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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RE[5]: Making progresses, but...
by bogomipz on Tue 11th May 2010 20:09
in reply to "RE[4]: Making progresses, but..."
Member since:2005-07-11
"I'm fairly certain that someone released an input_server plugin to implement Alt-drag a few years back, but sadly I can't remember the name.
It seems to have been integrated (see previous pages in discussion), sadly someone thought that Ctl+Alt+Click was smarter in meantime... "
Yes, I completely agree. This should require a single modifier key only, it doesn't matter which modifier, but it needs to be only one key.
I dislike spatial browsing because of my love for big hierarchies in file storage, but it may be better in the long run.
For deep hierarchies, I'm sure you will love Tracker's right-click drill down. It just might make spatial browsing bearable for you
RE[6]: Making progresses, but...
by Neolander on Tue 11th May 2010 21:10
in reply to "RE[5]: Making progresses, but..."
Member since:2010-03-08
For deep hierarchies, I'm sure you will love Tracker's right-click drill down. It just might make spatial browsing bearable for you
Maybe ^^ Once Haiku reaches beta quality and handles USB pens + FAT filesystem and WPA encryption + Atheros chips, I'll try to install it on my hard drive, and do my everyday work using it + a 8 GB usb pen, in order to definitively decide if I like it or not. At the moment, in VBox, I can play with the OS and stress-test it a bit, but performance is not good enough for everyday use, which I need for a more in-depth usability test. Moreover, I need some OS development environment in order to play with my code (at the moment I use 2 custom GCC+binutils builds, one for i686 and one for x86_64, Kate as a C/C++/asm code editor, Bochs for testing purposes, and a bash-like command interpreter along with mtools and dd for repetitive task automation sake), and I don't know if I could set up one in Haiku easily.
Edited 2010-05-11 21:21 UTC
News
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
Okay, so it's just a Virtualbox-specific bug (on my Athlon64 3000+, with ~500 MB of virtual RAM and 64MB of virtual video ram, it takes around 20-30 seconds to fully load desktop + deskbar + tracker).
No, what I'm talking about is using tabs on the left and right side but with horizontal labels. If you wonder why this may be useful, compare how much apps the deskbar with default settings (vertical list of horizontal buttons) can show with how much it can show when it's put at the bottom of the desktop. This would allow much more tabs to be put on the side of a window. Currently, you can put 3-4 tabs side by side as a maximum, with tabs on the left or on the right, you could make ~10-tabs windows easily.
It seems to have been integrated (see previous pages in discussion), sadly someone thought that Ctl+Alt+Click was smarter in meantime...
"Everywhere"? By my count, the "Mount" menu exists in exactly one place: Tracker's right-click menu. "
Right click on desktop + Deskbar menu. I thought I had seen more, though. IMO, it should be in only one place, or, even more nice, not appear in menus unless an option is set somewhere...
Sure, if you have multiple drives/partitions, or regularly insert & unplug removable media. "
Problem is that manual drive mounting is a geek-only feature. Normal users don't manually mount/umount their partitions everyday, they just have them mounted automagically as needed and unmount them through a right-click menu. As an example, Windows automatically mounts drives/partitions, why some linux desktops do not but show an icon for the unmounted drive/partitions and mounts them automatically when you want to access them. I prefer the second option myself : it's not resource-intensive, it works without the need of going through some manual mounting (and hence learning about mounting), and it's easily discoverable too...
Ctrl-Shift-K. "
Alt+K (Ctl+Shift+K does not work, so I suppose that's what you meant) still leads to messy results, just like mac OS classic.
1/It does not reorganizes the icons on a grid, it wastes space everywhere...
2/...and hence icons finally get out of the window, leading to the need of scrolling or resizing the window.
Random example of both : http://yfrog.com/jmmesshp
Yeah, or a way to disable per-folder display settings, like in Windows XP.
Ctrl-Opt-Up: open parent folder & close current folder
Ctrl-Opt-Down: open selected sub-folder and close current folder, double-clicking a folder with Option (Win-key) held down accomplishes the same thing.
This still means that spatial browsing is not the preferred way of browsing files : you have to learn some keyboard shortcuts or play with preferences in order to do otherwise.
My problem is with having this used as a default setting. But then, as you said...
Actually, that argument, while perfectly valid, is one of the things that make me less enthusiastic about Haiku than as usual : in the end, wouldn't bearing the BeOS legacy have the same effect on it as the one bearing the DOS legacy has had on Windows for a very long time ?
Maybe, though ergonomically-wise it's generally better to make people use the knowledge which comes from using other OSs, in order to reduce learning pain. However, you're right that applying this principle everywhere is bad for innovation. I dislike spatial browsing because of my love for big hierarchies in file storage, but it may be better in the long run.
That's a design choice which I, and many potential users, happen not to like. Let's see how well it'll perform in the future ^^
Only if you can make usability-aware devs use it, which requires more usability in the whole OS first
Edited 2010-05-11 16:50 UTC