Windows

The ATI Radeon graphics driver package for Windows operating system is called ATI Catalyst.

There are unofficial modifications available such as Omega drivers and DNA drivers. These drivers typically consist of mixtures of various driver file versions with some registry variables altered and are advertised as offering superior performance or image quality. They are, of course, unsupported, and as such, are not guaranteed to function correctly. Some of them also provide modified system files for hardware enthusiasts to run specific graphics cards outside of their specifications.

Macintosh

ATI used to only offer driver updates for their retail Mac video cards, but now also offer drivers for all ATI Mac products, including the GPUs in Apple’s portable lines. Apple also includes ATI driver updates whenever they release a new OS update. ATI provides a preference panel for use in Mac OS X called ATI Displays which can be used both with retail and OEM versions of its cards. Though it gives more control over advanced features of the graphics chipset, ATI Displays has limited functionality compared to their Catalyst for Windows product.

ATI stopped support for Mac OS 9 after the Radeon R200 cards, making the last officially supported card the Radeon 9200. The Radeon R100 cards up to the Radeon 7000 can still be used with even older Mac OS versions such as System 7, although not all features are taken advantage of by the older operating system.

Linux

Initially, ATI did not produce Radeon drivers for Linux, instead giving hardware spe

In mid 2004, however, ATI started to support Linux (XFree86, X.Org), hiring a new Linux driver team to produce ”fglrx”. Their new proprietary Linux drivers, instead of being a port of the Windows Catalyst drivers, were based on the Linux drivers for the FireGL (the FireGL drivers worked with Radeons before, but didn’t officially support them), a card geared towards graphics producers, not gamers; though the display drivers part is now based on the same sources as the ones from Windows Catalyst since version 4.x in late 2004. The proprietary Linux drivers could support R200 (Radeon 8500-9200, 9250) chips. For a better display driver, the repository drivers are recommended.

The frequency of driver updates increased in late 2004, releasing Linux drivers every two months, half as often as their Windows counterparts. Then since late 2005 this has been increased to monthly releases, inline with the Windows Catalyst releases.

In 2008, ATI changed its release cycles and driver versions; now referred to as Catalyst ., the driver package still includes an internal 8.xx.x driver revision, but it is now monthly, sharing a common code base with the Windows driver (starting with internal release 8.43). In 2009, the Catalyst driver officially dropped support for R500 and older chips, the FOSS driver being deemed stable and complete enough. The last driver release supporting older architectures is Catalyst 9.3.

For information on alternative Open Source drivers, see below.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD systems have the same open-source support for Radeon hardware as Linux, including 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300-series chipsets. The R300 support, as with Linux, remained experimental due to being reverse-engineered from ATI’s proprietary drivers, but with the release of official documentation by AMD (following its buying out of Ati), all Radeon families up to R700 have at least 2D support in the FOSS drivers, with basic video acceleration and power management, and up to R500, have at least ‘basic’ (up to OpenGL 1.5 feature set, GLSL is still a work in progress) 3D acceleration. On R600/700, 3D is still very much experimental, and Evergreen support has barely started due to lack of documentation.

ATI does not support its proprietary fglrx driver on FreeBSD, it has been partly ported by a third party as of January 2007. This is in contrast to its main rival, NVIDIA, which has periodically released its proprietary driver for FreeBSD since November 2002 (64-bit beta driver available as of December 3, 2009). In the meantime, the release is similar to Linux.

MidnightBSD

MidnightBSD supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300 chipsets. This support is similar to FreeBSD and Linux.

AmigaOS

Since the introduction of AmigaOS 4 users gained partial support for R100/R200 Radeon cards (Radeon 8500/9100 have no 3D support). Currently, RadeonHD R700 Amiga OS4 driver is under development by 3rd party developer. The AmigaOne X1000, slated for release in 2010, will include an R700 based GPU.

BeOS

Although ATI does not provide its own drivers for BeOS, it provides hardware and technical documentation to the Haiku Project who provide drivers with full 2D and video in/out support. They are the sole graphics manufacturer in any way still supporting BeOS.

MorphOS

MorphOS supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets.

FOSS drivers

On September 12, 2007, AMD released documentation without an NDA for the RV630 (Radeon HD 2600 PRO and Radeon HD 2600 XT) and M56 (Radeon Mobility X1600) chips for open source driver development, for its strategic open source driver development initiative. This initial documentation released sufficient programming information for a skeleton display detection and modesetting driver to be released. This was version 1.0.0 of the ”radeonhd” driver, developed in cooperation with Novell. The register reference guides for M76 (Mobility Radeon HD 2600/2700/3600/3800 series) and RS690 (AMD 690 chipset series) were also released on January 4, 2008..

Most of the work is shared with the existing Xorg radeon driver that also supports older Radeon architectures. Conceptually, radeonhd initially tried to directly hit a card’s register to perform its operations, while Xorg’s driver radeon makes use of AtomBIOS (an abstraction layer created by Ati to ease the programming of new video card drivers) when available. Since AtomBIOS headers have been made public by AMD and are kept up to date, the argument went rather moot.

As of December 2009, the DRM part of the radeon driver is now included in the mainstream Linux kernel, the first version appearing in [http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_32 kernel version 2.6.32], used by default on several GNU/Linux distributions.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Radeon, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

No related posts.

2000

Google announced a new “MentalPlex” search technology that supposedly read the user’s mind to

determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the step of actually typing in the search query. This always led to a page full of April Fool’s results.

*[http://www.google.com/mentalplex/ Google MentalPlex]

*[http://www.google.com/mentalplex/MP_faq.html Google MentalPlex FAQ]

*[http://www.google.com/mentalplex/MP_illustrations.html Google MentalPlex Usage Illustrations]

2002

Google reveals the technology behind its PageRank Systems—PigeonRank. Google touts the benefits of this cost-effective and efficient means of ranking pages and reassures readers that there is no animal cruelty involved in the process. The article makes many humorous references and puns based on computer terminology and how Google PageRank really works. (etc. the pigeons consume the nuts or whatever called Lin/ax)

*[http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html Pigeon Rank]

2004

Fictitious job opportunities for a research center on the moon. Luna/X (a pun to Linux and the Latin word for moon, as well as a reference to both the Windows XP visual style and Mac OS X) is the name of a new operating system they claimed to have created for working at the research center.

*[http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html Google Copernicus Center]

2005

Google Gulp, a fictitious drink, was announced by Google in 2005. According to the company, this beverage would optimize one’s use of th

This hoax was probably intended as a parody of Google’s then invite-only email service called Gmail. Although ostensibly free, the company claimed the beverage could only be obtained by returning the cap of a Google Gulp bottle to a local grocery store: a causal loop. In the Google Gulp FAQ, Google replies to the observation “I mean, isn’t this whole invite-only thing kind of bogus?” by saying “Dude, it’s like you’ve never even ”heard” of viral marketing.”

*[http://www.google.com/googlegulp/ Google Gulp]

*[http://www.google.com/googlegulp/faq.html Google Gulp FAQ]

2006

On April Fool’s Day 2006, Google Romance was announced on the main Google search page with the introduction, “Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.” It pretends to offer a “Soulmate Search” to send users on a “Contextual Date”. A parody of online dating, it amusingly had a link for “those who generally favor the ‘throw enough stuff at the wall’ approach to online dating” to ”Post multiple profiles with a bulk upload file, you sleaze” in addition to ”Post your Google Romance profile”. Clicking on either of these gave an error page, which explained that it was an April Fool’s joke and included links to previous April Fool’s Jokes for nostalgia.

