OSNews

"After what were surely a few extra pots of coffee last night, Apple released iPhone OS 2.2, the latest update to its operating system for the iPhone and iPod touch. As with the 2.1 update just over two months ago, Apple administered a healthy dose of new features and fixes throughout the OS and a handful of applications, many of which we saw previewed over the last couple months. Let's take a look at the most significant changes, some appreciated polish, and recap what's still missing."

The Genode OS framework has seen another release. "We are pleased to announce the release 8.11 of the Genode OS Framework introducing a new device-driver API, a C runtime, support for asynchronous notifications, and many improvements of the base API. With the new release 8.11, we are aiming at enabling Genode for real-world applications that require custom device drivers and the reuse of existing code. Among the major improvements are a new device driver API that eases the reuse of existing device drivers and a C runtime that facilitates the reuse of a wealth of existing C library code on Genode. Furthermore, we extended the base API by a number of exciting feature such as support for asynchronous notifications, capability typification, and managed dataspaces."

What's after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The EE Times has a more detailed write up as well as WebIndia, TopNews.in, Eureka Alert, and Small Times.

Microsoft plans to offer one more public test version of Internet Explorer 8 before releasing the final version of the updated browser, the company said late Wednesday. The next test, essentially a "release candidate" version will come in the first quarter of 2009. That means the final release won't hit Microsoft's initial goal of finishing the browser this year. "Our next public release of IE (typically called a "release candidate") indicates the end of the beta period," general manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a blog posting, "We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in Web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done."

Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers.

Two years ago, Microsoft and Novell inked a landmark deal on patents and Linux-to-Windows interoperability. According to Microsoft and Novell, it's a deal that has shown dramatic momentum in its second year, with a triple digit percentage increase in customers for a total tally of more than 200 customers. "I was surprised at the number of over 200 customers, so I actually went back and double checked it just to make sure," Susan Heystee, General Manager for Global Strategic Alliances at Novell told InternetNews.com. "That represents over 250 percent growth in terms of the number of customers that are part of the partnership which is really great. A real positive surprise has been the great customer momentum."

Linux and other Unix-like operating systems use the term "swap" to describe both the act of moving memory pages between RAM and disk. It is common to use a whole partition of a hard disk for swapping. However, with the 2.6 Linux kernel, swap files are just as fast as swap partitions. Now, many admins (both Windows and Linux/UNIX) follow an old rule of thumb that your swap partition should be twice the size of your main system RAM. Let us say I’ve 32GB RAM, should I set swap space to 64 GB? Is 64 GB of swap space really required? How big should your Linux / UNIX swap space be?

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of Mozilla corporation has posted a report the details the financial status of Mozilla for this year. "Our revenue remains strong; our expenses focused. Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2007 were $75 million, up approximately 12% from 2006 revenue of $67 million. As in 2006 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2006"

From MacRumors: "Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at LISA '08 last week. [...] This year's conference invited Apple's Jordan Hubbard to speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms". The presentation slides (PDF), besides generally interesting info on Mac OS X, feature a table that shows a release date of Q1 2009 for OS X 10.6 Leopard.

Strike one for Apple. Curling is a better sport anyway - the first end goes to Apple. The Cupertino company sued clone maker PsyStar for licensing and trademark violations and copyright infringement, only to be greeted by a counter lawsuit from PsyStar, who claimed Apple was a monopolist. U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with Apple on the counter lawsuit Tuesday. In his 16-page decision Tuesday, Alsup ruled Apple's products don't constitute a market to dominate. As a consequence, Apple then can't be considered a monopolist, Alsup wrote. An Apple spokesman had no comment. A representative for Psystar couldn't be reached for comment. The original lawsuit is still running, so PsyStar can, for now, continue selling its clones.