http://www.osnews.com Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:36:02 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/story/22519/MikeOS_4_0_Released_with_BASIC_Interpreter http://osnews.com/story/22519/MikeOS_4_0_Released_with_BASIC_Interpreter A new version of the learning tool OS MikeOS is available, sporting a new BASIC interpreter with 24 instructions. You can run BASIC code from inside the text editor by pressing F8. See the App Developer Handbook for a guide to the BASIC dialect (somewhat similar to old 8-bit BASICs, nostalgia fans), and the User Handbook for info on running MikeOS from a USB key, floppy or CD. Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:28:39 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) OSNews, Generic OSes http://osnews.com/story/22518/IBM_Halts_Future_Cell_Development http://osnews.com/story/22518/IBM_Halts_Future_Cell_Development German website Heise Online has received confirmation that IBM is terminating its Cell processor line. This means that no future development will take place, making the PoweXCell 8i the last Cell processor. Parts of the Cell project will still make it into future processor designs, however. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) IBM http://osnews.com/story/22517/Growl_for_Windows_2_0_Arrives http://osnews.com/story/22517/Growl_for_Windows_2_0_Arrives "The Growl for Windows Project developers have released version 2.0 of their Windows-compatible port of the Mac-based Growl global notification application. The major update includes a number of bug fixes, performance improvements and new features." Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:51:39 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Windows http://osnews.com/story/22516/Dell_Earnings_Down_54_Percent http://osnews.com/story/22516/Dell_Earnings_Down_54_Percent "Dell reported its third-quarter earnings results Thursday, showing a small improvement over the last quarter, but revenue was down 15 percent over the last year, and profits fell 54 percent. The company reported revenue of $12.9 billion, within analysts' expectations between $12.8 billion and $13.5 billion. Earnings were 17 cents per share, when excluding 6 cents of pretax expenses and amortization. That's 54 percent off the 37 cents Dell recorded a year ago. Besides its acquisition of Perot Systems last month, there weren't too many positive signs in the recently completed quarter. Shipments were also down 5 percent across its businesses." Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:44:54 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Hardware, Embedded Systems http://osnews.com/story/22515/Microsoft_s_Problematic_Lack_of_Nightly_Builds_for_IE http://osnews.com/story/22515/Microsoft_s_Problematic_Lack_of_Nightly_Builds_for_IE "Many wonder why Microsoft doesn't offer nightly builds - or at least something fairly frequent - of Internet Explorers. Ars talks to Microsoft's general manager for Internet Explorer, who says the IE9 development cycle will look much the same as previous versions. We don't think that's a great idea." Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:39:23 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Internet Explorer http://osnews.com/story/22514/Nobel_Peace_Prize_to_Linus_Torvalds_ http://osnews.com/story/22514/Nobel_Peace_Prize_to_Linus_Torvalds_ Now this is one to ponder. This year, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Barack Obama, president of the United States. The prize has been given to both politicians and non-politicians alike, and Keith Lofstrom thinks its time to hand over the Peace Prize to a non-politician once more: Linus Torvalds. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:11:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Linux http://osnews.com/story/22513/Zero-day_Flaws_in_Firefox_Extensions_Found http://osnews.com/story/22513/Zero-day_Flaws_in_Firefox_Extensions_Found One of the main reasons why Firefox has become so successful is its extension framework, and the large community of extensions developers that has grown around it. What many users are not aware of, however, is that extensions are a bit of a security nightmare. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:53:58 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Mozilla & Gecko clones http://osnews.com/story/22512/After_Long_Wait_Camino_2_0_Finally_Hits_the_Streets http://osnews.com/story/22512/After_Long_Wait_Camino_2_0_Finally_Hits_the_Streets "Camino - the Gecko-based browser with native Cocoa interface and more seamless Mac OS X integration - has finally landed an official 2.0 release. The browser uses a much newer version of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine (the same one used in Firefox) along with updated tabs and improved security features. However, Camino still lags Firefox in support for Web fonts and advanced HTML5 features like the video tag and offline storage." Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:32:34 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Mozilla & Gecko clones http://osnews.com/story/22511/Microsoft_No_NSA_Backdoor_in_Windows_7 http://osnews.com/story/22511/Microsoft_No_NSA_Backdoor_in_Windows_7 Earlier this week, a senior National Security Agency official told US Congress that the NSA had worked on Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7. This spurred a flurry of rumours about the NSA building backdoors into Windows 7, but Microsoft has today categorically denied these claims. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:22:44 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Windows http://osnews.com/story/22510/Interview_CEO_of_Kiloo_Maker_of_App_Store_C64_Emulator http://osnews.com/story/22510/Interview_CEO_of_Kiloo_Maker_of_App_Store_C64_Emulator Jacob Moller*, founder and CEO of Kiloo, the maker of the Commodore 64 emulator in the Apple App Store has kindly answered a few of my questions regarding App Store controversies, and most importantly, porting to other platforms and future projects. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:19:52 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kroc Camen) Original OSNews Interviews http://osnews.com/story/22505/Google_Unveils_Chrome_OS http://osnews.com/story/22505/Google_Unveils_Chrome_OS Google has just unveiled its Chrome OS operating system during a press event at the company's headquarters, and it's pretty much exactly what we expected it to be: a streamlined Linux kernel booting straight into the Chrome web browser. The code is available starting today. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:01:20 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Google http://osnews.com/story/22509/Microsoft_To_Open_C_VB_Net_Compilers http://osnews.com/story/22509/Microsoft_To_Open_C_VB_Net_Compilers "Microsoft, which has been pursuing concurrent improvements for its Visual Basic and C# programming languages, plans to open up compilers for the languages and add capabilities for asynchronous programming and immutability. Discussed at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the blueprint for the two languages will feature compilers as services and accommodations for multicore processors, said Luca Bolognese, program manager for the languages group at Microsoft." Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:29:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Microsoft http://osnews.com/story/22508/Microsoft_Makes_Big_Azure_Announcements_at_PDC_2009 http://osnews.com/story/22508/Microsoft_Makes_Big_Azure_Announcements_at_PDC_2009 "Microsoft's Ray Ozzie significantly blew past the basic Exchange, SharePoint and SQL database hosting services with the Azure announcements at PDC 2009 yesterday. The announcements also blow right past Amazon EC2 and targets Microsoft at Google, Force.com (Salesforce.com's cloud), OpSource and others offering hosting on demand, web services and bus interconnection services in the cloud. Microsoft peeled back last year's Azure onion, showing us how Microsoft wants to do much more than just offer computing platforms or hosted Microsoft products." Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:56:55 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Microsoft http://osnews.com/story/22507/Inside_MinWin_the_Windows_7_Kernel_Slims_Down http://osnews.com/story/22507/Inside_MinWin_the_Windows_7_Kernel_Slims_Down "Back in 2003, Microsoft assembled a team of engineers to rethink the lowest levels of Windows, so that the OS could be more easily slimmed down and secured to run in servers and embedded applications. That project, called 'MinWin', has now started to bear fruit." Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:21 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Windows http://osnews.com/story/22506/Internet_Explorer_9_To_Get_GPU_Rendering_CSS3_HTML5_Support http://osnews.com/story/22506/Internet_Explorer_9_To_Get_GPU_Rendering_CSS3_HTML5_Support At PDC '09 Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division, revealed the first details of the company's next browser, Internet Explorer 9. Even though the new browser is still in an early development stage, the first few builds are being tested internally. It is poised to come with some fancy improvements - including HTML5 and CSS3 support. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:53:14 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Internet Explorer