Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Sep 2011 22:22 UTC, submitted by kragil
The story about how secure boot for Windows 8, part of UEFI, will hinder the use of non-signed binaries and operating systems, like Linux, has registered at Redmond as well. The company posted about it on the Building Windows 8 blog - but didn't take any of the worries away. In fact, Red Hat's Matthew Garrett, who originally broke this story, has some more information - worst of which is that Red Hat has received confirmation from hardware vendors that some of them will not allow you to disable secure boot.
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RE: Reported to the European Commission
by moondevil on Sat 24th Sep 2011 10:50
in reply to "Reported to the European Commission"
Member since:2005-07-08
Where is the page where to complain to:
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/consumers/contacts_en.html
Let's just send similar emails to them.
RE[2]: Reported to the European Commission
by Paddlaren on Sat 24th Sep 2011 12:46
in reply to "RE: Reported to the European Commission"
Member since:2011-09-24
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/consumers/contacts_en.html
Under "1. What can I do if I suspect that a business practice restricts competition?" and step 2a is recommended you to send email to:
comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu
to inform the Commission that there is a possible threat to a competitive market.
So lets see if there is some power in the EC 
BR
Erik
News
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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2011-09-24
I posted this to the European Commission for Competition (http://ec.europa.eu/competition/consumers). I still wait for some kind to response or registration ID to follow up on later.
BR
Erik
Sir or Madam,
I have followed the discussion on the Internet regarding new requirements from Microsoft that PC vendors are obliged to use UEFI secure boot to label PD hardware with the Windows logo. The problem is best describe in reference [1] bellow; PC vendors is obliged to have UEFI but not obliged to be able to disable it if users need to, nor are there a central database of certificates where different software vendors can register certificates.
I am concerned that Microsoft and PC vendors effectively restrict the competition in choice of operating system by using this mechanism.
Analysing the situation is seems clear to me and the parts of the open source community that this will effectively disable the ability of using operating systems other than Windows 8 on the device. From my perspective it seems like Microsoft are using their dominant position to enforce the PC vendors to lock user to Microsoft operating systems and software thus disable owners to have a different opinion of the software on their purchased hardware device.
Similar mechanisms has been used for along time and with great success by some mobile phone vendors to secure that the telephone software is the original software from the original vendor. This is an indication of how well the mechanism works and how well it hinders competitive software to be loaded on the device unless new certificates can be added or the mechanism can be disabled.
I propose that this problem is analysed and that measures are taken to ensure that PC hardware sold in EU are open to run any feasible operating system by owners choice, preferable using the same secure mechanism.
Mind that Android, MeeGo, or Apple OS X would not exist if the PC users had been enforced to use only operating systems from Microsoft. All of them relies on operating systems (GNU/Linux and BSD) developed outside the control of Microsoft. This depicts the the benefit of competition on the operating system level, and the price of locking computer to only one commercial operating system vendor.
References:
[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/25185/Microsoft_Responds_to_Secure_Boot...
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/22/protecting-the-pre-os...
[3] http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/5850.html