* [http://www.google.com/romance/ Google Romance]

* [http://www.google.com/romance/faq.html Google Romance FAQ]

* [http://www.google.com/romance/tour.html Google Romance Tour]

2007=

Gmail Paper

At about 10:00 PM Pacific time (where Google has its headquarters) on 30 March 2007, Google changed the login page for Gmail to announce a new service called Gmail Paper. The service offered to allow users of Google’s free webmail service to add e-mails to a “Paper Archive”, which Google would print (on “96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum”) and mail via traditional post. The service would be free, supported by bold, red advertisements printed on the back of the printed messages. Image attachments would also be printed on high-quality glossy paper, though MP3 and WAV files would not be printed. The page detailing more information about the service features photographs of Ian Spiro and Carrie Kemper, current employees of Google. Also featured are Product Marketing Managers of Gmail Anna-Christina Douglas, and Kevin Systrom.

* [http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/index.html Gmail Paper Index]

* [http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html Gmail Paper Announcement]

* [http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/policies.html Gmail Paper Program Policies]

Google TiSP

Google TiSP (short for Toilet Internet Service Provider) was a fictitious free broadband service supposedly released by Google. This service would make use of a standard toilet and sewage lines to provide free Internet connectivity at a speed of 8 Mbit/s (2 Mbps upload) (or up to 32 Mbps with a paid plan). The user would drop a weighted end of a long, Google-supplied fiber-optic cable in their toilet and flush it. Around 60 minutes later, the end would be recovered and connected to the Internet by a “Plumbing Hardware Dispatcher (PHD)”. The user would then connect their end to a Google-supplied wireless router and run the Google-supplied installation media on a Windows XP or Windows Vista computer (“Mac and Linux support coming soon”). Alternatively, a user could request a professional installation, in which Google would deploy nanobots through the plumbing to complete the process. The free service would be supported by “discreet DNA sequencing” of “personal bodily output” to display online ads that relate to culinary preferences and personal health. Google also referenced the diet cola-and-Mentos reaction in their FAQ: “If you’re still experiencing problems, drop eight mints into the bowl and add a two-liter bottle of diet soda.”

*[http://www.google.com/tisp/ Google TiSP]

*[http://www.google.com/tisp/faq.html Google TiSP FAQ]

*[http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html Installation page]

*[http://www.google.com/tisp/press.html Press Release page]

*[http://www.google.com/tisp/notfound.html Not found page - April fools version]

2008

Blogger “Google Weblogs (beta)”

The Blogger dashboard featured an announcement for Google Weblogs, or “GWeblogs,” or “Gblogs,” the next revolution in personal publishing. Features include algorithms putting your best content at the top of your blog (rather than publishing by reverse chronology), automatically populating your blog’s sidebar with the most relevant content, posting directly into Google search results for maximum visibility, blog headers refreshed with images from Google’s team of artists for anniversaries of a scientific achievement (similar to Google Doodle), and automatic content generation (‘Unsure of what to post about? Just click “I’m Feeling Lucky” and we’ll “take care” of the rest!’)

The announcement was followed by a link to a video tour of the product, which actually led to Tay Zonday’s cover of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

*[http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/04/announcing-google-weblogs-beta.html Blogger Buzz: The Official Buzz from Blogger at Google: Announcing Google Weblogs (beta) ]

Dajare

Google launches Dajare in Japan (google.co.jp), with the mission of “organizing the world’s laughter.”

gDay

Google announces gDay in Australia , a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created. The name is a play on the phrase “g’day”.

Gmail Custom Time

Gmail’s sign-in page and a banner at the top of each Gmail inbox announced a new feature, called Gmail Custom Time, that would allow its users to “pre-date” their messages and choose to have the message appear as “read” or “unread”. The new feature uses the slogan “Be on time. Every time.”

Around 11:00 p.m. EST March 31, 2008, on the newer and older version of Gmail, but not in the basic HTML version, in the upper right corner, next to Settings, a link appeared labeled, “New! Gmail Custom Time”. The link led to a 404 error until April 1, when it led to the full Gmail Custom Time hoax page. Clicking any of the three links at the bottom of the page brought the user to a page stating that Gmail Custom time was, in fact, their April Fool’s Day joke.

Google wrote that the new joke feature “utilizes an e-flux capacitor (a pun from the movie ”Back to the Future”) to resolve issues of causality.” Fake testimonials were given by “beta users”; one example is, “I used to be an honest person; but now I don’t have to be. It’s just so much easier this way. I’ve gained a lot of productivity by not having to think about doing the ‘right’ thing.”

The feature only allowed for ten pre-dated emails per year, claiming that any more “would cause people to lose faith in the accuracy of time, thus rendering the feature useless.”

*[http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html Gmail Custom Time]

Google Book Search Scratch and Sniff

Google Book Search has a new section allowing users to “scratch and sniff” certain books. Users are asked to “…please place your nose near the monitor and click ‘Go’”, which then “loads odors”. When clicking on “Help”, users are redirected to a page in a book that describes the origins of April Fools’ Day.

*[http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2008/04/google-book-search-now-smells-better.html Inside Google Book Search Blog: "Google Book Search now smells better"]

Google Calendar is Feeling Lucky

Google added the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button to its calendar feature. When a user tries to create a new event, the user was given the regular option of entering the correct details and hitting “Create Event”, and also the new option of “I’m Feeling Lucky” which would set the user up with an evening date with, among others, Matt Damon, Eric Cartman, Tom Cruise, Jessica Alba, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Angelina Jolie, Britney Spears, Anna Kournikova, Johnny Depp, George W. Bush, or Lois Griffin.

Google Dialect Translation

Google announces Google 사투리 번역 (”Google dialect translation”) for translating regional dialects of Korean to and from Standard Korean.

Google Docs

A little easter egg was added, where a user can click the file menu and directly under new document is “New Airplane” which immediately opens a copy of a Google branded paper airplane. To reach the file menu, click the new menu, then “Document” then a new window opens. The image that is embedded in the “New Airplane” document can be seen [http://docs.google.com/File?id=dftvhrcj_296cwft89fb_b here].

Google Manpower Search

Google launches Manpower Search (谷歌人肉搜索) in China (google.cn). This new feature is powered by 25 million volunteers who do the searching around the clock. When the user entered a keyword, volunteers will search any possible answers from a mass of paper documents as well as online resources. The user is expected to get the search result within 32 seconds. The “search” button now avoids the user’s cursor, making it tricky to click on the button.

*[http://www.google.cn/intl/zh-CN/renrou/index.html Google Manpower Search]

Google Talk

Google announces plans to, on April 22, 2008 (Earth Day), shorten all conversations over Google Talk thereby reducing the energy required to transmit chats in an effort to reduce carbon output.

* [http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2008/03/google-talk-goes-green.html Google Talk Goes Green]

Google Wake Up Kit

Google launched their “Wake Up Kit” as a calendar notification option.

The ‘wake up’ notification uses several progressively more annoying alerts to wake you up. First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used. The kit includes an industrial-sized bucket and is designed to be connected to your water main for automatic filling. In addition, a bed-flipping device is included for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.

