thebrandhorsts.com

Gone are the muddy look and questionable color scheme that have defined Ubuntu’s default look for a long time. In their place is a Gnome KDE desktop that’s both smooth and striking, but more importantly inviting—its violet hues and far gentler undertones and highlights give the warm, comfortable feel any potentially off-putting software demands. No one will ever be able to claim with a straight face that it’s as pretty or as polished as what you get with Windows or Mac OS X. But for the first time Ubuntu looks as though it really deserves to compete with those big boys.

Read more…. Ubuntu 10.04 (“Lucid Lynx”) Review.

I have been working more hours that I care too, it takes me away from my friends and family, but it is what it is what it is….

Where do we stand. Apple fighting with Adobe over Flash or should I say Adobe is fighting with Adobe. Who really wins in this case, the consumer? I guess the answer is HTML5 or is it. I can say that the only time I miss Flash is when I visit Youtube. I read that 45% of all videos viewed on the web are from Youtube. The remaining are from Hulu, etc… With that being said I know that Youtube is working on their new format. Personally I can’t wait.

What is HTML5? Well according to wikipedia.
HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML. It aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

If you are interested in reading more. Check out: http://diveintohtml5.org/

We will have to see what time brings. As we always do.

Found this interesting,  and see I am not the only one its true…..  or is it?

MG Siegler
TechCrunch.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010; 12:02 PM

When Apple was demoing its new iBooks application for the  iPad today during their keynote address, I just kept thinking to myself: this simply must have been designed by Delicious Monster, the shop behind the brilliant Mac app Delicious Library. I’m not the only one who thought that either. Delicious Monster founder  Wil Shipley thought the same thing. The only problem? His shop didn’t make it.

In fact, Shipley was quite vocal on Twitter during the keynote today about the situation. “No, Apple didn?t license iBooks from me. They just copied me. Ah well,” he  wrote. Later, he  added, “I guess it?s not enough Apple has hired every employee who worked on Delicious Library, they also had to copy my product?s look. Flattery?” While Shipley tries to play it off as not that big of a deal, clearly he’s pretty upset about it. And he should be. I mean, the bookshelf view in iBooks is nearly identical to the main bookshelf view used in Delicious Library. Not only that, but it’s not like this is a little-known app that Apple may have missed: it has won the Apple Design Award twice, and been a runner-up one other time. Apple gives out those awards.

Still, as Shipley  notes, iBooks is only for eBooks while Delicious Monster is for all types of media, and has much more functionality. But if Apple really did hire much of Shipley’s team then just re-create the look, that’s a little shady. We’ve reached out to Shipley to confirm those hires and will update if we hear back.
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Back in July, you may recall that Shipley had to kill the Delicious Library iPhone app because of a change to Amazon’s APIs for pulling product data.

You may wonder why Apple didn’t just hire Shipley if they poached his whole team? “They couldn?t afford to hire me,” he  writes.

Update: Shipley has responded with some lengthy comments.

Notably, he says, “[Delcious Monster co-founder] Mike Matas was a UI designer on the iPad, [former employee] Lucas Newman is an iPhone/iPad engineer, and [former employee] Tim Omernick was an iPhone/iPad engineer but left a while ago to work on games independently.”

“But the thing about iBooks is, it’s a book-reader. So, of course they looked around, found the best interface for displaying books (Delicious Library’s shelves), and said: yup, this is what we’re doing,” he went on to say. “Although Delicious Library was the first to do it, we didn’t try to copyright the idea of wooden shelves, or of showing books photo-realistically. ‘Look and feel’ is kind of an outmoded concept, I think.”

“Now, of course Apple couldn’t contact me ahead of time and say, ‘Hey, we’re taking your idea, thanks.’ Their lawyers would worry they’d open themselves to a huge lawsuit, for one, and they’d also be leaking a secret. Nor could they write me a check. Even a token one would be an admission (in their lawyers’ eyes) that they were copying something. They are a public company ? they can’t write someone a check unless they got some value in return. And if they got value, the lawyers would ask, how much was it? How was it determined?,” he continues

“So their official policy has to be, ‘No, of course it’s a crazy coincidence that these shelves look almost entirely like Delicious Library’s shelves.’,” he concludes

But this goes even deeper for Shipley:

“As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don’t work for Apple, or Google (I’ve been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It?s my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.”

“But your children aren?t really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, ‘Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.’”

CrunchBase Information iPadInformation provided by CrunchBase.

