![[Calibre's grid browser]](http://lwn.net/images/2013/calibre/grid-browser-sm.png)
File management does not seem to be a one-size-fits-all proposition. Thus, while general-purpose file managers exist, it often appears that much of the development effort goes into domain-specific management tools. We have a whole set of photo management applications, for example, and even more music managers. When it comes to electronic books, though, there seems to only be one viable project out there: Calibre. LWN last looked at Calibre almost exactly two years ago. The recent version 1.0 release provides an obvious opportunity to see what has been happening with this fast-moving utility.
iPad app Planetary has just been added to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum’s collection, but the institution has also gone as step further by acquiring the app’s code. This is the first time the museum has acquired a piece of code, and it has also worked with the original creators to make the source code available to everyone, in an attempt to preserve software as if it was a living thing. “With Planetary we are hoping to preserve more than simply the vessel,” Cooper-Hewitt’s Sebastian Chan explains, “more than an instantiation of software and hardware frozen at a moment in time.”
Throughout this year, market research news has been basically dreary for PCs and PC equipment makers. But, as sales of PCs slip, sales of new-generation devices are rising. Chromebooks, running Google’s Chrome OS platform, have been one of the bright spots in the hardware market. Now, school systems around the U.S. are purchasing Chromebooks for students, a trend that Google could subsidize and one that is reminiscent of Apple’s strong focus on the education market from years ago.
If you stay tuned to news from U.S. school districts, you’ll see that school systems are purchasing Chromebooks at a steady clip. Westwood High School in Massachussetts is buying Chromebooks to issue to students who will return them once they graduate. The Bell-Chatham school board has approved Chromebook purchases for students, as has the Sumner School District.
Over at VentureBeat, Dean Takahashi writes that IBM released details this week on its massive 12-core Power8 microprocessor for enterprise IT.
The chip is 650 millimeters square and will be built with IBM’s 22-nanometer silicon-on-insulator manufacturing technology. Capable of transferring data within the chip at speeds of 230GB per second, the 4 GHz Power8 has a 96MB memory cache embedded within the processor. According to IBM, each core is twice as efficient as past chips.
The entire Power-based ecosystem has lost many supporters in the industry like Freescale, AppliedMicro, Xbox and Playstation, so Power 8 is very important to get right,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “It will be a real challenge to fight both Intel and AMD in this space given their scale, and very important to IBM given they are banking on Power architecture for the their platform future. We believe IBM will exit the X86 server market and sell their line to Lenovo, making Power8 critical to IBM’s future success.”
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