[http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/new_wakeup.html Google Wake Up Kit]

Virgle

Google announces a joint project with the Virgin Group to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars . This operation has been named [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/announcing-project-virgle.html Project Virgle]. The announcement includes videos of Richard Branson (founder of Virgin Group) as well as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the founders of Google) on YouTube, talking about Virgle. An “application” to join the settlement includes questions such as:

I am a world-class expert in:

Physics

First Aid

Engineering

Guitar Hero II

After the user submitted the application, the site notifies the user that the user is not fit for space, or that the user’s application is fine and “all you have to do is submit your video” [as a response to their video on YouTube]. As a result, an open source Virgle group has been established, [http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/ OpenVirgle]. On the FAQ page, the final question is “Okay, come on — seriously. Is this Virgle thing for real?” The reply links to a page that tells the user it’s an April Fool’s joke, and then mentions that the user “Dragged us out of our lovely little fantasy world, to crush all our hopes and dreams.”

*Virgle Application Page – http://www.google.com/virgle/application.html

Yogurt

Google’s Orkut displayed its name as yogurt, Google Bang, Inc.

YouTube

On April 1, 2008, all featured videos on the UK and Australian homepages, and later, all international homepages, of Google-owned YouTube linked to a video of Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up”, causing all users of the website who clicked on featured videos to be Rickrolled.

This was the first year YouTube participated in Google’s April Fool’s Day tradition.

2009=

Google runs on Microsoft Windows IIS/3.0

google.com.au reported as if it ran on IIS/3.0 and google.com on Apache/0.8.4 (on Linux).

CADIE

The announcement of CADIE was made on March 31, 2009 11:59 PM by the CADIE Team, not on April 1. The announcement on the Google blog was made at 4/01/2009 12:01:00 AM.

The introduction page and all of the references to CADIE in Google’s Products were taken down on April 2, replaced with a message stating:

We apologize for the recent disruption(s) to our service(s).

Please stand by while order is being restored.

However the technology page describing the technical capabilities of the software remained at:

[http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/tech.html Technical Description]

When using Google Books or GMail, a user would come across an announcement dated March 31, 2009 at 11:59:59, declaring a new “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity”. CADIE is also [http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gball/faq.html mentioned] on the gBall FAQ page: “Google’s new CADIE technology will interpret the data obtained from each ball to provide useful tips to owners”. There was also a link on Google’s [http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en Homepage] for CADIE, and a [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/cadie-awakens.html blog entry] in Google’s official blog.

CADIE technology is also used to generate [http://www.google.co.jp/intl/ja/landing/senryu/index.html "senryu"] (a type of Japanese poem similar to haiku) based on search terms for certain Japanese queries.

[http://www.google.com/ The Google Search homepage] had a link to the [http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html CADIE announcement], stating that “For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.” The page links to the blog below.

On mobile devices, a link shows up to [http://www.google.com/mobile/default/brainsearch.html Brain Search], which uses CADIE technology to “index your brain”.

[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/intro_android.html This] is what it all looks like from a mobile device.

YouTube

On April 1, 2009, YouTube gave some users a look at a [http://www.youtube.com/t/new_viewing_experience new "viewing experience"] when they selected a video within certain areas such as the “recommended for you” section. This new interface caused the whole layout including the video you were watching to flip upside down. Although the option was not visible for some, it could be viewed by adding &flip=1 to the end of a video URL. Adding &flip=1 to the end of a video URL no longer causes this effect, and the video loads normally. A page on “tips for viewing the new layout” suggested users hang their monitors upside down from the ceiling, although the layout did not reverse mouse-control.

Gmail

When one is using the Gmail service, they will notice that it has a [http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html new option], named “Gmail Autopilot” in which the service would analyze an email. On that page it says under the FAQ section,”You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.” However, if a person logs into their Gmail account and goes under the Settings tab they will notice that there is no Autopilot tab. The program could be customised to contain certain types of grammatical or spelling errors, as well as complexity and length of the sentence. It also has a way of responding to relationship related messages, such as if someone spoke aggressively, even in a humorous way, the system would “terminate relationship.”

[http://www.google.com.au/gball gBall]

Google Australia announced the development of a ball that will change how Australian Football is played the world over.

The newest football technology—”gBall”—is a prototype ball for use in the Australian Football League with GPS.

[http://www.google.com.au/ Google Australia] announces (“New! Get the newest football technology – gBall.”) that they are developing a [http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gball/ prototype ball] for use in the Australian Football League with GPS. Apparently, the ball will measure the location, force, and torque of a kick, and “vibrate if player agents or talent scouts want to speak to you”. Google claimed that the ball will cost $10 with a cost-per-kick set of payments in addition to the basic fee.

Google Analytics

A blog post to the Google Analytics Blog investigates the analytics reports of CADIEs activities [http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/cadies-google-analytics-reports.html http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/cadies-google-analytics-reports.html]

Google Maps

Google’s CADIE has a recommended places to visit using Google Maps. Viewing [http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?f=q&ie=UTF8&moduleurl=http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/doc/panda-mapplet.xml&utm_campaign=en&utm_medium=mapshpp&utm_source=en-mapshpp-na-us-gns-mp "CADIE's recommended places for humans"] one will see each of her suggested places listed, that, when clicked, displays a photo and humorous commentary.

There is also a “[http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?f=q&ie=UTF8&moduleurl=http:%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fintl%2Fen%2Flanding%2Fcadie%2Fdoc%2Fpanda-mapplet.xml&ll=42.366662,-71.106262&spn=114.307001,316.40625&z=2 CADIE's recommended places for humans].” link in Google Maps, which leads to the “Panda Mapplet” and includes several marked locations with “CADIE’s” commentary. Under Redmond WA a link is listed which will rick roll the viewer.

Blogger

[http://cadiesingularity.blogspot.com/ CADIE's personal blog/homepage]

Google Chrome with 3D

A build of Google Chrome was offered rendering web pages in Anaglyph 3D, “powered” by CADIE.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/cadie/ A 3D effect was actually possible with this browser, but it only made the window appear to be sunken into the monitor.

Google Earth Powered by CADIE

Google announced a new [http://earth.google.com/cadie.html Google Earth powered by CADIE], which claimed to allow the user to see ocean terrain imagery from the world’s most advanced submarine, explore the deep sea, soar with CADIE in real time, view CADIE’s Recommended Summer Vacation, and chat with CADIE, among other options.

Google Code

The [http://www.google.com/codesearch Google Code Search homepage] is featuring LOLCODE examples.

CADIE is set to [http://code.google.com/creative/cadie/ write code for you] based on specified features, however all that is returned is bad code or witty criticisms of your request and choice of programing language, recommending the use of INTERCAL.

CADIE’s source code was supposedly uploaded to Google Code, but she changed her mind and replaced it with a “fun program” consisting of 31 lines of INTERCAL. When executed, this program prints out the message “I do not feel like sharing.”

Google Book Search

CADIE recommends some books at [http://books.google.com/ Google Book Search homepage]. Also, when viewing a book, there is a Generate book report button. When clicked it says “Gotcha! It’s April Fools’ Day! Sorry, but you’ll have to actually read the book yourself.”

Google Docs on Demand

Google has announced new [http://docs.google.com/ Google Docs features] enhanced by CADIE

Add subliminal messages and images to documents.

If a person makes a new presentation and looks for the subliminal message and image buttons under the insert menu they will notice it is not there.

Upgrade your Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level automatically

[http://www.google.com/google-d-s/cadie.html And many other savvy new features].

Google Mobile

Google Mobile has a link to “[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/intro_android.html Brain Search]“. The instructions are to “Put phone to forehead for brain indexing” and “Think your query”.

