Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 6th Jul 2007 11:15 UTC
After Axel Dorfler and Robert Szeleney, it is Kristian 'Vanders' van der Vliet's turn to answer the Five Questions. Vanders is one of the primary developers behind Syllable, the fork of (the now dead) AtheOS which saw the light of day July, 2002, because several AtheOS developers were concerned about the project's long-term goals. Syllable is free/open source software under the GPL license.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/25/13 0:45 UTC
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 23:59 UTC
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 22:33 UTC
Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Linked by Howard Fosdick on 05/24/13 21:41 UTC
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 14:44 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 23:22 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:04 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 22:01 UTC
"In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/23/13 17:52 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/22/13 22:23 UTC
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2006-06-26
Well that's a lot of it right there. Haiku's philosophy (from my perspective anyway) is that BeOS was awesome so we should revive it in open source form. It currently maintains both source and binary compatibility with BeOS and sticks closely to the BeOS look and feel. There are a few advantages to this approach: they don't need to design an API (though internal design issues remain), existing BeOS applications will run on it without modification, and it has a built-in userbase of BeOS devotees.
Syllable has a somewhat different philosophy. It's trying to be the best desktop OS it can be. It takes a lot of inspiration from BeOS because BeOS did a lot of things right, but it's continually diverging away from BeOS and is not locked to any of BeOS's design decisions. This is a blessing and a curse. It gives the developers a lot of freedom to do things better than they've been done before in other operating systems, but it means it doesn't run existing BeOS applications. Lack of software is definately Syllable's biggest weakness at the moment, but it is steadily improving as Vanders mentions in the interview.
From a practical perspective, Syllable is significantly more stable and has better hardware support than Haiku currently does, or at least that has been my impression (I have not personally used Haiku). Haiku also has a rather nasty choice ahead of them. The C++ ABI (or at least the name mangling scheme) used by GCC changed between version 2 (which BeOS uses) and all later versions starting with 3. So they either need to stick with old creaky GCC 2, break binary compatibility with BeOS or produce their own custom version of GCC 4 (or 3 I suppose) that is ABI compatible with 2.