Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 15th May 2010 19:23 UTC
There's one complaint we here at OSNews get thrown in our faces quite often: what's up with the lack of, you know, operating system news on OSNews? Why so much mobile phone news? Why so much talk of H264, HTML5, and Flash? Where's the juicy news on tomorrow's operating systems? Since it's weekend, I might as well explain why things are the way they are. Hint: it has nothing to do with a lack of willingness.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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2010-03-08
/begin rant
I agree with you. Unix vs VMS's and DOS's ugly grandson is boring. I agree that UNIX was a cool OS back on its days, and certainly still is for servers, but it's not meant to be a desktop operating system nor is not good at it.
UNIX is an OS family where the preferred data type in system calls is char*, which was not designed with multitasking in mind at all, whose standard GUI structure is horrible (a single app can take down everything by crashing), and for which "event-driven", "pop-up threads" and "asynchronous" are scary words which only get rarely used...
Things are no better in the Windows side. Sure, it's finally stable, but
-The kernel is horribly bloated. In fact, the whole OS suffers from an insane bloat level.
-Everything is still pixel-based
-Just every driver installation CD sees some obvious need to reinvent standard controls and break interface consistency
-There's still a lot of silly popups.
-A web browser is used to render every single system windows, in order to justify its infamous presence.
-When you want to install an app, you still have to give full admin rights to an untrusted "setup.exe" program.
And so on... In fact, Windows could be a good OS, provided that it did not bear the Win9x legacy and had a simpler kernel structure. But it does bear this legacy, and unless a complete rewrite occurs someday it will bear it forever.
I know, I know, desktop is not everything. But that's because things are pretty much mature on the server side. Sometimes, we get a new filesystem, yeah. A 10% performance increase. Or a compatibility layer which allows running apps from os Y on top of os Z with "almost no performance loss". And then life goes on. Revolutionary changes in the server area are planned with the advent of distributed operating systems which just about every computer science lab has a team working on. To the contrary, the desktop is still very immature, but does not get attention anymore.
That's why I'm working on a desktop operating system project. I try to prove that some real evolutions are still possible in that area. But it won't be ready tomorrow. And it could never be ready at all, even though articles like this are encouraging me to go further and prove that the desktop still has something to say.
The fact is, at the moment, I've got nothing that's worth showing. Only some written doc (targeted user experience and kernel design) and a code which turns multiboot data into something useful and arch-independent, and which *almost* turns long mode on. Until I get a fully working µkernel, there's nothing interesting here. And until I get some usable GUI running on top of it, there's nothing worth showing here at OSnews.
It'll take a year or two, at least, before I get a stable GUI, if I take the time to write clean code (which I want to do). Hence, at the moment, I can only agree with this article : it's sad that OS development is so out of fashion, especially in the desktop area, and that people now learn C# and Java instead of C++ and C. But well... If you want this to change, change it yourself
/end rant
Edited 2010-05-16 09:03 UTC