Linus Torvalds has decided it is time to release version 4.0 of the Linux kernel. For some this will make sense, but here's some background for the rest you who may have heard the term Linux but may not know what it is all about.
First off, like Windows and iOS it is an operating system. Before Linux there was Unix, primarily a mainframe-based operating system. First released in October 1991, Linux is called a Unix-like operating system because many of the commands and structures are similar. One big difference between the two is that Linux is what is known as an open source product. This means that for all intents and most purposes it is free and people can take it and make additions to the base kernel, just as many companies have including Canonical with their product Ubuntu.
The original name Torvalds wanted to use was Freax considering Linux a bit egotistical, but the latter stuck after about six months of the other one being proposed. Originally designed for the now ancient Intel x86 platform, it has since been ported to more hardware platforms than any other operating system and is a big component of server systems around the world today. Interestingly it only makes up about 1% of all home PC systems. Android is built on top of Linux as are many game consoles, media players, firmware systems and many other hardware locations.
The kernel or core of Linux is controlled and maintained by Linus Torvalds as the focus point for hundreds of developers worldwide. A Linux distribution is then built around this kernel giving us the likes of Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and others, some free, and some commercial versions with many additional utilities and libraries added on top of the existing ones. The new version 4.0 is more about users voting for it rather than a vast new feature set but it does have some nice graphics improvements and other bits and pieces.
In a related news story, after seven years in development the first version of the open source database named HBase 1.0, running on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), has been signed off by Apache. Apache is both a software foundation and an open source server product found often installed with Linux but also on other platforms all over the world and holds about half of the world's server space. The target for HBase is large-scale internet platforms, including those built with dozens or hundreds of smaller devices like graphic cards. It is a distributed, non-relational database. Yahoo!, for example, currently runs HBase v0.98 on 3,000 of their servers.
Apple has been so slow getting their Apple Watch to market that the popular Pebble already has a new colour E Ink version on sale on Kickstarter. The target was US$500,000 (16 million baht) but they managed to raise $5.4 million in a few hours. The Kickstarter price was $159 and $179 versions were available at the time of writing with $199 listed as the expected final in-store price. Commercial shipments are due in May in three colours (black, red and white) with a Gorilla Glass screen, seven days of battery life and fully backwards compatibility to the original Pebbles. It has Bluetooth support for iOS 8 or later and Android 4.0 or later, so in short most of the current smartphone marketplace. It comes with a microphone and silent vibrating alarms. The new Pebble will be releasing a software development kit and the device comes with a hardware port to allow experimentation with plug in bits and pieces.
The new model will however have a more chronologically based time-centric approach rather than loading it down with a multitude of separate apps which the Pebble people found to be inefficient for a watch-based device and by extension larger devices primarily used for social media and notifications. Voice to text is another addition to integrate with existing technologies but iOS integration will initially be more limited in this area. The original Pebble, also a Kickstarter project, was quite popular and over a million units have been shipped to date.
A significant part of power usage in any device, especially one used sparingly, is standby power. For the most part the energy used by this state is fairly low but over time it can add up especially in lower powered devices and circuits. Enter some MIT scientists who are working on cutting down even this power requirement. In one prototype they used 20 picowatts of power to save 10,000 picowatts in leakage. At these levels it is hard to see any benefits unless you changed say pica to mega but the same approach is being used to build tiny low-powered radios that could have a multitude of uses. Where this is going to end up and anyone's guess but the fact that scientists are still working on these types of problems is encouraging.
That's it for this week. Remember to back up your data regularly, most people don't.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years’ standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com