The Novell-backed OpenSUSE Linux distro project today released the final OpenSUSE 11.2, which received a mostly positive, in-depth review from eWEEK. Meanwhile, Novell released its Mono Tools for Visual Studio for developing .NET applications for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X, says another eWEEK story.

The 11.2 release of OpenSUSE, an upstream community version of Novell’s enterprise-focused SUSE Linux, falls within a busy season of Linux distro upgrades. Last week, for example, Mandriva was released in final 2010.0 form. (We covered Mandriva 2010′s final development release on Oct. 13, here.)

As we noted in our Oct. 1 report when OpenSUSE released its 11.2 Milestone 8 (M8) version, the new release features numerous bug fixes, Linux kernel 2.6.31, and improved partitioning. The release establishes ext4 as the default file system, and offers early support for the Btrfs filesystem. Other OpenSUSE improvements include interface enhancements to the YaST partioner interface, improved package management and mirror handling, and Zypper command line enhancements.

OpenSUSE 11.2 features updates to the latest desktops, including GNOME 2.28 and KDE 4.3, as well as the latest versions of numerous applications, including Firefox and OpenOffice.org. The new release also offers improved social networking clients, with GNOME’s Gwibber supporting Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca., and KDE’s Choqok client supporting Twitter and Identi.ca.

eWEEK review: OpenSUSE still one of the best

According to the review by Jason Brooks in our sister publication, eWEEK, which focuses primarily on the new package tools, OpenSUSE 11.2 maintains its position as being “one of the best desktop Linux distributions available.” He notes, however, that the distribution has not grown much easier except in package management, and still caters to power users, in the menu-surfing Windows meaning of the word.

“Where Fedora and Ubuntu focus on delivering friendly interfaces for mainstream user functions and shunting everything else to the command line (the home of the Unix power user), OpenSUSE enables users to click their way through a great many administrative tasks — control panel complexity be damned,” writes Brooks.

This approach makes OpenSUSE more discoverable than its peers, says the review, but it also leads to confusion in some areas, “such as where parallel, installed-by-default software upgrade and installation tools vie for your attention in right-click menus and system control panels.”

As an example of both the pros and cons of OpenSUSE, Brooks points to the new package management tools, which are tied to Novell’s much-praised OpenSUSE Build Service. “The new tools make it easier than ever for users to locate and install the particular software they want,” writes Brooks, “but it’s easy as well to turn reasonably supportable distributions into Frankenstein-like mashups of potentially conflicting packages.”

Still, the review praises the new package tools and build service, saying, “OpenSUSE isn’t the only distribution to boast a volunteer software packaging community, but OpenSUSE 11.2 makes the process of finding and configuring these packages faster and simpler than any other Linux option I’ve tested.”

As an example, he compares OpenSUSE’s tool for configuring networked software repositories with that of Ubuntu, and notes that the latter requires users to locate and manually enter repository details. By contrast, “OpenSUSE offers up a list of popular community repositories from within the tool,” he writes.

Brooks adds that importing a cryptographic repository key is also much easier on OpenSUSE. On the flip side, OpenSUSE’s “zypper dup” distribution update command, when combined with an assortment of software repositories with overlapping packages, “can lead to warring upgrades,” he warns.

Brooks praises other 11.2 enhancements, including the ability to write Live CD images to a USB stick, as well as a new Ubuntu-like option for full volume encryption, and a check-box option for creating a separate home partition. Brooks also praises the new partitioning tool that appears both in the system installer and in the Yast config tool set.

Novell releases Mono Tools for Visual Studio

In other Novell-related news, the company announced the release of its Mono Tools for Visual Studio, which is designed for developing .NET applications for Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X within Microsoft Visual Studio, reports Darryl Taft in eWEEK. The technology is available as an add-in module for Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment), enabling developers of Microsoft’s .NET runtime and application development framework to “utilize their familiar Visual Studio environment to design, code and maintain multiplatform applications,” according to Novell.

The software is said to be available in three editions: Professional ($100), Enterprise ($250), and Ultimate ($2,500). The Ultimate version offers “a limited commercial license to redistribute Mono on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and includes five enterprise developer licenses,” according to Novell.

Key features of Mono Tools for Visual Studio include:

Development and porting of .NET applications to Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X with analysis, testing, debugging and deployment all from within Visual Studio

Creation of turnkey virtual appliances and software appliances for .NET applications using integrated appliance building functionality, and integration with Novell’s SUSE Studio Online hosted tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or OpenSUSE appliances

Integrated porting analysis tools that provide .NET developers a road-map to Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX.

