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Raspberry Pi Gets A Store
Raspberry Pi Foundation has opened a store to enable users to easily download applications that run on the credit-card sized computer.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation said it partnered with Indiecity and Velocix to create a store for applications that run on the Raspberry Pi computer. The Foundation said that the store itself is an application that runs under its Raspbian Linux distribution and at launch has 23 applications available for download.
The Raspberry Pi Store contains games such as Freeciv alongside applications such as Libreoffice and Asterisk. The Raspberry Pi Foundation said its store accepts compiled binaries, Python code, images, audio and video.
The Raspberry Pi Store will allow developers to charge for applications, with the Foundation saying that it hopes to see a mix of hobbyist and commercial software. The Foundation also asked users that download applications to review them in order to improve the results put out by its recommendations system.
While the Raspberry Pi was initially intended to help teach people how to program, the device has gained wider popularity due to the fact that its hardware can run many typical PC desktop applications. The Foundation’s Raspberry Pi Store will make it easier for users to find and install applications on the device, which can only be a good thing for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Linux adoption.
Mozilla Touts WebRTC
Mozilla has shown off WebRTC integration in its Firefox web browser, demonstrating real-time video conferencing and file transfer capabilities.
All major web browser developers have started to integrate the WebRTC protocol and now Mozilla has shown off how far its integration has come. The firm demonstrated working video conferencing, file transfer and sharing capabilities through the Firefox web browser.
Mozilla was keen to push its implementation of the Datachannels API that is part of WebRTC to allow instant messaging and file transfer. The firm’s impressive demonstration shows off seamless sharing between two clients that had initiated a video conversation, with tabs and files being sent and viewed with little user interaction.
Mozilla’s demonstration does highlight the need for tight sandboxing within the web browser, however as a peer-to-peer protocol that automatically encrypts communications between two hosts, WebRTC could challenge some existing closed communication protocols such as Skype.
Maire Reavy, product lead for Firefox Platform Media at Mozilla said, “WebRTC is a powerful new tool that enables web app developers to include real-time video calling and data sharing capabilities in their products. While many of us are excited about WebRTC because it will enable several cool gaming applications and improve the performance and availability of video conferencing apps, WebRTC is proving to be a great tool for social apps.”
Mozilla didn’t say when its WebRTC implementation will enter the stable release channel, however given the outfit’s rapid release schedule, it should be a matter of weeks rather than months.
Do Supercomputers Lead To Downtime?
As supercomputers grow more powerful, they’ll also become more susceptible to failure, thanks to the increased amount of built-in componentry. A few researchers at the recent SC12 conference, held last week in Salt Lake City, offered possible solutions to this growing problem.
Today’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems can have 100,000 nodes or more — with each node built from multiple components of memory, processors, buses and other circuitry. Statistically speaking, all these components will fail at some point, and they halt operations when they do so, said David Fiala, a Ph.D student at the North Carolina State University, during a talk at SC12.
The problem is not a new one, of course. When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 600-node ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) White supercomputer went online in 2001, it had a mean time between failures (MTBF) of only five hours, thanks in part to component failures. Later tuning efforts had improved ASCI White’s MTBF to 55 hours, Fiala said.
But as the number of supercomputer nodes grows, so will the problem. “Something has to be done about this. It will get worse as we move to exascale,” Fiala said, referring to how supercomputers of the next decade are expected to have 10 times the computational power that today’s models do.
Today’s techniques for dealing with system failure may not scale very well, Fiala said. He cited checkpointing, in which a running program is temporarily halted and its state is saved to disk. Should the program then crash, the system is able to restart the job from the last checkpoint.
The problem with checkpointing, according to Fiala, is that as the number of nodes grows, the amount of system overhead needed to do checkpointing grows as well — and grows at an exponential rate. On a 100,000-node supercomputer, for example, only about 35 percent of the activity will be involved in conducting work. The rest will be taken up by checkpointing and — should a system fail — recovery operations, Fiala estimated.
Because of all the additional hardware needed for exascale systems, which could be built from a million or more components, system reliability will have to be improved by 100 times in order to keep to the same MTBF that today’s supercomputers enjoy, Fiala said.
Fiala presented technology that he and fellow researchers developed that may help improve reliability. The technology addresses the problem of silent data corruption, when systems make undetected errors writing data to disk.
Tegra 3 No Match For Adreno 320
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-cores are slowly starting to show up in new phone and tablet designs, and in case you’ve been following the market, you know they will be the fastest thing around until A15 parts appear.
But aside from the custom Krait core, Qualcomm’s new chips feature new Adreno 3 series graphics and judging by some early benchmarks, this is a match made in heaven.
Tom’s Hardware put the new graphics core to the test, with some very impressive results. Basically Adreno 320 blows the competition out of the water. However, it does not manage to surpass the huge SGX543MP4, used on the third generation iPad.
In GLBenchmark 2.1 the SGX543MP4 ranks first, with 251 and 139 points in Pro and Egypt tests. Adreno 320 comes in second, with 191/137, the SGX543MP2 scores 147/90, while the Tegra 3 TL30 scores 82/63. However, in fill rate tests Adreno 320 trails both the SGX543MP4 and SGX543MP2, but it is still miles ahead of the Tegra 3, SGX540 and Adreno 225.
However, in off-screen GLBench 2.5 Adreno 320 manages to squeeze ahead of SGX543 parts and the rest of the competition, but once again it loses in fill rate tests.
Adobe Gives Up On Windows XP
Adobe said today that the current CS6 version of Photoshop will be the last one to support the operating system.
Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post that the Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP. He said that modern performance-sensitive software requires modern hardware graphics interfaces that Windows XP lacks, in particular a way to tap into the power of GPUs. By only working on newer operating systems and hardware Adobe can bring in significantly better performance.
Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers, he said.
Adobe hopes that by providing this information early it will help you understand our current decisions around operating system support and where we we’re headed with future releases of Photoshop. It is hard to see how any serious user of Adobe products could be using an XP machine anyway. The move away from XP started with CS 5 which only ran on Vista.
RIM, Microsoft Sign Patent Licensing Deal
September 25, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Research In Motion’s shares jumped on Tuesday after it inked a patent licensing deal with Microsoft Corp to use one of the technology company’s file storage systems.
Microsoft said the patent being licensed by RIM greatly expands the size of files that flash memory devices can handle and increases the speed at which those files can be accessed. The technology also provides the ability to seamlessly transfer data between a variety of different devices.
“This is potentially money out of RIM’s coffers for the right to use the ex-FAT patent in its technology. But what it does for investors and others is provide a glimpse into what the BlackBerry 10 devices can do,” said Kevin Restivo, a mobile device analyst at global research firm IDC.
RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone market slip away to Apple Inc, Samsung and other competitors, and the company’s fate may depend on the success of its new line of devices, the BlackBerry 10, which is set to hit the market early in 2013.
RIM hopes the BlackBerry 10 will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple’s iPhone and others that run on Google Inc’s Android operating system.
“I think there is some anticipation and speculation around the devices that RIM will launch as a result of the announcement today,” Restivo said.
Samsung Goes HSA
It seems that the IFA 2012 show in Berlin was a good show for AMD as well, or to be precise, it was good for the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation founded by AMD, ARM, Texas Instruments, Imagination and Mediatek. Samsung has joined up alongside six new members.
The HSA Foundation was created back in June at AMD’s Fusion Developer Summit as a foundation that will deliver new user experiences through advances in computing architectures in order to improve power efficiency, performance, programmability, portability across computing devices and general support of software across a broad spectrum of devices in order to remove the need for code rewriting for various different platforms.
Senior Manager of Technology Marketing at AMD, Sasa Marinkovic, noted on the AMD blog that there is no doubt that the HSA Foundation is off to a good start and in addition to Samsung, they are more than happy to welcome six additional companies including Apical, Arteris, MulticoreWare, Sonics, Symbio and Vivante.
Oracle Wants More Money From SAP
Oracle is appealing the damages awarded from SAP that it was granted and is pushing for more.
The news has disappointed SAP, according to a German newspaper, and the firm is worried that the appeal will draw out the five year long legal battle even longer.
“We are disappointed that the lawsuit Oracle pulls further out,” said a SAP spokesman to the German newspaper Mannheimer Morgen.
“We had agreed on a sensible arrangement, because we believe that this case has gone on long enough. We remain committed to bring this dispute to an end.”
Neither firm has commented yet, but the appeal follows SAP’s admission of liability in the Tomorrownow affair.
SAP pleaded guilty last year and acknowledged that its Tomorrownow subsidiary had done wrong. Tomorrownow was accused of downloading information belonging to Oracle, including software and customer information related to Peoplesoft users.
Oracle was initially awarded $1.3bn in damages but this was knocked down to $306m by a judge who told it that it had two options, accept that sum or take SAP back to court.
Microsoft Silent On Windows 8 Pricing
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With just two months remaining before the retail launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has yet to provide pricing on its new OS.
Analysts today blamed Microsoft’s attempt to accommodate both desktops and tablets with Windows 8 for the lack of information.
“The delay in releasing pricing is all about uncertainty around the PC market and competition from Apple,” argued Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “Microsoft needs to price Windows in a way that looks smart versus Apple’s OS X, doesn’t leave money on the table with commercial PC customers, and enables OEMs to compete better with the iPad.”
The delay in pricing Windows 8 is real: During the Windows Vista and Windows 7 cycles, Microsoft unveiled retail prices weeks before each OS made the RTM, or “release to manufacturing,” milestone, and four or more months before retail sales started.
Microsoft disclosed Vista prices 58 days before that edition’s RTM, and 148 days before retail availability. Windows 7′s prices were made public 28 days before RTM and 120 days before its on-sale date.
Windows 8 ‘Grace Period’ Ends
Microsoft has halted the 30-day grace period, a trademark of Windows 7, in the retail copies of Windows 8, requiring that users provide a product key during setup.
The change runs counter to previous practice by the Redmond, Wash. developer. With Windows 7, for example, users could run the OS for 30 days before activating the copy by providing a legitimate key.
That “grace period” was used by some to evaluate the software prior to purchasing, to save up to $100 by using an “upgrade” license to install the OS on a newly-formatted hard drive, and to create physical partitions or virtual machines for quick testing purposes.
Because Windows 8 handles activation differently, the grace period has been eliminated.
As several blogs have noted, customers must enter a unique product key — a 25-character alpha-numeric string — to proceed during Windows 8 setup. Failure to do so stops the process in its tracks. The Consumer Preview and Release Preview used this technique too, although Microsoft provided users a generic key for those sneak peeks.
Once Windows 8 is installed — assuming the machine is connected to the Internet — it automatically seeks out a Microsoft server to verify that the key is valid and then activates the OS. “If the licensed computer is connected to the Internet, the software will automatically connect to Microsoft for activation,” states the end-user licensing agreement, or EULA, for Windows 8 Pro.