Home Blog Page 1975

Microsoft’s Xbox Team Testing Smartwatch Prototypes with a Surface Connector

Spotwatch_large

Microsoft is prototyping its own wrist-worn device. A reliable source familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox plans has revealed to The Verge that the company has been developing a wrist-worn device for just over a year. We understand that Microsoft had originally planned to release a “Joule” heart rate monitor accessory for the Xbox, but the company has since decided to focus on a smartwatch instead. The Wall Street Journalfirst reported on Microsoft’s plans earlier this week, citing unnamed supply chain sources who claim Microsoft has requested 1.5-inch displays from component manufacturers.

Microsoft’s smartwatch is said to be in the prototype phase, with teams who have worked on Xbox accessories and the Kinect sensor focused on the device….

Continue reading…

Read more at The Verge

Linux in 2013: ‘Freakishly Awesome’ – And Who Needs a Fork?

Features, performance, security, stability: pick, er, four

LCS2013  If there was a theme for Day One of the Linux Foundation’s seventh annual Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place this week in San Francisco, it was that the Linux community has moved way, way past wondering whether the open source OS will be successful and competitive.…

Read more at The Register

Report from the Freedesktop Summit

Dot Categories:

During the week of 8 April 2013, developers from the KDE, GNOME, Unity and Razor-qt projects met at the SUSE offices in Nürnberg to improve collaboration between the projects by discussing specifications. A wide range of topics was covered.

Read more at KDE.news

Samsung: Galaxy S4 for U.S. has Four Cores, Not Eight

The smartphone maker confirms that its next flagship phone will feature a quad-core processor instead of its octa-core chip. [Read more]

 

Read more at CNET News

Foxconn Must Pay Microsoft for EVERY Android Thing it Makes

New deal to earn dosh from Google’s labours

Microsoft will collect a royalty for every device built by Foxconn that runs Google operating systems Android or Chrome OS.…

Read more at The Register

Toshiba’s KIRAbook is a High-Resolution Windows 8 Competitor to the Retina MacBook

Dsc06641_large

Toshiba has unveiled the KIRAbook, an ultrabook with a high-resolution display set for US release in May. The KIRAbook will arrive with a 13.3-inch 2560 x 1440 display, 256GB of solid-state storage, 8GB of RAM, and Windows 8 Home Premium. It’ll be the first ultrabook to rival the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro and the Chromebook Pixel in terms of pixel density, although at 221 PPI it falls short of the Pro’s 227 PPI and the Pixel’s 239 PPI displays. It’ll be available with full 10-point multitouch, but Toshiba says it’ll also offer models without touchscreens.

At launch, there will be three versions of the KIRAbook, but we only know the details of the two higher-end models right now. Both will arrive with touchscreens, but different…

Continue reading…

Read more at The Verge

Why Microsoft Won’t Make an iPhone Rival

Rather than creating a premium device to rival Apple and Samsung in the developed world, Microsoft plans to rely on partners to mine emerging markets with budget smartphones. [Read more]

 

Read more at CNET News

Debian Base for First Pardus Community Edition

The Turkish government, developer of the Pardus Linux distribution, has released the first version of the Pardus edition aimed at end users. The base of the distribution has switched from Gentoo to Debian

Read more at The H

X.Org Servers Updated To Fix Security Flaw

Peter Hutterer has issued unscheduled updates to the X.Org Server 1.13 and 1.14 release series to address a new input security vulnerability on Linux…

Read more at Phoronix

5 Favorite Sessions from Collaboration Summit Attendees

Now more than halfway through the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, attendees have started to weigh in on the best sessions and experiences so far. Some cited Monday’s keynote presentations from heavy hitters such as Samsung and Jaguar Land Rover. Others focused on the technical discussions in Tuesday’s sessions, which covered a range of topics from Automotive Grade Linux to kernel scheduler load balancing. And for some, simply meeting the developers on the other side of an email list provided the best experience at the conference. Here, five Linux community members tell us their conference highlights so far. (See their abbreviated answers in video on Tout.)

Carol Sanders

 

“It’s been great learning about the open source projects, in particular Jaguar and Samsung and the collaboration they’re looking for and that we can offer.

“Whether you work for a different company or not, it seems like you can really participate. I’m looking forward to some of the other technical presentations where I can learn about Linux and how it’s changing.” – Carol Sanders, Vyatta. 

 

 

 

 

Abdel Sadek, NetApp 

“The subjects are great, but what’s even greater is getting to meet people and have discussions with people on the other side of engineering from different companies. I got to meet people I’ve been working with for several years but I’ve never met with them.

“Even some of the presentations we had that weren’t direclty related to what our company does triggered a lot of good ideas that I can bring back to the company and gave me some ideas for changes.

For cloud computing we talked about what’s missing and what can be done and especially from a storage perspective. We know we’re doing a lot on our end that’s really good but there are parts of the Linux kernel that need to be added as well.” – Abdel Sadek, NetApp.

 

 

Davidlohr Bueso

 “I was particularly interested in the Linux weather forecast by Jon Corbet yesterday. It presented some challenges that we’re going to face this coming year. Some of which I wasn’t aware, particularly in the new architectures with big.LITTLE and how that will imply changes in course scheduling code. Me working in performance issues, I find that attractive and challenging.

“I’ve been impressed with the keynotes and event organization as well. I hope tomorrow will be just as good.” – Davidlohr Bueso, Hewlett-Packard. 

 

 

 

 

Shuah Khan, Samsung 

“Today I attended ACPI 5.0 improvements, which is really interesting. I’ve been kind of watching the Linux mailing lists on Linux LKML. It gave me insight into balance bewtween ARM and ACPI and how we can use the same infrastructure to transparently implement.

“Also, being able to add GPIO interrupts and such, and see where I can contribute, possibly. The second one I heard about was power scheduling which was very insightful. There are a lot of questions to be answered in terms of getting it to primetime.

“And the big thing I’m getting out of this conference is being able to put faces to email addresses.” – Shuah Khan, Samsung. 

 


Iisko Lappalainen, MontaVista Software

 

“Yesterday the best speaker was Jon Corbet. I really liked his presentation because it went over the challenges we had with Linux and the latest developments. It’s interesting to see what’s really going on in the community.

I’m talking today about cloud and the hypervisor solutions. (So) that was really interesting to hear about what’s happening with the scheduler and with the core, in general.” – Iisko Lappalainen, MontaVista Software.