OSNews

While I'm still chipping away at my AmigaOS 4.1/sam440ep review (try writing a thesis and a large review at the same time), Cloanto released AmigaForever 2009. AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.

Whenever we talk about Mac clone makers such as Psystar, we all more or less accept as a fact that Apple is selling copies of its Mac OS X operating system at a price lower than it would have been if Apple did not have a hardware business. Even though we treat this statement as fact - recently, I've been wondering: where is the proof?

Well, it really seems as if Psystar is committed to continue its business, no matter what. The company entered chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, and many wondered if this meant the end of the clone maker and the legal case between Apple and Psystar. Well, today the clone maker announced that it is emerging from chapter 11, and while they're at it, they also introduce a new "Mac".

The FAT file system is the file system used by MS-DOS and earlier versions of Windows. It's a relatively simple and straightforward file system, supported by just about any operating system, making it the favoured file system on memory cards and the like. FAT is an ECMA and ISO standard, but these only apply for FAT12 and FAT16 without support for long file names, and therein lies a problem.

Today's a slow news day, so I thought it would be a good day to bring up an idea I've been incubating. I've been contemplating launching an OSNews-like site on the topic of Enterprise Computing. Obviously, OSNews covers the OS-related aspects of heavy-duty business, scientific, and academic computing already, and sometimes news on databases, app servers, cloud computing and other related topics too, but a lot of the kind of news that is useful to enterprise IT people falls outside of OSNews' purview, and it's appropriate to keep it that way. But I think that the enterprise IT world could use an OSNews-like site to aggregate and examine the latest news in that sphere. So my question to you, dear OSNews readers, is this: Do you agree? Would you be interested in reading and participating in a site on that topic? Would you be interested in being involved? If so, I'd like to recruit a few editors to help me launch it. Read on for more details. Update: Are there any native Korean speakers who read OSNews? If you are one, and you'd be willing to help me out with a short project, please contact me.

The Mono discussion may be tiring, but the fact of the matter is that thanks to this discussion, various major Linux distributions are now making official statements detailing their position in the Mono/C# debate. The latest to do this is Ubuntu, which reiterated their position yesterday.

We've had a lot of debates recently on the merits - or dangers - of Mono. We've had troubles with how Microsoft views Mono and whether or not everyone is safe using it, but we also had a public back-and-forth among Debian maintainers. During all this, Richard Stallman remained pretty mum on the issue, today he broke the silence on the FSF website.

As was anticipated, the boys and girls at Mozilla have released the final build of Firefox 3.5 today. Firefox 3.5 - originally supposed to be 3.1 - comes with many welcome improvements, chief among which is support for HTML5 audio and video tags.

A known and usual problem with alternative operating systems is getting them on normal users' desktops. OEMs won't take you seriously until you gain massive traction, and even then your chances are still pretty low. So, iXsystems, PC-BSD's parent company, decided to take matters into its own hands, and has unveiled a PC-BSD workstation, with a PC-BSD laptop under way.

With all the talk about Moore's Law, and doomsday predictions of the industry hitting the ceiling of what's possible with regular transistors, you'd almost forget that a lot of people are already thinking about the next revolution in computing: quantum computers. Researchers at Yale have succeeded in producing the first working solid-state quantum processor. Highly intriguing, but way over my head.