Unixster

Reviewer Ken Mingis (computerworld.com) writes that “Apple’s new 27-inch iMac can be described in one word: stunning.” Citing its super-high-resolution LED-backlit display, speed, and industrial design, Mingis concludes: “With an absolutely stunning screen, a lot of under-the-hood performance improvements, the wireless keyboard and the new mouse, and flexibility that makes it fit in at work or at home, this new iMac could lead to a resurgence in desktop sales for Apple.”

The mobile phone market suffered a six percent drop in shipments year to year, but saw a 5.6 percent improvement over the previous quarter, says IDC. Meanwhile, Motorola, which showed a 6.4 percent yearly drop, according to IDC, posted 3Q earnings that beat analyst predictions.

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell’s blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city’s switch to Google’s corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save. Still, the Novell blog post is intriguing because it’s a missive from an open source-focused company criticizing the Los Angeles decision with barbs frequently aimed at open source solutions. It claims that L.A. should have opted for Novell’s fee-based Groupwise solution. Huh?

When running a modern Linux graphics driver stack in a composited environment there is a lot less tearing — particularly with regard to video playback, but OpenGL applications too — now than there was in the past, but there is still room for improvement. One of the ways to improve this is by properly controlling the display of buffers with how often the swaps occur and to sync them with the monitor’s refresh rate or the rate at which the compositor is running.

If you’re fetching several resultsets that contain a lot of common data, it can make sense to obtain a single resultset that has all the data that’s required, store it in a temporary table, and then select from this temporary table as needed.

Open Source philosophy fosters environments where people readily exchange knowledge and willingly share innovations as a way to develop skills for the betterment of humankind.

The Linux-Kongress is traditionally where kernel developers exchange honors and advice about new features and enhancements. This year a number of speakers presented performance improvement data and discussed what aspects of Linux can be drawn out even more.