Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th May 2010 10:03 UTC, submitted by robertson
Two news items about alternative operating system news in a row? What is this, Christmas? In any case, the Haiku project, the darling of OSNews (hey it's okay now), has released its second alpha release. This new stable development release contains some serious improvements over the first alpha.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:33 UTC
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
Linked by Anonymous on 06/18/13 22:26 UTC
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 22:25 UTC
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:45 UTC
"I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/18/13 17:32 UTC, submitted by poundsmack
A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)".
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:58 UTC
"The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/17/13 17:52 UTC
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 21:03 UTC
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 20:46 UTC
"And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/14/13 17:32 UTC
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.More News »
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2010-03-08
I like the way everything works together in a desktop operating system where the kernel, GUI, and API have all been designed together. It has a sort of "solid" feel to it. One example of this is, I can click and drag almost anything onto anything in Haiku and have the expected result. (file onto application icon, selected text into another application window, image onto the desktop...) Hmm... I realize I'm not making a very good point, but anyway, that's how I feel when using Haiku.
I can understand that. GUI developed separately from the kernel on Linux feels just horrible. I've learned programming with Delphi (RAD development on top of Windows API), and have been the "unified" feeling of it ever since.
Also, free and open source software is important to me, so even though Windows and Mac OS X are made by single companies, I am not interested in them.
I agree that the issue is relatively important. That's not a major selling point for most users however, and won't make any difference for a Linux user.
Haiku does does not have the concept of being "busy". There is nothing equivalent to the Windows hourglass, the Mac OS X pinwheel, or the (rarely seen) Linux hourglass. Haiku doesn't even have a mouse cursor for that. The user is always in control.
Well, on VirtualBox at least said user has to wait from time to time.
There's one area where Haiku does this the wrong way, though : startup, where the mouse pointer is already there while you can still do nothing useful and have to wait for some time before UI gets actually loaded.
I found the GUI to be very pleasant to look at and easy to learn. The major different I found was how the deskbar works, but you can click and drag the little "handle" to make it look like GNOME or Windows if you want.
Didn't know about that. The Windows/GNOME way of doing things is a waste of space, though, so I'll keep it as a vertical panel. What I found while playing with the deskbar, however, was an option that I was deeply missing : always on top. For the user to stay in control, the deskbar must stay easily accessible. With always on top, it feels clunky though (windows are not resized in order to stop going behind the deskbar), it's clear that it's not the developer's preferred options. It's sad, I think it should.
Other things which I dislike about Haiku's UI...
-> The tabbed windows border. It would become something useful if I could move the tab all around the window (including around the left, right, and bottom borders) and create tabbed windows in the way the newer KDE 4 does, but at the moment it's just harder to grab windows border with nothing in compensation.
-> I miss windows grabbing with Alt + Click in the middle of the window. It's one of the few powerful and distinctive features of Linux's window management.
-> I dislike the ways file browsing and management is done currently, because...
1/I get tired of seeing "mount" menus everywhere. Is mounting and unmounting really such an important task ?
2/The current way of managing file icons is not Fitts-friendly. To make file management an easy task, icons must be bigger, so that they can be targeted easily even when you move the pointer with little precision. Use of list views does not allow that. 16x16 icons have very low readability and are hard to target (especially in 1280x1024).
Moreover, icons in folders are a mess as soon as you stop using list view, just like in older releases of Mac OS... And just as annoying. Last issue with icons : apparently, you can't have a global setting for all folders, which means that if you want to get rid of the list view, you must go into each and every folder, one by one, and change this settings. This is horribly bad.
3/Spatial file browsing is bad as a default settings. It fills your desktop with loads of windows that you don't care about, and once you've done with it you must close all those windows, one by one. That mistake was introduced by older Mac OS too, if I remember well... Some people like it, most do not, hence don't make it the default.
I like how the default settings are very nice. I find that Haiku has a good balance of "setup everything nicely for me and don't let me mess it up" and "give me the power to do whatever I want on my computer". I am often tweaking Linux, or in other words, working ON Linux instead of working IN Linux. I don't find that to be the case in Haiku. (Or Mac OS X)
I tweak Linux and Windows more than Haiku myself, that's true. But I've still some issues with default settings, as shown above...
As a software developer, I like the standard API that is included on all Haiku installations, which includes widgets, graphics, and sound.
That's one of Haiku's selling point as a developer, sure
There are philosophical differences in how software is packaged and run. There isn't really a concept of an application being "installed". Instead, all of the files for an application just sit in a directory. To "uninstall", just delete the directory. You could put all of your Haiku applications on a USB drive, stick it in any Haiku computer, and just run the applications right off the drive. I know Linux software can be setup to run like this, but in Haiku it is expected.
It's true that it's simpler. But I wonder if this behavior is here to stay when Haiku devs begin to have security in mind. Good security without some kind of installer is difficult. I'm personally a packet advocate : it allows caring about security and centralized software management, without introducing some "next" hell...
Edited 2010-05-10 20:15 UTC