OpenSUSE 11.2 is now available in final form for free download. More information and links to download sites may be found here

Ability to run and debug applications in Mono within Visual Studio to isolate incompatibilities between Mono and .NET and between Linux and Windows

Automated packaging for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and OpenSUSE to prepare applications for immediate deployment on Linux

The “Mono Tools” are based on Mono, a from-scratch open source implementation of .NET. Developed by the Novell-sponsored Mono project, which has also developed the Moonlight open source clone of Microsoft’s Silverlight, Mono has proven to be controversial in the open source community, as are most Novell-sponsored efforts that appear to sidle up to Microsoft. While an impressive piece of software, and imminently useful in a .NET dominated enterprise software world, Mono is also seen by many as a potential legal landmine, due to Microsoft patents.

In the eWEEK story Taft quotes Joseph Hill, Novell’s product manager for Mono, as telling him, “We know that Visual Studio developers are very comfortable with their IDE and they have no [intention of switching] from it.”

By: Rich Brown
Published on: 10/20/2009

We can’t claim to have even seen Apple’s updated Mac Minis, let alone reviewed them, but we can still form a few opinions of the updated specs and the addition of an OS X Server version to the Mac Mini line-up.

To recap, Apple updated the CPU, default RAM, and hard-drive capacities of both its $599 and $799 Mac Minis earlier today. The Core 2 Duo chip in the $599 Mac Mini goes from 2.0GHz to 2.26GHz, the RAM doubles from 1GB of RAM to 2GB, and the hard drive jumps from a 120GB to a 160GB model. The $799 Mac Mini gets a bigger performance boost with its Core 2 Duo chip going from 2.0GHz to 2.53GHz. Its RAM also doubles from 2GB to 4GB, but its hard drive stays the same size.

When we review Macs, we like to pretend we live in a world where computers are tools, where we can be operating system agnostic, and where we appreciate, but stop short of fetishizing, good design. Under those assumptions, and based purely on its specs, we have concerns with the price of both new Mac Minis next to competing small scale Windows-based PCs.

We’ll withhold judgment until we can actually test the new Mac Minis, but our hunch is that Gateway’s $459, Core 2 Quad-based SX2800-01 slim tower would outperform or come close enough to either new Mac Mini in processing typical workloads. The benefits of the smaller Mac Mini case may also have a hard time competing with the Gateway’s versatility that comes from an HDMI output and its upgrade options. We also expect more competitive small PCs to come out over the next few weeks as the holiday buying season continues.

Even if the standard Mac Minis do compete well on performance, the server iteration of the Mac Mini is more interesting, and we credit Apple for listening to a specialized portion of the Mac Mini’s current user base. For $999, Apple will now sell you a Mac Mini that essentially mirrors the new $799 model, except that instead of OS X you get OS X Server, and the DVD burner has been replaced by a second hard drive, for 1TB of storage overall. The price might be more than the DIY crowd will tolerate, but any small workgroup environment that might benefit from an out-of-the-way traffic cop it can plug in and forget could very likely be interested in what the Mac Mini Server has to offer.

Introducing Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. It’s easy to set up. Easy to run. And even easy to afford. Just $999.

There’s a whole server in there.

What is Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server?

Exactly what you’d expect — a Mac mini specifically designed to be a server with Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server preinstalled. Instead of a SuperDrive, there are two 500GB hard drives that give you all the power and storage you need to help your group work more efficiently than ever.

What can it do for you?

Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is designed to help you communicate, collaborate, and share information. It’s perfect for any small business or group — retail shops, doctor and law offices, classrooms, design studios — you name it. Now you can have your own server that supports email on Mac computers, PCs, and iPhone. Sync and share calendars and contact information. Access and swap files securely, and at lightning speed, between Mac computers and PCs. Easily create full-featured wikis and high-quality podcasts. And automatically back up all your important data.

A well priced Apple Server for only 999, what do you think?  File Sharing, Media Server, Mail Server, Address Book.

The new iMac from Apple has an option to select the Intel i7.

Configure your iMac 27-inch

New iMac

Use the options below to build the system of your dreams.

