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Windows from version 1 to version 7..
March 4, 2011 | 
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Windows 1
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Opera Software makes fun of Apple’s Mac App Store’s weird decision
Opera was the first non-native browser to be available for download in Apple’s Mac App Store. Though, Apple judged that the Opera browser is “inappropriate” for people younger than 17 years old.
Opera Software “accepted” this weird decision with a humorous/satiric press release:
This week, the Opera web browser became the first non-native browser made available in Apple’s Mac App Store, but only for those over seventeen years of age. Jan Standal, VP of Desktop Products for Opera Software, is surprised.
“I’m very concerned,” says Standal. “Seventeen is very young, and I am not sure if, at that age, people are ready to use such an application. It’s very fast, you know, and it has a lot of features. I think the download requirement should be at least 18.”
For those under 17, there is a workaround. Just visit www.opera.com and download it. We do not ask for your age or your credit card number. Please, get your parents’ permission before using this browser.
Netbeans 6.9.1 on Ubuntu 10.10 Installation – OpenJDK problem
I wanted to install Netbeans IDE 6.9.1 (C/C++ version, but I believe that the problem is generic) on my Ubuntu 10.10 laptop, so after downloading the latest version from netbeans.org, I tried to install it:
$ ls -l netbeans-6.9.1-ml-cpp-linux.sh -rw-r--r-- 1 ** ** 36699136 2011-02-06 00:58 netbeans-6.9.1-ml-cpp-linux.sh $ chmod +x netbeans-6.9.1-ml-cpp-linux.sh $ sudo ./netbeans-6.9.1-ml-cpp-linux.sh |
and got the following output:
Configuring the installer... Searching for JVM on the system... Extracting installation data... Running the installer wizard... null |
The installation wizard (GUI) did not appear at all.
Luckily, I “immediately” thought “hmm, I re-installed Ubuntu quite recently, did I install JRE?”
So, I checked if I had “Java” installed and checked that everything is “good”:.
$java -version java version "1.6.0_20" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea6 1.9.5) (6b20-1.9.5-0ubuntu1) OpenJDK Client VM (build 19.0-b09, mixed mode, sharing) |
As you can see, I had OpenJDK installed..
For some reason, which I don’t know, I had already installed the Sun JDK, but not removed the OpenJDK, or at least set the java to point to the Sun version.
So, using synaptic, I unistalled OpenJDK (you can (un)install OpenJDK and Sun JDK from the Software Center also):
$java -version java version "1.6.0_22" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_22-b04) Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 17.1-b03, mixed mode) |
And then, everything worked fine..
Google vs. Bing search test
n an recent article in searchengineland.com, Conrad Saam run some search “accuracy” tests on Google and Bing. He used some complex queries in order to check if the two search engines were able to “understand” and answer what was he looking for. Of course, this testing method, especially since he used only 20 queries, can only be characterized as subjective, but the outcome was that Bing outperformed Google.
Doing these sounds fun.. I will try it one day and let you know about my results..
After Chrome, Opera will drop support for H.264
As you probably already know, some days ago Google announced that they will not support H.264 video codec in the future releases of Chrome (announcement).The <video> html tag, in Chrome, will support WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other open codecs in the future.
After this announcement, Opera decided to support Google’s decision on dropping the H.264 codec. Thomas Ford, Senior Communications Manager, Opera, told Muktware, “Actually, Opera has never supported H.264. We have always chosen to support open formats like Ogg Theora and WebM. In fact, Opera was the first company to propose the <video> tag, and when we did, we did it with Ogg. Simply put, we welcome Google’s decision to rely on open codecs for HTML5 video.”. Indeed, Opera was the company that proposed the <video> tag in an post back in 2007.
I have to disagree with both companies’ decision, because there is a big difference between better supporting and promoting open standards and forcing the drop of a proprietary technology that is currently so commonly used..
FPGA as a processor?
I just read an article about some research being done on University of Glasgow. Researchers placed/programmed (more than) 1000-cores on an FPGA (about FPGA). Each core is supposed to have each own dedicated memory (it is not a technical article, so not many technical details were given). According to the article:
The researchers then used the chip to process an algorithm which is central to the MPEG movie format – used in YouTube videos – at a speed of five gigabytes per second: around 20 times faster than current top-end desktop computers.
You can read the article here.
New Weblog, First Post
Distributed Life
Welcome to Distributed Life blog. As the title suggests, this will be a technology (computer science mostly) related blog. My focus will be on Distributed Systems, since it is my area of interest, but I will also write some posts about Opera browser and generic technology/Internet topics that I find (extremely) interesting.
Topics’ Sources
The topics you will find here will be mostly drawn from my everyday (academic and not) experiences and from other interesting posts or sites that I meet. The Opera related topics will be focused so that they will explain to you why Opera browser is unique (don’t worry I won’t be biased towards Opera. I am the first to say that Opera still has some major problems..)
Posting Frequency
As I said, the posts will be drawn from interesting (or to be precise, from what I consider interesting :-P) topics, so the frequency that I will write new posts will vary from daily to weekly+. Anyaway, this weblog is not meant to be a generic tech one.. who needs one more of these!
Hope you will enjoy! Thank you for reading..