Linux 3.2 kernel released: What you need to know

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After a long delay due to kernel.org being hacked in August 2011, Linux 3.2 has finally been released. It’s a whopper of a release with optimizations and tweaks in nearly every facet of the OS; here’s the rundown of what’s new inside and why you want to upgrade to it.

First and foremost, the Intel GPU (graphics processing unit) DRM/KMS driver has been optimized to use Intel’s RC6 graphics power-saving feature. In a nutshell, that means that battery life on Ubuntu laptops is going to get a lot better with the Precise Pangolin (12.04) release of Ubuntu. DRM (the Direct Rendering Manager) and KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) aren’t things that a general or even hardcore user needs to concern themselves with, but, basically, it’s the pieces of the graphics puzzle that deal with handling the memory management of the drawing, backgrounding and re-drawing of applications as you minimize and switch between applications. The actual power savings are going to differ from machine to machine, but every machine should see improvement.

Canonical’s Ubuntu has taken this power saving a step further with its PMUtils crowdsourcing initiative. If you are a confident command line interface Linux user, please go take part. Your data will help battery management everywhere.

Another improvement to the 3.2 kernel is in the networking TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) stack. The WiFi drivers have been improved, and PRR (Proportional Rate Reduction) support has been introduced to the kernel. What this means is that your browsing experience will be faster as transmission rates will be adjusted in a more timely fashion to recover from throttling and other bottlenecks you may encounter along the way to your destination. File transfers should see the same efficiency boost, speed-wise.

Some filesystem optimizations have been included too, designed to make Linux more scalable in large storage configurations, especially on enterprise systems. Reliability and ease-of-management options are included, as well as larger allocation blocks in the EXT4 filesystem to speed up disk access for sharing files and drives across operating systems like Windows via Samba. If you run a Linux file server at home or in the workplace, this is welcome news.

Finally, it should be mentioned that code has been introduced to assist with system throttling when writing large amounts of data to slow drives, making the user experience snappier when you have to move large amounts of data to and from drives or removable media. Syncing your MP3 device shouldn’t reduce your machine to a stuttering crawl so much with the enhancements.

There are many more optimizations coming with the 3.2 kernel that deal with large-scale servers and storage solutions (thin provisioning and the Btrfs filesystem to name a couple) that aren’t mentioned here, as well as a number of tweaks and services that are outside the scope of desktop or small business computing. The information above is what you need to know as a general or fairly hardcore Linux user.

Want to try it out now? You don’t need to wait until an official release. Ubuntu’s 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) is available now and comes with the 3.2 kernel;download the (beta) daily build. If you just want to upgrade your existing system to 12.04, just open a terminal and type out “sudo do-release-upgrade -d”. That will grab the proper libraries and run through installation for you. Alternately, if you like using a nice GUI with your upgrades, you can type “sudo update-manager -d” and you will see that an upgrade is available to you (pictured right).

All in all, this is one of the larger kernel improvements that we’ve seen, with many improvements under the hood. Have you upgraded to the 3.2 kernel? What’s your experience been?

Windows 8 Storage Spaces: Built-in RAID and thin provisioning for all the family

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With yet another beautiful example of feature creep and an overwhelming belief that Windows 8 must please all of the people all of the time, Microsoft has unveiled Storage Spaces, a new RAID-like storage solution that will be built into Windows 8.

In essence, Storage Spaces allows you to group physical disks into pools of any size (pools of hundreds of disks, as found in a datacenter, have been tested by Microsoft). These pools can be allocated as spaces, which then appear as a normal drive letter in Windows and can be used to store documents, videos, photos, and so on. Any array of physical disks can be used to make a pool — you can use a combination of external USB and internal SATA, if you wish. Spaces can be configured to be redundant and provisioned.

Redundancy in Storage Spaces is through either mirroring (RAID 1) or parity (RAID 3). In both cases, if a mirror or parity disk fails, Spaces will tell notify you with a Windows pop-up, and then proceed to rebuild your volume if you have the capacity. Otherwise, it’ll wait until you slot in another drive. Spaces can also stripe data (RAID 0) across a pool, and according to Microsoft performance is “very competitive” with actual RAID implementations.