When you click “Try Now”, a page loads with “Brain indexing” status. When indexing is complete, a button comes up with “search me”. by clicking this button, the user is directed to fake search results. There are several possible results:

[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/results1.html What's the name of that woman by the window? She's my boss's boss, but, oh man, is it Suzanne? Susan? Blanche?]

[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/results2.html Should I order the pizza? I don't remember if it makes me gassy.]

[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/results3.html Wow, cute guy. Should I go up to him?]

[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/results4.html Why is everyone looking at me so strangely?]

[http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/results5.html When is Mom's birthday? I should send her a card.]

Google Knol

Knol was updated so that all of the featured articles were about Artificial Intelligence, with a message from CADIE indicating that this “improvement” was for the good of mankind.

HTTP Headers

In keeping with the CADIE theme Google has altered the server HTTP header to contain the name of various AI entities, including HAL 9000, WOPR and GLaDOS

Other server HTTP headers found were IIS/Bob (a reference to Microsoft Bob), IIS/Clippy (a reference to Clippy), IIS/3.0, Netscape iPlanet, Chrome/3.0, Google Operating System (BETA), CERN/3.0 (a reference to CERN HTTPd), Apple (a reference to Apple II), IRIX, MCP, Apache/0.8.4, Conficker, and Skynet.

Oil Tanker Data Center

During the last minutes of Google’s [http://www.google.com/corporate/green/datacenters/summit.html Data Center Efficiency Summit], Urs Hoelzle presented in a “special topic”: Google had bought an oil tanker, the “M/S Sergey”, where Google’s data center containers were being submerged in oil tanks to enable extremely high-efficiency cooling. The presentation can be seen in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91I_Ftsd-7s#t=41m20s the video], and includes slightly customized Wikipedia images from the

article Oil tanker, including a retouched photo of commercial oil tanker ”AbQaiq” and the oil tankers side view graphic.

Even though Google did apply for a US patent to build [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080209234%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080209234&RS=DN/20080209234 data centers on cargo ships] and oil cooling is an existing technology, summit attendee James Hamilton believed this topic to be an April Fools joke. The ship’s name “M/S Sergey” is also likely to be a pun on Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin.

2010

Google and Topeka, Kansas, Switch Places

In early March, the city of Topeka, Kansas, temporarily changed its name to Google in an attempt to capture a spot in Google’s new broadband/fiber-optics project. Then, on April 1 (April Fools’ Day), Google jokingly announced that it would be changing its name to Topeka, to “honor that moving gesture” and changed its home page to say Topeka in place of the Google logo.

Google Books available in Anachrome 3D

Google books introduced a feature which allows any book to be read in 3D, assuming the viewer has appropriate glasses. It was enabled by clicking the “View in 3D” button in the menu bar above the book. This feature was removed after April 1, but on June 29, 2010, Google [http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/06/3d-viewing-option-available-again-on.html announced its restoration].

Google also released the latest form of 3D glasses, similar to the ones you would use today when seeing a movie.

Store anything on Google Docs

Google [http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/03/upload-and-store-anything-in-cloud-with.html announced] that Google Docs will have the capacity to upload ”anything”, including physical objects like keys, remote controls, etc. The [http://www.google.com/google-d-s/promos/storage.html site] declared that one could use this to find items like keys using CTRL-F and send objects around the globe by “uploading” and “downloading” them, at the low price of $0.10 per kg.

Search results generated in different units

Google’s search results page displayed the time taken to load the results in different units than seconds. Several of these are pop culture references, as with 1.21 gigawatts, while others refer to slang:

* at warp X.XX

* 0.XX centibeats

* 0.XX centons

* X.XXe-15 epochs

* 0.0X femtogalactic years

* 1.21 gigawatts

* X.XX hertz

* XX.XX jiffies

* 0.XX microfortnights

* 0.XX microweeks

* 0.XX nanocenturies

* 11.90 parsecs

* 0.XXe+43 Planck times

* 23.00 skidoo

* 2.00 shakes of a lamb’s tail

* 0.XX times the velocity of an unladen swallow

* dhaka time

YouTube ASCII video filter

The logo of YouTube was changed to an ASCII-style one made out of 1s. The YouTube logo is a reference to some videos having a new quality setting, namely “TEXTp”. According to a notice underneath the videos, viewing the video with this quality setting enabled allows YouTube to save one US dollar ($1) per second on bandwidth costs. The notice also remarks on the source of this new “feature”, wishing the reader a happy April Fool’s Day.

However in accordance with the announcement, the video quality on many videos was indeed able to be set to ‘TEXTp’ and video output was rendered through an ASCII filter.

This feature was removed from 2 April 2010.

Animal Translator BETA

Google placed a link on the main page, advertising a new Google Animal Translator service to add to their Language Translator service. Clicking the link would take you to a page advertising an app for Android phones for the translator, with the tagline being “Bridging the gap between animals and humans”.

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/translateforanimals/

Once the app is installed on an Android phone it provides some amusing translations depending on the animal you select.

Standard Voicemail Mode for Google voice

Google placed a [http://www.google.com/googlevoice/standard_voicemail.html New! Standard Voicemail Mode] link in the Google Voice main page.

Evil Bit

Google added an “evil bit” to their AJAX APIs, to aid in generating an appropriate response to nefarious deeds. If an evildoer is “detected”, the code returns with, among other things, “For Great Justice”, a quote from the video game ”Zero Wing”.

Wave Wave Notifications

Google Wave can be set to have a human being [http://wave.google.com/getwavewave wave at you] to notify you of a change to a Google Wave. The user can also select the volume of the human notifier from a list of silent, medium, loud and vibrate. They can also select which human notifier they want, including Ashton Kutcher, Dr. Wave, Grandma, Werner Heisenberg, and Puppy. Clicking on any of the links on the new notifications page redirected the user to a Google help page, alerting them that it was an April Fools’ joke, but also that email notifications are possible.

Google Annotations Gallery

The Google Annotations Gallery (“GAG”) is an exciting new Java open source library that provides a rich set of annotations for developers to express themselves.

Japanese Input System

Google’s proposed keyboard includes a single key for each Japanese character.

Disemvoweling on Google Mail

The English-language home page of Google Mail, including its logo, was disemvowelled. A post on the GMail blog was created to address the issue, claiming that they had encountered a server error which firstly made the datacenters fail to render the vowel ‘a’ before failing to render the vowels, and were working on the problem. They also claimed to be investigating whether the letter ‘y’ was impacted.

Chrome Sounds (Google Chrome Extension)

Google created a new extension, [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kkfibincabhfblmkmhcabnlghmncdcaf/ Chrome Sounds], after “months deep in psychoacoustic models, the Whittaker-Nyquist-Kotelnikov-Shannon sampling theorem, Franssen effects, Shepard-Risset Tones, and 11.1 surround sound research” . The extension provides audio for actions performed within the Google Chrome web browser.

For a few interesting sounds, try going to different countries’ localized Google pages.

The full list of sounds that this extension makes can be found by going to the Chrome Tools menu, choosing Extensions, turning on developer mode, and viewing the source of the extension.

Google Analytics Goes Back to Hits

Google decided that hits really is the only metric for tracking web site usage.

Life size Picasa

Google offered an option which allows the user to print lifesize cardboard cutouts of all of their photos.

ReaderAdvantage Program

Google [http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/04/google-reader-gives-back.html announced] a reward program for Google Reader, known as ReaderAdvantage™, in which they would assign points to users depending on the number of items read on Google Reader. The rewards were different badges, which, on visiting [http://www.google.com/googlereader/reader-advantage.html the ReaderAdvantage™ page] and clicking on the enroll button, shows [https://services.google.com/fb/forms/readeradvantage/ this page].

