Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 8th Dec 2009 19:19 UTC
Law and Order And we have news of yet another massive copyright infringement lawsuit in the music industry. This one takes place in Canada, and the infringed party is placing a truly massive claim on the infringing party: 50 million USD, with the possibility of it exceeding 60 billion USD. Bad news? Well, no, not really - you really need to consider the infringing party in this one. This is irony not even the ancient Greeks could imagine.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 8th Dec 2009 18:24 UTC, submitted by google_ninja
Google After a long wait, Google has finally released the first official beta release of Google Chrome for Mac. This being a beta release, it is not yet entirely on par feature-wise with the Windows version, but in return Mac users get a browser that is very well integrated with Mac OS X. Update The Linux beta is out too! More here.

 

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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 8th Dec 2009 00:48 UTC, submitted by Yama
Hardware, Embedded Systems We've seen a lot of reports going back and forth about whether or not Linux is doing well in the netbook space. As it turns out, research firm ABI Research as well as Dell say about one third of their machines ship with Linux pre-installed - which is pretty darn impressive.

 

Linked by David Adams on Mon 7th Dec 2009 18:52 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Google had a media event at the Computer History Museum today to announce new mobile computing services, and seem to have brought to light the kind of "jetpack and flying car" futuristic functionality that mobile computing aficionados have been talking about for years. I'm sure it will all be a little creaky at first, but today may prove to be an important mobile computing landmark.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 7th Dec 2009 18:51 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless In what is certainly entirely expected, I was wrong about the whole CrunchPad drama. I suspected it was nothing more than a publicity stunt, but as it turns out, Fusion Garage's side of the story confirmed that the break between them and Arrington is real. During a press conference today, Fusion Garage told their side of the story, while also officially introducing the CrunchPad Joo Joo.

 

Linked by Bahadir on Mon 7th Dec 2009 18:24 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes The Codezero team has released version 0.2 of their L4 microkernel. In this release, the microkernel is fully capability checked, and they introduced the notion of containers to provide isolated execution environments.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 4th Dec 2009 23:01 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Earlier this week, we reported on the apparent death of Michael Arrington's dream, the CrunchPad. The CrunchPad was supposed to be a slick tablet, but according to an emotional blog post by Arrington the project had been more or less stolen from him by Chandrasekar "Chandra" Rathakrishnan, CEO of Fusion Garage. Rathakrishnan has announced to hold a press event Monday, telling his side of the story, as well as a brief demonstration of the actual device.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 4th Dec 2009 19:29 UTC
Internet & Networking You thought the whole browser ballot thing in Windows was behind us, right? That everybody was finally happy, so that we could continue doing what an overwhelming number of people have already done without a ballot screen - that is, install non-IE browsers? Not exactly. Opera, Mozilla, and Google still had complaints, which Microsoft addressed, making everybody happy.

 

Linked by David Adams on Fri 4th Dec 2009 17:16 UTC
In the News This 24/7 Wall Street article displays three common media ailments: hyperbole, a love for top ten lists, and an obsession with December predictions for the coming year (which off course OSNews is obviously also falling victim to), and there are some predictable losers on this list (Blockbuster Video, anyone?). I thought it would be an interesting topic for OSNews because three of the companies/brands are quite familiar to us: Palm, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems.

 

Linked by David Adams on Fri 4th Dec 2009 16:14 UTC
Privacy, Security, Encryption Websense has made ten predictions about security/vulnerability trends for 2010. There's no crystal ball, so we're not talking about malicious innovation, but mostly a recognition that certain nefarious activities are gaining traction and will expand in the near future. Of particular interest to OSNews readers: exploitations of Windows 7 and IE 8 vulnerabilities, the beginning of the end of the Mac's reprieve on security issues, and increasing targeting of mobile devices (beyond Rickrolling your iPhone, presumably). Read on to learn OSNews 2010 security predictions.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 3rd Dec 2009 22:58 UTC
Google Google has just launched its very own public Domain Name System resolver, with which the company hopes to speed up internet traffic. The search giant claims its DNS is more secure (through protection against cache poisoning attacks) and faster than others.

 

Written by Ian MacGregor on Thu 3rd Dec 2009 20:40 UTC
Window Managers Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd Dec 2009 23:41 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Time. Coming. Long. Put these in the appropriate order, and you'll get my reaction to this news. Nokia has announced that it is planning a major overhaul of the user interface to the Symbian operating system, still the most popular smartphone platform in the world.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd Dec 2009 23:17 UTC
Features, Office A few weeks ago, we talked about how the rise of computing, a field wherein English is the primary language, is affecting smaller languages, and more specifically, the Dutch language (because that's my native tongue). Of course, it's not just the smaller languages that are affected - English, too, experiences the pressure.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd Dec 2009 17:22 UTC
Google As most of you will know, a common problem for any new operating system is hardware support. Drivers don't grow on trees, and usually need to be written by manufacturers, which costs time and money. Luckily for Chrome OS, it uses the Linux kernel which makes the hardware support question far less problematic. Still, when it comes to printers, the situation is different, and here, Google is trying to achieve something which should've been done ages ago.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Dec 2009 23:53 UTC
Windows There was a bit of a stink today about an antivirus vendor claiming that Microsoft's November security patches caused computers to show a 'black screen of death'. Microsoft has investigated the issue, and states that the antivirus vendor, Prevx, is wrong.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Dec 2009 19:03 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
Qt Nokia has released the latest version of its cross-platform toolkit Qt, version 4.6. As usual, it comes with a whole slew of improvements and new features, and this time, they even added a new platform into the mix.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 1st Dec 2009 17:14 UTC
Law and Order The case between Apple and Psystar may in fact finally be over. AppleInsider is reporting on a document filed with the California court which says that the two companies have entered into a settlement agreement. However, since AppleInsider doesn't actually provide the document in question, and nothing shows up yet on dockets, it's all a little bit unclear. Update: Here's the filing. It does not cover the Florida case, but pretty much ends the California one. Round 1 a smashing victory for Apple, round 2 has Psystar starting heavily crippled.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 30th Nov 2009 23:45 UTC
SUN Microsystems Yesterday (today if you're in the US), Sun released the latest version of its virtualisation solution, VirtualBox 3.1. Among speed improvements and other smaller features, the biggest news is that Virtualox 3.1 introduces something called teleportation: you can move running VMs between machines - servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn't matter to VirtualBox. Coincidentally, this reminded me of an idea I once had about moving running applications between machines.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 30th Nov 2009 19:37 UTC, submitted by -ujb-
Morphos The MorphOS team seems to be on a roll. Recently, they added support for the PowerPC G4 Mac mini models from Apple, meaning it suddenly became a lot easier to get your hands on a computer capable of running MorphOS. As expected, the team has now announced that a release with PowerMac G4 support is coming as well.