Provisioning is a slightly more complex subject that doesn’t usually come up on home computers. Basically, a space is a virtual. You can set it to appear as any size, even if the underlying pool is much smaller. Provisioning allows you to create a “movies” space that is 10TB on a 2TB pool — then, when the pool begins to fill up, Windows/Storage Spaces will tell you to add another drive. The other advantage of thin provisioning is that you don’t have to decide on partition sizes ahead of time (an arduous task that many of you have no doubt suffered through). For example, if your computer has a 6TB pool of drives, you could put three 6TB spaces on top of it — games, movies, and photos — and then proceed to use all three spaces in any manner you like, simply adding more disks when and if you run out of space (pictured above). Never again will you have to worry about the size of your Steam folder!

Both pools and spaces can be created and managed using Powershell or a Control Panel applet. It looks like the process will be easy enough to set up, but whether it will be advertised to regular consumers (Clippy: “You seem to have multiple drives installed! Do you want me to set up a pool?”) or kept as a power user feature remains to be seen. As you can see from the screenshot above, Storage Spaces definitely aren’t part of the Metro experience.

If you’ve used Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender feature, this will all sound quite familiar — and rightly so, as it seems like Drive Extender was torn out of Windows Home Server 2011 and slotted into Windows 8. Much in the same way that OS X Server has been folded into the latest home version of Mac OS X, it looks like Windows 8 is shaping up to be a tablet, laptop, netbook, desktop, and home server OS — cool, as long as a license doesn’t cost the earth.

What happens if Facebook shuts down?

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Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been steadily churning an idea over in my head: What would happen if Facebook died? What would the world be like if you woke up one day, rolled over to check your smartphone, and found that Facebook simply didn’t exist?

On an microscopic scale, you might’ve experienced something similar in the past, when it was quite common for your Facebook account to be inaccessible due to a bug or ongoing maintenance. It’s jarring to be disconnected from your friends, loved ones, and painstakingly fabricated digital ego — but you calm yourself with the knowledge that the outage is only temporary. On the other hand, though, you hear harrowing stories of people who have had their Facebook accounts banned (or Gmail accounts deleted), and how they have lost years of photos, memories, and messages. What would happen if you scaled this effect up to almost a billion people?

Would there be an outcry of monumental proportions, followed by some kind of pitchforked rush on Facebook HQ? Or would it be more like a veil being lifted from the collective consciousness, with a billion people blinkishly emerging into the Real World for the first time in years? I suspect it would be the former.

A better question to ask, though, is whether Facebook could actually be shut down. I don’t mean physically — Zuckerberg could obviously pull the plug at any time — but, more ideologically, is Facebook too large and important to fail? I mean, very few people would argue that the internet itself is a necessity of everyday life — some countries have even gone as far as declaring internet access to be a human right — and, more and more, Facebook is becoming the internet for many people. In 2011, Americans spent around 30% of their online time on social networks and blogs, with Facebook making up the vast majority of that. A further 10% of online time is spent playing games, most of which will have been Facebook-based Zynga games. In many respects, Facebook has become the spiritual successor to the AOL Browser, which for a large percentage of surfers — back in the ’90s, at least — was the internet.

Unlike AOL’s walled garden of yore, though, Facebook has weaseled its way into the very fabric of the web. If you shut down AOL at its peak, you would have a bunch of upset users, but they wouldn’t have actually lost anything except their email. If Facebook ceased to exist, you would lose messages, photos, friends, business connections, and a whole slew of other things. Just like when a hard disk dies, you would be forcibly separated from a large portion of your digital livelihood if Facebook closed.

Bye bye, Best Buy?

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I admit it: I shop at online retailers all the time. A significant chunk of the Christmas presents I gave this year were in the form of Amazon gift certificates. And if you’ve been reading me here for any length of time, you know that I spend more time browsing andbuying things from Newegg than I do hanging out with some members of my family. But I still felt my heart sink into my kneecaps as I read Larry Downes’s story on Forbes.com, “Why Best Buy is Going out of Business… Gradually.”