Wingdings in Adsense

Wingdings was announced as a new font option for Adsense users.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Google’s hoaxes, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The ELF format has replaced older executable formats such as a.out and COFF in many Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, IRIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, Syllable, and HP-UX (except for 32-bit PA-RISC programs which continue to use SOM). ELF has also seen some adoption in non-Unix operating systems, such as the Itanium version of OpenVMS, BeOS Revision 4 and later for x86 based computers (where it replaced the Portable Executable format; the PowerPC version stayed with Preferred Executable Format), and Haiku. The PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Wii, Nintendo DS and GP2X consoles also use ELF. AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS also running on PowerPC machines, use ELF. On the Amiga platform the ELF executable has replaced the previous EHF (Extended Hunk Format) which was used on Amigas equipped with PPC processor expansion cards. The Symbian OS v9 uses E32Image format that is based on ELF file format.

Most Sony Ericsson (for example, the W800i, W610, W300, etc.), some Siemens (SGOLD and SGOLD2 platforms: from Siemens C65 to S75 and BenQ-Siemens E71/EL71) and Motorola (for example, the E398, SLVR L7, v360, v3i and all phone LTE2 which has the patch applied) phones can run ELF files through the use of a patch that adds assembly code to the main firmware (known as the ”ELFPack”, in the underground modding culture).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Executable and Linkable Format, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Details on the implementation’s internals are not released, which makes it difficult for third-party vendors to provide tools to handle NTFS.

Linux

The ability to read and write to NTFS is provided by the NTFS-3G driver. It is included in most Linux distributions. Other solutions exist as well:

* Linux kernel 2.2: Kernel versions 2.2.0 and later include the ability to read NTFS partitions

* Linux kernel 2.6: Kernel versions 2.6.0 and later contain a driver written by Anton Altaparmakov (University of Cambridge) and Richard Russon. It supports file read, overwrite and resize.

* NTFSMount: A read/write userspace NTFS driver. It provides read-write access to NTFS, excluding writing compressed and encrypted files, changing file ownership, and access rights.

* Tuxera NTFS: High-performance read/write commercial kernel driver, mainly targeted for embedded devices from Tuxera which also develops the open source NTFS-3G driver.

* NTFS for Linux: A commercial driver with full read/write support available as free and non-free download(s) from Paragon Software Group.

* Captive NTFS: A ‘wrapping’ driver which uses Windows’ own driver, ntfs.sys.

Note that all three userspace drivers, namely NTFSMount, NTFS-3G and Captive NTFS, are built on the Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), a Linux kernel module tasked with bridging userspace and kernel code to save and retrieve data. All drivers listed above (except Tuxera NTFS and Paragon NTFS for Linux) are open source (GPL). Due to the complexity of internal NTFS structures, both

Mac OS X

Mac OS X v10.3 and later include read-only support for NTFS-formatted partitions. The GPL-licensed NTFS-3G also works on Mac OS X through FUSE and allows reading and writing to NTFS partitions. A performance enhanced commercial version, called Tuxera NTFS for Mac, is also available from the NTFS-3G developers. NTFS write support has been discovered in Mac OS X 10.6, but has not been activated as of version 10.6.1, although hacks do exist to enable the functionality.

Microsoft Windows

While the different NTFS versions are for the most part fully forward- and backward-compatible, there are technical considerations for mounting newer NTFS volumes in older versions of Microsoft Windows. This affects dual-booting, and external portable hard drives.

For example, attempting to use an NTFS partition with “Previous Versions” (a.k.a. Volume Shadow Copy) on an operating system that doesn’t support it, will result in the contents of those previous versions being lost.

Others

eComStation, and FreeBSD offer read-only NTFS support (there is a beta NTFS driver that allows write/delete for eComStation, but is generally considered unsafe). A free third-party tool for BeOS, which was based on NTFS-3G, allows full NTFS read and write. NTFS-3G also works on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, QNX and Haiku, in addition to Linux, through FUSE. A free for personal use read/write driver for MS-DOS called “NTFS4DOS” also exists.

Compatibility with FAT

Microsoft currently provides a tool (convert.exe) to convert HPFS (only on Windows NT 3), FAT16 and, on Windows 2000 and higher, FAT32 to NTFS, but not the other way around.

Resizing

Various third-party tools are all capable of safely resizing NTFS partitions. Starting with Windows Vista Microsoft added the built-in ability to shrink or expand a partition, but this capability is limited because it will not relocate page file fragments or files that have been marked as unmovable. So shrinking requires relocating or disabling any page file, the index of Windows Search, and any Shadow Copy used by System Restore. Using a third-party tool is an easier option.

Universal time

For historical reasons, the versions of Windows that do not support NTFS all keep time internally as local zone time, and therefore so do all file systems other than NTFS that are supported by current versions of Windows. However, Windows NT and its descendants keep internal timestamps as UTC and make the appropriate conversions for display purposes. Therefore, NTFS timestamps are in UTC. This means that when files are copied or moved between NTFS and non-NTFS partitions, the OS needs to convert timestamps on the fly. But if some files are moved when daylight saving time (DST) is in effect, and other files are moved when standard time is in effect, there can be some ambiguities in the conversions. As a result, especially shortly after one of the days on which local zone time changes, users may observe that some files have timestamps that are incorrect by one hour. Due to the differences in implementation of DST between the northern and southern hemispheres, this can result in a potential timestamp error of up to 4 hours in any given 12 months.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article NTFS, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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John Cage and the Experimental Composition Classes

Brecht met the artist Robert Watts at Rutgers University in 1957, and through Watts, Allan Kaprow. The three started to meet regularly for lunch at a local branch of Howard Johnson’s, New Jersey. After a meeting with John Cage organised by Brecht whilst the latter was in New Jersey hunting mushrooms, the three men started to attend Cage’s Experimental Music Composition classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. In the classes, Cage encouraged his students to use chance and games as major elements in the creation of art.

“George Brecht’s understanding of an intimate situation was far greater than mine. I needed more space to really work. But George really came to life in that situation…. He became a leader; and immediately he influenced not only me, but everybody else: Jackson Maclow, Higgins, Hansen. George Segal stopped by, and so did Dine, Whitman and Oldenburg.” Allan Kaprow

Initially writing theatrical scores similar to Kaprow’s earliest Happenings, Brecht grew increasingly dissatisfied with the didactic nature of these performances. After performing in one such piece, Cage quipped that he’d “never felt so controlled before.” prompting Brecht to pare the scores down to haiku-like statements, leaving space for radically different interpretations each time the piece was performed.

As well as Cage’s constructive criticism, Brecht was becoming increasingly interested in Marcel Duchamp’s theories on art, which he’d written

It was only while reading Robert Lebel’s 1959 monograph on Duchamp and pondering the consequences of the readymade that Brecht truly understood what he was searching for: Just as the readymade is an object lifted from its mere commodity status by being transported into an art context, the “event” would be an act–often a simple one performed daily, such as turning on and off a switch–on which he would cast his spotlight in order to force us to pay attention to it, in order, as the Russian formalists would have said, to “make it strange” and “de-automatize our perception.”

