shoulder into them at ramming speed. Laptops are light weight, practical, and can go with you anywhere. Problem is, they can also go quite to pieces at the merest oops. So and so many MHz, MB, and GB, are things the average prospective buyer can check before making a purchase. But chances are that the staff at the store would be less than pleased if you came in and began your own impromptu test of PC impact survivability. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Hardware Sat, 14 Apr 2007 21:23:40 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5526/ Once again AMD strikes hard to win the price war between AMD and Intel, this time it is AMD's top of the line desktop processors that gets a real price cut. This is great news for us users, but maybe not so great for AMD, the price war between the two have seriously hit AMD finances. Monday AMD warned that it expects to report revenue of $1.23 billion for the last quarter ending March 31, 2007, this is down from its prior forecast of between $1.6 and $1.7 billion. AMD blamed the low average selling prices for the downturn, which is a clear sign that the price war is causing some financial pain. This revised revenue figure represents AMD's worst since the first quarter of last year, when it reported revenue of $1.22 billion, this was before they included the results from the now merged ATI. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Hardware Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:16:42 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5520/ The age old question for the rich and the famous, "What do you give the one who has everything?" or give yourself, is, like most things, subject to inflation. Once it was enough to have your own luxury yacht to leave just about anybody in the dust in the conspicuous consumption department. But after a few years, too many mere mortals could afford one. And you can only get so far by trying to impress with size. Sooner or later you're cruising along in a supertanker, and driving a moped to the toilet. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech General Sun, 08 Apr 2007 22:58:49 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5498/ When Be Inc., the creators of the BeOS operating system, went the way of most computer companies through the history of this volatile industry in 2001, and went under the hammer and to Palm Inc. (later PalmSource and ACCESS), the users of their software were left stranded. With an Open Source version of the operating system, Haiku, only a distant dream at the time, and time and hardware leaving the OS behind. These users and enthusiasts needed an upgrade path. That was seemingly supplied by a company called YellowTAB and their Zeta version of BeOS. But despite muted protestations to the contrary, suspicions were rife that the company, led by Bernd Korz, did not have legal access to the source code the software was based on, and the abillity and right to develop and distribute it. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Wed, 04 Apr 2007 07:29:53 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5496/ Everyone that has been following the BeOS/Haiku/Zeta related news for the past few years knew that this was about to happen sooner rather than later. The Zeta project is now officially dead. To quote myself “I predict that we will see the death of Zeta in a not to distant future.”, this was my conclusion in a story written just over a week ago. And yesterday Bernd Korz, head of Zeta’s development team announced on his blog that he will cease all development in Zeta, this in turn effectively means that the project is dead and that Zeta will no longer be in development. Bernd Korz been the head of the development team since the projects start seven years ago, much has been done during those seven years, but not nearly enough to keep up with Zeta’s rival in the BeOS scene, Haiku. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:33:34 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5470/ For decades people have tried to replicate the human mind, using more and more sophisticated software make better A.I’s, but still the best A.I’s are not much smarter than your average cockroach. Maybe that’s the problem? Everything that we’ve done so far is software based, the hardware to drive the A.I has been much unchanged. But a Norwegian team at the University of Oslo has made what will possibly be the next generation of hardware. Every creature in nature is a product of evolution, and did I mention that creationism is just bull? What the team has done is add evolution to hardware (Norwegian), all hardware that you and I have used so far is made the creationism way, it’s made and can not be changed at runtime through evolution. All changes to existing hardware have to be made through software. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Hardware Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:46:54 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5454/ Back in 2001 when the company behind BeOS, Be Inc. went bust, and its intellectual property was sold to Palm Inc, everything looked rather dim in the world of alternative operating systems. BeOS was and probably still is one of the most “sexy” operating systems ever made, but sadly it was way ahead of its time. When Windows was still stuck with the FAT32 file system, which only supported files with no greater size than 2GB (files larger than this at your own risk of data loss), BeOS featured its own 64bit journaling file system, BFS, that supported file sizes north of 260GB. Not only was BeOS’s file system far superior to that of other operating systems at the time or now for that sake, but even on an old Pentium powered computer you had boot times below 10 seconds, compared to Windows’ two cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes boot time. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Sat, 24 Mar 2007 03:38:41 +0100 http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/5416/ Red Hat has released its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 whose enhancements include additional performance, scalability and security features, extensive new hardware support, expanded development environment and toolset, improved interoperability Microsoft Windows and Unix."We have been developing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for two years with our customers and partners driving the agenda. Their pain points were clear: they were unable to consume all of the technology being sold to them, and it was was not solving their business problems effectively. Our resolve has been and will always be that we will deliver software that solves real business needs," said Paul Cormier, executive vice president, engineering, Red Hat.Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform is the world's most compelling operating environment, claims Red Hat. With Advanced Platform, customers are able to greatly reduce the cost and complexity of purchasing, integrating and managing separate virtualisation, storage management and high availability software. Sci/Tech - Sci/Tech Software Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:20:33 +0100