Fascinating interview with the Flappy Bird creator. I like this guy - he seems to have his priorities straight.

It's the perfect product for movie lovers. It has a super-simple interface, completely abstracts Torrents away, works on the three major desktop platforms, and with one click and just a few minutes of waiting, you're watching a high-quality movie streamed through BitTorrent.

The entertainment industry could have built this years ago. Except, they were too busy suing the shit out of the very people they should have been serving to realise all the technology they needed already existed. Had the entertainment industry not been the only industry in the world that is protected by a huge, special legal framework, they would have been forced to innovate much sooner - and they most likely would have built this a decade ago.

Good news for iPhone 4 owners - and good on Apple for taking care of this demographic.

Getting the update is easy indeed. There's a certain other mobile operating system that could learn a few things from that one.

Out of the millions of things Samsung throws at a wall each year to see what sticks, they seem to have picked the fake leather on devices. The most recent victim? A Windows 8 laptop - the ATIV Book 9 'Style'. This thing joins the phones, tablets, and ChromeBooks Samsung has already tacked the fake leather onto.

Genuine question: is there anyone in the audience here who likes this look? If so, why?

The original source is DigiTimes, so some salt may be required, but sources confirmed it to Cnet. There's no detail on exactly which steps Google has actually taken, but it's clear this reeks quite strongly of the same illegal and despicable acts Microsoft committed 15 years ago to pressure OEMs into not shipping BeOS.

This from the company behind "Scroogled".

On a more general note, hypocrite company behaviour like this should be illegal. A company should not be able to say "leave company Abc behind because they do xyz, and come join us!", only to then turn around and do xyz as well. This is lying, and should be punishable in some way.

Don't try this on a production machine.

Interesting look at the goings-on surround Ballmer's end.

Pretty sure Google will introduce windowing support soon in Android, possibly within the next 18-24 months (Android 5.0, perhaps?). It seems inevitable. iOS, on the other hand - we'll see.

CDE 2.2.1 has been released on March 1. The release includes various bugfixes, a NetBSD port and improvement for UTF-8 locales with a new Greek UTF-8 translation.

And with that Frankenlauncher out of the way, the Nokia X suddenly became worth buying.

This was always inevitable. Apple won't mind though - they're still raking in the profits.

With the release of version 14.02, the Genode project has added two major features to the OS-construction framework: Using VirtualBox on top of Genode/NOVA, a wide range of unmodified guest OSes can now be integrated as components into Genode-based systems. The second feature is the addition of the file systems of the NetBSD kernel as rump kernels. The release documentation covers plenty of further improvements.

With storage and virtualization, the new release addresses two topics that are fundamental for using Genode as general-purpose OS, and both topics have been approached in a pretty holistic manner.

When it comes to storage, the project has significantly advanced over the past year but a few key pieces were still missing, namely mature file systems and a block cache. After having investigated FUSE-based file systems in the previous release, the project started exploring so-called rump kernels, which enable the execution of subsystems of the NetBSD kernel at user level. Originally, the rump kernel project was created to ease the development of drivers on NetBSD. The basic idea behind them is to link a driver to a stripped-down version of the NetBSD kernel that does not contain any privileged instruction. Hence, it can be executed in user mode. To interact with the outside world, a rump kernel uses a small so-called "hypercall" interface. By implementing this interface on top of the Genode API, rump kernels have become usable on Genode now. The immediate benefit is the availability of the time-tested file systems of the NetBSD kernel. But in the future, other NetBSD subsystem such as the TCP/IP stack or device drivers could be considered just as well.

At block level, the project took the chance to redesign the internal interfaces of the existing block-level components to support fully asynchronous operation. This step enables the effective use of modern disk-controller features such as native command queuing, and even the out-of-order processing of block requests. As the cherry on top of this line of work, there is a new block-cache component.

Over the past 5 years, virtualization has always played a role for the project. It started with running the paravirtualized OKLinux on top of the OKL4 microkernel. Later L4Linux was made available to Genode running on the Fiasco.OC kernel. Once the NOVA hypervisor found its way to the framework, the project embraced the use of the Vancouver virtual machine monitor, which enabled the use of unmodified Linux kernels. However, none of these solutions appealed well for a large user base, mainly because they were difficult to use or lacked features. By adding support for VirtualBox on top of NOVA, the project has finally found an answer to the question for product-grade virtualization on top of the framework. The integration of VirtualBox with Genode was no ordinary porting work but quite an engineering feat, which turns the architecture of VirtualBox pretty much upside down. In contrast to the host operating systems already supported by VirtualBox, Genode's version does not extend the host kernel in any way. VirtualBox leverages hardware-based virtualization (VT-x) but lives as a plain user-level program with no special privileges.

As with each new version, there are numerous smaller improvements and new features. For example, a new pseudo file system called trace-fs makes it possible to interactively use Genode's event tracing mechanism via Unix tools such as cat, grep, and echo.

All the changes are covered in detail in the release documentation of version 14.02.