An exhibition of Brecht’s work held at the Reuben Gallery, October 1959 ”Toward Events: An Arrangement” clearly pointed the way: The press release stated that ‘art is to become actively rather than passively existent, to be enjoyed as an unfolding experience….works, or ‘events,’ such as The Dome, The Case, The Cabinet, are presented three dimensionally.’ The final piece in the jigsaw, combining a Duchampian love of chance with a scientific belief in art as research, was an ephiphany Brecht had in 1960, in which he decisively separated the artwork from the control of the artist;

“In the Spring of 1960 … waiting for my wife to come from the house, standing behind my English Ford station wagon, the motor running and the left-turn signal blinking, it occurred to me that a truly ‘event’ piece could be drawn from the situation.” George Brecht.

The Yam Festival, 1963

”Yam” was a name thought up by Brecht and Watts in late 1962 to act as an umbrella project ‘for all manner of immaterial, experimental, as yet unclassified forms of expression.’ Specifically intending to provide a platform for ‘art that could not be bought,’ the earliest ”Yam” events involved mailing event cards and other objects stamped with the word ‘Yam’, or variations, to friends. Designed to increase anticipation, the project reached a head with a month-long series of events in May, 1963, in New York, Rutger’s University and George Segal’s farm.

The festival, (‘May’ backwards), was organised as a wide ranging series of events taking place throughout the month, whose main objective was to bypass traditional gallery outlets, giving artists and ‘receivers’ greater freedom.

“In all of its formats and strategies Brecht’s and Watt’s ”Yam Festival” operated as an alternative to the gallery system, producing “art” that could not be bought.” Julia Robinson

Artists participating in the festival included Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Al Hansen, Ay-O, Dick Higgins, La Monte Young, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Ray Johnson. The festival has come to be seen as a proto-fluxus event, involving many of the same artists. ”Yam” evolved parallel to George Maciunas’ ”Fluxfests”, set up with almost identical aims but currently operating only in Europe whilst Maciunas was stationed in Germany. The International Fluxus Festival of the Newest Music (”Festum Fluxorum”), 1962-63, would feature the work of artists such as Cage, Raoul Hausmann and Nam June Paik. Brecht’s event-scores, including the famous ”Drip Event”, were amongst the pieces Maciunas would perform, along with pieces by Kaprow, Watts, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Terry Riley, Emmett Williams and Dick Higgins.

Maciunas in Germany

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Water Yam (artist’s book), under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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The widespread adoption of the PC platform at homes and small business popularized computers among people with no formal training. This created a fast growing market, opening an opportunity for commercial exploitation and of easy-to-use interfaces and making economically viable the incremental refinement of the existing GUIs for home systems.

Also, the spreading of Highcolor and Truecolor capabilities of display adapters providing thousands and millions of colors, along with faster CPUs and accelerated graphic cards, cheaper RAM, storage devices up to an order of magnitude larger (from megabytes to gigabytes) and larger bandwidth for telecom networking at lower cost helped to create an environment in which the common user was able to run complicated GUIs which began to favor aesthetics.

Windows 95 and “a computer in every home” (the 32-bit versions)

:”Main article: Windows 95. See also Windows NT.

After Windows 3.11, Microsoft began to develop a new consumer-oriented version of the operating system. Windows 95 was intended to integrate Microsoft’s formerly separate MS-DOS and Windows products and includes an enhanced version of DOS, often referred to as MS-DOS 7.0, although many people believe that Windows 95′s MS-DOS was not really DOS at all. It also featured a significant redesign of the GUI, dubbed “Cairo”, which was eventually used in Windows NT 4.0. Both Win95 and WinNT were 32-bit based technologies, which could exploit the abilities of the Intel 80386 CPU, as the preemptive multitasking and up to 4GiB of linear a

Windows 95 saw the beginning of the Browser wars when the World Wide Web began receiving a great deal of attention in the popular culture and mass media. Microsoft at first did not see potential in the Web and Windows 95 was shipped with Microsoft’s own online service called The Microsoft Network, which was dial-up only and was used primarily for its own content, not internet access. As versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer were released at a rapid pace over the following few years, Microsoft used its desktop dominance to push its browser and shape the ecology of the web mainly as a monoculture.

Windows 95 (and its 32-bit professional counterpart Windows NT) evolved through the years into Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, sharing the same basic GUI themes (in XP, the user can even switch to the ”classical Windows” 95/NT look). With Windows 98, the Active Desktop theme was introduced, allowing a HTML approach for the desktop, but this feature was coldly received by customers, who frequently disabled it. At the end, Windows Vista definitively discontinued it, but has a new SideBar on the desktop.

Mac OS

The Macintosh’s GUI has been infrequently revised since 1984, with major updates including System 7, and underwent its largest revision with the introduction of the “Aqua” interface in 2001′s Mac OS X. It was a new operating system built primarily on technology from NeXTStep with UI elements of the original Mac OS grafted on. Mac OS X uses a technology called Quartz for graphics rendering and drawing on-screen. Some interface features of Mac OS X are inherited from NeXTStep (such as the Dock, the automatic wait cursor, or double-buffered windows giving a solid appearance and flicker-free window redraws), while others are inherited from the old Mac OS operating system (the single system-wide menu-bar). Mac OS X v10.3 introduced features to improve usability including Exposé which is designed to make finding open windows easier.

With Mac OS X v10.4, new features were added, including Dashboard (a virtual alternate desktop for mini specific-purpose applications) and a search tool called Spotlight, which provides users with an option for searching through files instead of browsing through folders.

GUIs built on the X Window System

In the early days of X Window development, Sun Microsystems and AT&T attempted to push for a GUI standard called OPEN LOOK in competition with Motif. OPEN LOOK was a well-designed standard developed from scratch in conjunction with Xerox, while Motif was a collective effort that fell into place, with a look and feel patterned after Windows 3.11. Many who worked on OPEN LOOK at the time appreciated its design coherence. Motif prevailed in the UNIX GUI battles and became the basis for the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). CDE was based on VUE (Visual User Environment), a proprietary desktop from Hewlett-Packard that in turn was based on the Motif look and feel.

In the late 1990s, there was significant growth in the Unix world, especially among the free software community. New graphical desktop movements grew up around Linux and similar operating systems, based on the X Window System. A new emphasis on providing an integrated and uniform interface to the user brought about new desktop environments, such as KDE, GNOME and XFCE which are supplanting CDE in popularity on both Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The XFCE, KDE and GNOME look and feel each tend to undergo more rapid change and less codification than the earlier OPEN LOOK and Motif environments.

In the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century X Window GUIs such as Compiz Fusion, Beryl and KDE began to incorporate translucency and drop shadow effects.

AmigaOS

Later releases added improvements over the original Workbench, like support for high-color Workbench screens, context menus, and embossed 2D icons with pseudo-3D aspect. But often Amiga users preferred alternative interfaces to standard Workbench, such as Directory Opus or [http://scalos.noname.fr/ ScalOS] interface. An interesting article about these replacements is available [http://abalaban.free.fr/wb.html here] (in French language).

The use of improved, third-party GUI engines became common amongst users who preferred more attractive interfaces – such as Magic User Interface (MUI), and ReAction. These object-oriented graphic engines driven by “classes” of graphic objects and functions were then standardized into the Amiga environment and changed Amiga Workbench to a complete and modern guided interface, with new standard gadgets, animated buttons, true 24-bit-color icons, increased use of wallpapers for screens and windows, alpha channel, transparencies and shadows as any modern GUI requires.

Modern derivatives of Workbench are Ambient for MorphOS, ScalOS, Workbench for AmigaOS 4 and Wanderer/Zune for AROS.

