Search Results for: haiku

Late June 2009 I bought a 13" MacBook Pro (2.26 GHz, 4 GB RAM). I suppose that after just three months, the blinding "first joys" over getting a laptop have worn off. By now, I deem my thoughts about this device to be realistic and of an appropriate level. The past few weeks I attained mastery over the Mac OS through personal discovery, accompanied by a very insightful book; I bought additional software and hacked the Dock to suit my preferences.

Whenever there is a new company popping up, offering to install OSX on "Hackintoshes", everyone questions: Is this company for real? Do they think they can really take on Apple's Legal Team? What are their motivations? They're probably just in it for a quick buck or looking to be bought out once they achieve minor success. Here, I outline what I learned about Quo Computer on July 10th, 2009 and some of the things people can expect.

And yet another week has flown by. Nothing particularly exciting happened this week, but we did have some interesting conversations about old software, some phone news, Microsoft revealed the pricing information for Windows 7, and we talked about netbook customer satisfaction.

I moved into the realm of digital SLR photography back in 2003 when when I got myself a Canon 10D. The 10D served me very well for 7 years and 14 000 pictures. Then I decided it was time for an upgrade so, I got myself a full frame 21 Megapixel monster, the EOS 5D MkII. It's quite an upgrade, it even does video. These are my impressions after having it for a few weeks.

At the end of January this year, I wrote a rather harsh, but honest article on the state of SkyOS. I was very worried that the closed-source operating system, for which users have to pay in order to beta test it, would never reach a final version, something that was promised to the people paying the price. This feeling was strengthened by a lack of updates; we were five months without news, six months without a release, and 8 months without a changelog update. My article got the ball rolling, but now that we're five weeks down the road, is that ball still rolling?

Yet another week has passed, so it's time for another week in review - the 8th instalment already. This week was marked by the realisation that Qemu and DOSBox on mobile phones are cool, that Apple is working hard on Safari 4, and that Microsoft appears to be more concerned about Linux than about Apple. And, of course, Haiku got Flash. This week's My Take is about zombies.

A long time ago, when Windows was busy crashing into walls, when the Mac OS was running around naked in the woods looking for someone to protect its memory, and when Linux was frantically jumping up and down with a lollipop in its mouth, we were blessed with the BeOS. It was new, free of legacy nonsense, fast, and designed from the ground-up to make sense (which it didn't, but at least they tried). It could do all sorts of fancy stuff that the other operating systems could only dream of, but at the same time, trivial things like actually getting networking and the internet to work brought it to its knees. Sadly, it didn't make it because Windows and the Mac OS were bullying BeOS, and of course it didn't help that BeOS' parents didn't really know anything about the real world either. The community around BeOS, however, never really died out, and the central hub, BeBits, weathered all storms. It found a new owner today.

BeGeistert 019: Alphaville, was held on 10-12 October 2008 in Dusseldorf, Germany. I went along for the first time in four years and came away with a mini laptop running Haiku. BeGeistert is an event usually held in Germany for BeOS users. It's been quite some time since I last attended. Last one I was at was Begeistert012 way back in 2004.

It seems that Haiku hacker Francois Revol (mmu_man) posted a few messages to a thread in MSI's forums asking to provide hardware with open specifications and/or (non-GPL) FOSS drivers such that alternative operating systems like Haiku and others could benefit and be supported as well. His messages were seemingly squelched by a forum moderator as "rubbish" while other, pro-Linux, postings seem to have remain untouched. Francois decided to respond with a public blog rant of his own opinions regarding the state of open source driver support and vendors' responsibility to their customers.

As some of you may have noticed, I'm slightly obsessed with my Aspire One netbook, and actually, with netbooks in general. They are great little devices, more powerful than you'd give them credit for upon first encounter. And, but that might just be me, netbooks are what laptops should have been from day one: truly portable. El Reg has put together a buyer's guide for today's netbooks, and while the guide is generally spot-on with its assessments, it does present some odd choices here and there. Read on for some of my own thoughts grown out of experience.

More often than not, the question arises on OSNews why certain projects or pieces of abandonware aren't released as open source software. Supposedly, this would speed up development, facilitate the growth of a community, all that jazz associated with open source development. Here are four projects I'd like to see released under a MIT license.

It seems like we're really on the subject of filesystems and related technology the past few days. We had an interview with the man behind BeServed, an item on WinFS' current status, and now we - possibly - have news on ZFS coming to Linux. Possibly, because it's all speculation from here on out.

The various Google Summer of Code slots have been awarded to the participating projects. As most of you will know, the Summer of Code is all about enticing programmers to contribute to open source projects. Students submit their ideas to mentor organisations (these mentors are approved by Google first), and after selecting the ideas the mentors like the most, the programmers work to complete their task. If they succeed, Google will grant them a stipend. Google selected 174 mentor organisations for this year's Summer of Code. Read on for a selection of interesting applications that have been approved.

Every now and then, the Haiku mailing lists explode with emails about something called the distribution guidelines. The Haiku guys set up a set of guidelines with regards to use of the Haiku trademarks and logos; the "Haiku" name may not be used in the distribution's name, official trademarks and logos must be excluded, but the Haiku icons and artwork may be used. In addition to these cosmetic and trademark issues, the guidelines explain what is needed in order to receive the official "Haiku compatible" logo.