2199.00 for the base iMac 27″

• 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2x2GB
• 1TB Serial ATA Drive
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive
• Apple Magic Mouse
• Apple Wireless Keyboard (English) and User’s Guide

Computer Cpu Speed: 2.8 GHz
Computer Cpu Manufacturer: Intel
Cache Memory Installed Size: 8 MB

WASHINGTON, Oct 19 (Reuters) – Tens of millions of U.S. computers are loaded with scam security software that their owners may have paid for but which only makes the machines more vulnerable, according to a new Symantec (SYMC.O) report on cybercrime.

Cyberthieves are increasingly planting fake security alerts that pop up when computer users access a legitimate website. The “alert” warns them of a virus and offers security software, sometimes for free and sometimes for a fee.

“Lots of times, in fact they’re a conduit for attackers to take over your machine,” said Vincent Weafer, Symantec’s vice president for security response.

“They’ll take your credit card information, any personal information you’ve entered there and they’ve got your machine,” he said, referring to some rogue software’s ability to rope a users’ machine into a botnet, a network of machines taken over to send spam or worse.

Symantec found 250 varieties of scam security software with legitimate sounding names like Antivirus 2010 and SpywareGuard 2008, and about 43 million attempted downloads in one year but did not know how many of the attempted downloads succeeded, said Weafer.

“In terms of the number of people who potentially have this in their machines, it’s tens of millions,” Weafer said.

It was also impossible to tell how much cyberthieves made off with but “affiliates” acting as middlemen to convince people to download the software were believed to earn between 1 cent per download and 55 cents.

TrafficConverter.biz, which has been shut down, had boasted that its top affiliates earned as much as $332,000 a month for selling scam security software, according to Weafer.

“What surprised us was how much these guys had tied into the whole affiliated model,” Weafer said. “It was more refined than we anticipated.” (Reporting by Diane Bartz; editing by Gunna Dickson)

and we thought bloatware was bad.

Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Sports Modest Software Improvements But Big Plans

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Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon gives you the power of Ubuntu combined with the flexibility of Amazon’s cloud computing service. Ubuntu’s modularity, virtualization capabilities, range of applications and optimised performance make it the perfect solution if you’re deploying applications on Amazon’s Elastic Computing (EC2) cloud.

Amazon Web Services enables users to deploy applications into a cloud computing environment. By using virtualized servers that are deployed on Amazon’s EC2 service it is possible to build highly scalable on-demand systems. Whether you need a single server or a few hundred, Amazon EC2 can provide new server instances whenever required.
Ubuntu Server Edition is a great software platform for your Amazon instances. Its modularity means that it can be pared down to just the elements you need. Every element of Ubuntu is modular so you only need to include the parts you need making images more flexible and secure. Ubuntu is easy to set up with a comprehensive range of applications and development frameworks that are easy to install.

Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon EC2 is available now. This service allows you to create a fully running instance of Ubuntu Server Edition on EC2 in just a few clicks. All the applications you’ll need such as a web server, email server and common development frameworks are available. Users will need to create an account with Amazon’s Web Services and Amazon will charge you for your usage of EC2.
Ubuntu on Amazon benefits
Scalable computing

The ‘on demand’ nature of cloud computing allows you to quickly expand capacity and only pay for what you are using. There is no need to design your data centre or buy hardware to handle peak loads when you only use a fraction of it during regular periods. With cloud computing you simply allocate more instances as and when needed. This means that you can concentrate on your software and outsource the hardware aspects to the cloud provider.
An open platform

We provide Amazon images of Ubuntu server, along with security and bug fixes. Ubuntu consists of Open Source software without licensing fees so you can deploy the same applications on the cloud as you would on your hardware. With thousands of packages and additional third party applications, you are sure to find an application or development framework for almost every requirement.
Security and maintenance

Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon EC2 follows the standard Ubuntu maintenance life cycle. New versions are released every six months and are maintained with security and maintenance updates for 18 months (regular releases) or five years (LTS releases). Optimised for the cloud, instances can be deployed in a matter of minutes and provide best of class stability and performance.
Using the Ubuntu Server Edition Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

The images are available to anyone who would like to run Ubuntu Server Edition on Amazon EC2. All you need is an account with Amazon Web Services and to follow the instructions on Ubuntu on EC2 Starters Guide. Amazon will charge you for your usage of their AWS services
Getting help

You can get help from Canonical’s Technical support or ask for help on:
the EC2 community mailing list
IRC channel #ubuntu-server on Freenode

© 2009 Canonical Ltd. Ubuntu and Canonical are registered trademarks of Canonical Ltd.