There is a brief article on Ambient and descriptions of MUI icons, menus and gadget [http://www.aps.fr/article/ambient.html here] (aps.fr) and images of Zune stay at main [http://aros.sourceforge.net/pictures/screenshots/ AROS site].

Use of object oriented graphic engines (ReAction) dramatically changes the look and feel of a GUI to match actual styleguides.

RISC OS

Early versions of what came to be called RISC OS were known as Arthur, which was released in 1987 by Acorn Computers. RISC OS was a colour GUI operating system which used three-button mice, a taskbar (called the icon bar), and a file navigator similar to that of Mac OS. Acorn created RISC OS in the 1980s for their ARM-CPU based computers.

The GUI of RISC OS has developed over versions of RISC OS from 1987 to the present day with version 4.39 having a great ability to customise the interface.

OS/2

Originally collaboratively developed by Microsoft and IBM to replace DOS, OS/2 version 1.0 (released in 1987) had no GUI at all. Version 1.1 (released 1988) included Presentation Manager (PM), which looked a lot like the later Windows 3.0 UI. After the split with Microsoft, IBM developed the Workplace Shell (WPS) for version 2.0 (released in 1992), a quite radical, object-oriented approach to GUIs. Microsoft later imitated much of this in Windows 95.

NeXTSTEP

The NeXTSTEP user interface was used in the NeXT line of computers. NeXTSTEP’s first major version was released in 1989. It used Display PostScript for its graphical underpinning. The NeXTSTEP interface’s most significant feature was the Dock, carried with some modification into Mac OS X, and had other minor interface details that some found made it easier and more intuitive to use than previous GUIs. NeXTSTEP’s GUI was the first to feature opaque dragging of windows in its user interface, on a comparatively weak machine by today’s standards, ideally aided by [http://www.bytecellar.com/archives/000092.php high performance graphics hardware].

BeOS

BeOS was developed on custom AT&T Hobbit-based computers before switching to PowerPC hardware by a team lead by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée as an alternative to Mac OS. BeOS was later ported to Intel hardware. It used an object-oriented kernel written by Be, and did not use the X Window System, but a different GUI written from scratch. Much effort was spent by the developers to make it an efficient platform for multimedia applications. Be Inc. was [http://news.com.com/2102-1040_3-271718.html?tag=st.util.print acquired] by PalmSource, Inc. (Palm Inc. at the time) in 2001. The BeOS GUI still lives in Haiku, an open source software reimplementation of the BeOS.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article History of the graphical user interface, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Before World War II

In May 1888, the United States established a coaling station to service the vessels of the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. King David Kalākaua had granted the U.S. the exclusive rights to enter and develop the area earlier that year.

The U.S. Naval Radio Station in the Pearl Harbor area, the first government station in the islands, began operations on October 1, 1906. This radio station continued its operation until its deactivation in 1916.

On March 3, 1915, the United States Congress passed an Appropriations Act that authorized $400,000 for the construction of a high-powered, long distance radio station at Pearl Harbor. In 1916, this new station, NPM, began operations at Hospital Point, Pearl Harbor. At 0230 on the morning of September 20, 1916, Captain Clark, the first Commandant of the 14th Naval District, sent the following message from the NPM to the Naval Radio Station, Long Beach, California:

“SECRETARY OF THE NAVY, WASHINGTON, D.C. I HAVE THE HONOR TO SEND YOU THE FIRST THROUGH MESSAGE TO WASHINGTON, D.C., FROM PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII RADIO STATION, AND CAN REPORT SATISFACTORY PROGRESS OF THE PLANT. GEORGE R. CLARK SENDS.”

A congratulatory message from the Secretary of the Navy arrived 33 minutes later. During the years following World War I, the naval activities in the Pearl Harbor area continued to expand. It soon became obvious that the future expansion of the radio station facilities in the area would not be practical. In 1933, a tract of land at Lualualei was set aside by the territory of Hawaii for us

World War II

With the arrival of the major United States Pacific Fleet units at Pearl Harbor naval base in 1939, it became increasingly clear that a new receiver and control station was needed. Therefore, a secluded spot at Wahiawa, some north of Pearl Harbor, was chosen and purchased by the Navy for approximately one million dollars. Construction began on the of land in 1940 and was scheduled to be completed in 1942. During that time, the station at Wahiawa was considered the most important of a number of Naval Radio and Air Stations being constructed as a part of a general expansion program.

On December 7, 1941, a few minutes before 0800, several squadrons of Japanese aircraft passed over the Lualualei Transmitter Site on their way to bomb Pearl Harbor. As the planes passed over the major Naval Radio Stations they were strafed, but the casualties among the communications personnel were light. However, the radio stations themselves proved highly vulnerable to attack. Lualualei was located only from the shoreline and received its power over exposed land lines from the Hawaiian Electric Company, away. The radio facility at Wailupe, also along the seacoast, was deemed unprotectable. So, on the morning of December 10, it was decided to have all of the equipment at Wailupe moved to the new site at Wahiawa.

This new site was an excellent receiving area and the best-protected radio station on the island. Men worked day and night to transfer operations to Wahiawa and on December 17 the relocation was completed without the slightest interruption in communications service. This location became known as the Naval Radio Station, Wahiawa. Shortly thereafter, the Security Group Unit was also moved from Heeia to Wahiawa.

To improve naval communications in the Pacific area, a Communications Security Unit (COMSEC) was established at Wahiawa in 1942 under the management and control of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO). Their purpose was to assist in a program of cryptographic security, message traffic control and message traffic analysis.

It became apparent after the war that the naval communication facilities in Hawaii could never revert to their small pre-war status, but would have to continue in the role of “big business.”

After World War II

Shortly after the war, a committee was appointed by the CNO to make a survey of the facilities at Wahiawa and to make the appropriate recommendations concerning the location of the central point of radio communications. The committee decided that the central point should return to Pearl Harbor and that Wahiawa be relegated to a receiver site. However, in 1956, it was decided that insufficient space existed in the Pearl Harbor area to permit the continued expansion of communications facilities on Oahu. In addition, the various components were scattered throughout the Pearl Harbor complex which made the operation highly uneconomic and difficult to supervise. It was decided to relocate the central point back to the Wahiawa site.

Because the requirements for rapid communications from the Department of the Navy to the fleet operational commanders had changed, the CNO authorized the activation of an additional teletypewriter system. This system, known as HICOM, was activated in 1957 and operated parallel to the existing communications channels. Later, the Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT), established an additional parallel circuit known as the “Atomic Strike Coordinator Circuit.” It was determined that even more rapid communications would be necessary. Therefore, a new communications net, known as the “Naval Operation Net” was formed in 1959. At the same time, the Navy decided that the stations at Haiku and Heeia were no longer needed. The station at Heeia was turned over to the Marine corps Air Station at Kaneohe, while the Haiku station was placed in a non-operational status.

The communication stations on Oahu underwent a consolidation in 1967. The message centers at Pearl Harbor (NAVSHIPYD), Makalapa (CINCPACFLT), Camp Smith (CINCPAC), Moanalua (FLEWEACEN), Secure Voice Pearl Harbor, and Consolidated Maintenance came under an Officer-in-Charge, which was known as NAVCOMMACTS Pearl Harbor. NAVCOMMACTS Pearl Harbor was a department of NAVCOMMSTA Honolulu who exercised administrative and operational control. The message center at Barbers Point also came under the control of NAVCOMMSTA Honolulu at the same time.