In the story, Downes cites some chilling statistics about Best Buy losing market share, 40% of its value, a decreased market cap, and a B- average analyst rating. He also discusses the ways the company has failed to extricate itself from old-world thinking. In the ways its employees order products, aggressively try to up-sell or cross-sell when dealing with shoppers, and even address their own mistakes, the company is digging its own grave. Where Amazon makes even the most tedious and usually distasteful tasks a breeze — never have I had an easier time exchanging a product than I did my malfunctioning first Kindle — Best Buy introduces only frustration and confusion. And thus it’s no surprise that customers are turning away from it in favor of other options.

Given what’s already happened to other major electronics chains like CompUSA and Circuit City, there’s real reason to fear the disintegration of Best Buy. And if or (gulp) when it happens, it would be a major loss to both casual and serious buyers.

Wait — please don’t brand me as some incurable Luddite who can’t negotiate the transition to a digital marketplace. That’s not remotely true. Aside from clothes, certain tech products are about the only things I feel a need to buy in person. When I’m getting books — hey, not everything is yet available for my (replacement) Kindle — I never hesitate to do that online rather than at one of New York City’s roughly 800 Barnes & Noble stores. I’ve never accepted the argument that being able to rifle through a book’s pages and feel its cover is of any particular importance; for me, what matters is the content on the inside, and the easier that is to acquire, the better. Ditto cookware and other basic household appliances.

But when it comes to many tech-related purchases, being able to see, and in many cases feel, what you’re getting is crucial to making sure you’re not wasting your money or your time. For all the benefits of Amazon and Newegg, they prevent the direct interaction that is sometimes the most important information you can acquire before you lay down your credit card. Online reviews are frequently excellent for assessing a product’s bare capabilities, and especially good sites (like Newegg) give you all the specifications you need to make an intellectually informed decision. That’s just not always enough. Don’t you want to see your prospective HDTV’s screen in action, slide your fingers across a keyboard to see if it meshes with your typing style and preferences, get a concrete idea of how convenient a laptop really is for you, or sit down at the fully featured desk you plan to buy for using that computer? Even with our current, highly advanced web-based purchasing culture, some things can’t be left to mere faith.

Creative announces 100-core system-on-a-chip

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Just in time for the start of CES 2012, ZiiLabs has announced its latest media-focused system-on-a-chip (SoC). This time the wholly-owned subsidiary of Creative has packed 100 cores onto the silicon, combining four Cortex-A9 units operating at 1.5GHz with 96 “StemCell” floating point units. Called the ZMS-40, it’s engineered to be used in mobile devices running the Android operating system.

The architecture of the chip is akin to AMD’s Zacate and Llano offerings, but differentiates itself in the fact that it’s geared for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). Both chips take four logical cores and combine them with some extra muscle to help with media tasks. The ZMS-40 is programmed to use the OpenCL standard, which makes it perfect for Android devices. The problem is, Creative doesn’t have a great track record of actually getting its chips into said devices.

Last year ZiiLabs announced the ZMS-20, a chip with 48 StemCell cores with two ARM Cortex-A9s, in the exact same fashion as today’s release. Creative didn’t have a partner for the ZMS-20 either, making this two straight years of ZiiLabs announcing a chip with no apparent use. It makes us wonder what the company hopes to accomplish. Sure, the underlying tech is valid, and even needed for future speed progression, but to spend the money to engineer and develop a chip that has no apparent destination vexes the mind.

The other issue facing Creative is the fact that developers need to write their apps with the architecture of a chip in mind to fully take advantage of the power offered. Case in point being the fact that Nvidia had to launch a special application to showcase apps that have been written specifically for Tegra chips, Tegra Zone. The company has had to actively pursue larger developers to create titles that will showcase the power of the technology it has created.

With no deals (that we know of) pending for the ZMS-40, and with no apparent plans to recruit developers to write for the architecture, it looks like Creative just likes to throw money at cool-sounding chips and hope that someone notices. Perhaps, as ExtremeTech’s hardware analyst Joel Hruska suggests, Creative is simply trying to revitalize the Zen media player brand — by enticing customers with devices claiming to have “100 cores.”