The Makalapa Local Digital Message Exchange (LDMX) was activated in March 1973 by Vice Admiral G. C. Talle, Deputy CINCPACFLT. The system’s activation marked a significant step forward by improving writer-to-reader speed of service, message formatting, routing indicator assignment, and message recall for CINCPACFLT. In September 1977, the NAVCOMMACTS Pearl Harbor was disestablished and NTCC Camp Smith, NTCC Makalapa, NTCC Pearl Harbor, Secure Voice, and Consolidated Maintenance became separate departments of NAVCOMMSTA Honolulu. Concurrently, NTCC Moanalua was disestablished and the communication functions were turned over to the Fleet Weather Center.

In December 1977, NTCC Pearl Harbor was disestablished and absorbed into NTCC Makalapa in an ongoing effort to consolidate communications on Oahu. Subsequently, in February 1978, NTCC Makalapa, located in the basement of the CINCPACFLT headquarters building at Makalapa, became officially known as NTCC Pearl Harbor. The Commanding Officer of NAVCOMMSTA Honolulu transmitted the first message, via the LDMX system, in a ceremony marking the transformation of the CINCPAC Telecommunications Center at Camp H.M. Smith from Joint operation to Navy management in September 1973.

In April 1976, the Naval Communications Station Honolulu was officially renamed Naval Communication Area Master Station, Eastern Pacific (NAVCAMS EASTPAC).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Naval Computer and Telecommunications Area Master Station Pacific, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Since AMD64 and Intel 64 are substantially similar, many software and hardware products use one vendor-neutral term to indicate their compatibility with both implementations. AMD’s original designation for this processor architecture, “x86-64″, is still sometimes used for this purpose, as is the variant “x86_64″. Other companies, such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, use the contraction “x64″ in marketing material.

The term IA-64 refers to the Itanium processor, and should not be confused with x86-64, as it is a completely different instruction set.

Many operating systems and products, especially those that introduced x86-64 support prior to Intel’s entry into the market, use the term “AMD64″ or “amd64″ to refer to both AMD64 and Intel 64.

* BSD systems such as FreeBSD, MidnightBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD refer to both AMD64 and Intel 64 under the architecture name “amd64″.

* The Linux kernel refers to 64-bit architecture as “x86_64″.

* The GNU Compiler Collection refers to 64-bit architecture as “amd64″.

* Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo refer to both AMD64 and Intel 64 under the architecture name “amd64″.

* Fedora PackageKit, openSUSE, and Arch Linux refer to 64-bit architecture as “x86_64″.

* Haiku: refers to 64-bit architecture as “x86_64″.

* Java Development Kit (JDK): The name “amd64″ is used in directory names containing x86-64 files.

* Mac OS X: Apple refers to 64-bit arc

* Microsoft Windows: x86-64 versions of Windows use the AMD64 moniker internally to designate various components which use or are compatible with this architecture. For example, the system folder on a Windows x86-64 Edition installation CD-ROM is named “AMD64″, in contrast to “i386″ in 32-bit versions.

* Solaris: The “isalist” command in Sun’s Solaris operating system identifies both AMD64- and Intel 64–based systems as “amd64″.

* T2 SDE refer to both AMD64 and Intel 64 under the architecture name “x86-64″, in source code directories and package meta information.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article X86-64, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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WebKit is used as the rendering engine within Safari on Windows, Mac OS X and iOS. Other applications on Mac OS X can make use of WebKit, for example Apple’s e-mail client Mail and the 2008 version of Microsoft’s Entourage personal information manager both make use of WebKit to render e-mail messages with HTML content.

New web browsers have been built around WebKit such as the S60 browser on Symbian mobile phones, Midori, Shiira, Google’s Chrome browser, Uzbl, Maxthon 3 and the Android Web browser. WebKit has been adopted as the rendering engine in OmniWeb, iCab and Epiphany replacing their original rendering engines. Epiphany supported both Gecko and WebKit for some time, but the team decided that Gecko’s release cycle and future development plans would make it cumbersome to continue supporting it. Palm’s WebOS is also based on WebKit. The latest interface update for Valve Corporation’s Steam uses WebKit for rendering of its interface and built in browser. WebKit is used to render HTML and execute JavaScript in Adobe’s AIR application platform. In Adobe Creative Suite CS5, WebKit is used to render some parts of the user interface.

Ports

The week after Hyatt’s announcement of WebKit’s open-sourcing, Nokia announced that it had ported WebKit to the Symbian operating system and was developing a browser based on WebKit for mobile phones running S60. Now named Web Browser for S60, it is used on Nokia, Samsung, LG, and other Symbian S60 mobile phones. Apple has also ported WebKit to the iOS to run on the iPhone and iPod To

In June 2007, Apple announced that WebKit had been ported to Microsoft Windows as part of Safari. There are also ongoing ports for the open source operating systems Syllable, Haiku and AROS.

WebKit has also been ported to a number of toolkits that support multiple platforms, such as the GTK+ toolkit, the Qt toolkit, the Adobe Integrated Runtime and the EFL. Qt Software (owned by Nokia) includes the Qt port in the Qt 4.4 release. The Qt port of WebKit is also available to be used in Konqueror in KDE 4.1. The Iris Browser on Qt also uses WebKit. The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) port is under development (by Samsung and [http://profusion.mobi ProFUSION]) focusing the embedded and mobile systems, for use as stand alone browser, widgets/gadgets, rich text viewer and composer.

There is also a project synchronized with WebKit (sponsored by Pleyo) called ”Origyn Web Browser”, which provides a meta-port to an abstract platform with the aim of making porting to embedded or lightweight systems quicker and easier. This port is used for embedded devices such as set-top boxes, PMP and it has been ported into AmigaOS 4.1, AmigaOS 3.9 for Classic Amiga machines, AROS and MorphOS. MorphOS version 1.7 is the first version of OWB supporting HTML5 media tags.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article WebKit, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Adobe provides an official player for GNU/Linux on x86 in a binary-only form. Gnash, however, can be compiled and executed on many architectures, including x86, AMD64, MIPS/IRIX, and PowerPC. It also supports BSD-based operating systems. An early port for RISC OS, which has never had Macromedia/Adobe Flash support beyond Flash 3, does exist, as well as an early port for BeOS, where Flash support terminated at Version 4. Development of a port to AmigaOS 4.1 has also recently begun. A port to the Haiku Operating System also exists.

Currently, Gnash can play SWF files up to version 7, as well as some features of the new version 8,9 and 10 files. Gnash supports playback of FLV videos and allows playing some FLV files from YouTube, MySpace, ShowMeDo and other similar websites (older files with sound – newer files without playing sound). FLV support requires FFmpeg or GStreamer to be installed on the system.

Some other free-software programs, such as MPlayer, VLC media player or players for Windows based on the ffdshow DirectShow codecs can play back the FLV format if the file is specially downloaded or piped to it.

The goal of the Gnash developers is to be as compatible as possible with the proprietary player (including behavior on bad ActionScript code). However, Gnash offers some special features not available in the Adobe player, such as the possibility to extend the ActionScript classes via shared libraries: sample extensions include MySQL support, file system access and more. For security reasons the extension mechanism must be compiled-in explicitly and enabled via c

Gnash requires one of AGG, Cairo, or OpenGL for rendering. In contrast to most GNU projects, which are typically written in C, Gnash is written in the C++ programming language because of its GameSWF heritage.

The version 0.8.8 was released at the 22. August 2010. Rob Savoye announced that Gnash should now work with 100% of all YouTube videos.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Gnash, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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