Latest Technology in Computer Hardware

The rate at which new computer hardware products are arriving in the market is simply mind-boggling. As the technology advances, the size and the price of the devices come down, while the efficiency and capacity increase. The scenario is same in all cases, whether it is about internal components like processor, motherboard, RAM, graphics card, and hard disk or for peripheral accessories like mouse, keyboard, and monitors. Personal computers became popular only before about three decades back. But already there are huge piles of outdated and antique hardware components and devices. This is a tribute to the tremendous rate of development of latest technologies in computer hardware field. Perhaps, the newest entrant into the archeological catalogue of computer peripherals is CRT monitors. The sleek looking LCD monitors are spreading like computer virus.

Data storage devices have attracted considerable attention of the technology developers. New kinds of storage devices such as newer versions of flash memory cards, hard disks using latest technology and disks of ever-increasing capacity are the results of advancement in latest technology in compute hardware. The memory size of the random access memory (RAM) cards is soaring to enable the smooth functioning of graphics animation software packages and streaming video websites. Also, computer motherboards have undergone substantial changes over the years. More and more functions are being added to the motherboard. Also, despite the incredible improvement in performance and functionalities, the price of these components has actually fallen steadily.

The most vital component of a computer is the microprocessor. It is in this field that a battle of developing latest technologies in computer hardware takes place. The pace of development of microprocessor increases as the competition between the major processor chip manufacturing companies, Intel and AMD, intensifies. Both the companies are engaging in a neck and neck competition and continuously outdo each other in introducing new technologies.

In the field of computer peripherals, the latest technology in computer hardware is in developing yet another version of wireless mouse and keyboard. The concept of wireless mouse and keyboard is about a decade old. But the development of these items is still a work in progress. The latest products of wireless mouse and keyboard are said to be highly durable and error free.

Some of the developments in the latest technology in computer hardware are gearing up for changing the present concept of desktop and laptop computers. With new developments making possible the convergence of mobile phone technology and computers, a new breed of fully functional palm-top computers are going to be introduced in near future. With touch screen monitors and without the need for a mouse, these gadgets are likely to become the next big leap in the constantly leaping technological development field.

Candis Reade is an accomplished niche website developer and author. To learn more about Technology in Computer Hardware, please visit Electronics Hardware for current articles and discussions.

Tools of Programming: Algortihms and Flowcharts

We took a look into the basics of writing a computer program and the importance of "logic" in computer programming. We take the same topic forward here to look into tools that facilitate the same and help device a clean, clear and efficient logic to write a program.

Ok, so now we have a task to write a program for and we have the logic in mind. Although you can simply scribble down the key to the task and start along with writing the program, it is advisable to follow some organized approach in formulating the same. This leads us to what we call an algorithm. Infact, if you see the previous article, the example that we used there actually implied the use of an "algorithm". The steps we listed out there can be collectively termed as an "algorithm" for the problem we had at hand, namely - finding the average of numbers, or, finding the smallest number.

So what is an algorithm?

An Algorithm is a sequential and logical list of instructions to solve a problem covering all possible alternatives. Points to note: 

1. It is a sequential list of instructions
2. Is done informally using a pen and paper i.e. it is NOT a formal program that you feed into a computer
3. Being written in simple English, it is easy to write and debug

Some standardization and uniformity can be brought into algorithms through the next concept we look at - a flowchart.

A Flowchart is a diagrammatic representation of an algorithm using standard symbols and checks the flow of logic running through it.

Other Steps in Problem Solving: 

• Once we have an algorithm/flowchart ready, we move towards the next step in problem solving which we call coding. Coding is basically transcribing or translating the simple English instructions (algorithm) into High Level Code which can be fed into the computer.
• Once we write the program and feed it to the computer, we next have to perform a Dry Run on it, implying, we need to test it using raw data that exhausts all possibilities and tests all limits and conditions of the program
• Errors, if encountered as we test the program, need to be eradicated - which is called debugging the program.

We shall be making use of algorithms in understanding the logic behind solving the problems as we write programs. We have now the base and understanding of concepts to take our first steps towards writing programs.

Write A Program is a technology blog that includes news, views, articles and opinions on mobiles, gadgets, computers and latest technology trends/news. Visit us here [http://www.writeaprogram.net]