The Contiki operating system, known for its super-slim IPv6 stack, has been updated to version 2.7 with support for new Systems-on-a-Chip: single-chip devices with a microprocessor and an integrated 2.4 GHz radio. This new version has a much strengthened IPv6 wireless mesh networking setup that allows a bunch of chips to autonomously form wireless networks that can be connected directly to the Internet.
The Verge reviews the giant Nokia Lumia 1520:
Samsung and others have proven that there is a market for giant smartphones, warts and all. But that doesn't mean that just any smartphone is better if it's bigger, and the 1520 is a prime example of that. It's bigger and faster than any other Windows Phone yet, but it's not necessarily a better Windows Phone because of that. If all you've ever wanted in life is a Lumia 925 with a magnifying glass on top of it, the 1520 is exactly that. It's a tour de force in resolution and speed, but it's not a great smartphone or even a great replacement for a tablet.
And yet, it'll be a better tablet than any Windows 8.1 RT device. There's something poetic about that.
As you are all probably aware of (I hope), I maintain an open-source port of the XNU (iPhone OS/Mac OS X) kernel to ARMv7-A (soon AArch64 and ARMv6/v5!) platforms. The kernel is very bare in its implementation and needs a lot of work. Work seems to also not be put into the proper areas, so I made this article to rectify that issue. Simple enough, I hope.
Very interesting (via @stroughtonsmith).
A-EON Technology, the company behind the AmigaONE X1000, has not exactly been sitting still. They're hard at work developing the successor to the Nemo motherboard (which powers the X1000): it's called Cyrus, and is built around Freescale QorIQ processors, ranging from 32bit 1.5 Ghz (the P3) to 64bit 2.4 Ghz (the P5). Users have been invited to join the beta test programme for this new board, which will eventually power the successor to the X1000. On top of that, A-EON will invest $1.2 million in their partnership with Varisys, the company that builds the Amiga hardware.
Hyperion, the company that develops AmigaOS, hasn't been twiddling their thumbs either. The biggest hurdle the AmigaOS 4 developers are facing right now is SMP, but work on this issue is progressing.
One of the major hurdles right now, as AmigaOS Development Team Lead Steven Solie implied, is getting the AmigaOS Exec-kernel to support multiple CPU cores. As part of the process, a new so called "scheduler" is being implemented. The new scheduler is apparently already running in the current, internal builds of AmigaOS although Steven suggested there will be room for improvement and optimizations prior to an official release. AmigaOS 4.2 will also introduce the Gallium3D WinSys API for hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
As always with these niche products built by and for enthusiasts, it's hard to tell where it will lead to. However, fact remains that the X1000 was apparently a big enough of a success for A-EON to invest into the next generation, and for Hyperion to continue work on getting AmigaOS to support SMP - something that only benefits A-EON's machines.
While everyone else is whining about iOS and Android, the Amiga people are still doing their thing. You have to respect that.
I bought a Droid 4 twenty-one months ago.
As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I'm pretty sure I'm screwed.
Great article by Sean Hollister on the demise of the QWERTY slider. In the article, Hollister speaks with Doug Kaufman, manager of handset strategy for Sprint, and his revelations are intriguing - it's not so much that people do not want hardware keyboards; it's that people want iconic, flagship phones - like the S4, like the 5S - with huge marketing pushes. Since nobody is pushing a flagship QWERTY slider... Nobody buys them. However, when you ask consumers what they want, physical keyboards are very, very popular.
And so, Kaufman admits: if there was an HTC One or Galaxy S4, a top-of-the-line phone, but with a keyboard - it would sell.
Google has won a resounding victory in its eight-year copyright battle with the Authors Guild over the search giant's controversial decision to scan more than 20 million library and make the available on the internet.
In a ruling (embedded below) issued Thursday morning in New York, US Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the book scanning amounted to fair use because it was "highly transformative" and because it didn't harm the market for the original work.
"Google Books provides significant public benefits," writes Chin, describing it as "an essential research tool" and noting that the scanning service has expanded literary access for the blind and helped preserve the text of old books from physical decay.
Too much common sense. I'm not sure I can handle this.
Jolla's first smartphone, running their new SailfishOS, will be released in Finland on 27 November. It will feature Nokia HERE maps, and the Yandex Android application store.
Currently featuring over 85,000 apps in 17 categories, Yandex.Store offers the best and most popular apps - from social networking and communication apps like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Skype, Viber and WeChat to games like Angry Birds. Yandex.Store will provide in-app purchase opportunities and is available on smartphones and tablets in 37 languages.
International, non-Finnish people who preordered (like myself) will be notified via email shortly. I can't wait. I'm getting the 'other half' in red and white (I get two of them as part of my preorder package) - or perhaps, hot candy pink? Any suggestions from you guys and girls?
The Computer History Museum (CHM) announced today that it has, with the collaboration of the Digibarn Computer Museum and with permission from Apple Inc., posted the historic original 1978 source code for the Apple II DOS "Disk Operating System."
Pretty cool. More on the Apple II can be found at the Computer History Museum's blog.
I've always known this, and I'm sure most of you do too, but we never really talk about it. Every smartphone or other device with mobile communications capability (e.g. 3G or LTE) actually runs not one, but two operating systems. Aside from the operating system that we as end-users see (Android, iOS, PalmOS), it also runs a small operating system that manages everything related to radio. Since this functionality is highly timing-dependent, a real-time operating system is required.
This operating system is stored in firmware, and runs on the baseband processor. As far as I know, this baseband RTOS is always entirely proprietary. For instance, the RTOS inside Qualcomm baseband processors (in this specific case, the MSM6280) is called AMSS, built upon their own proprietary REX kernel, and is made up of 69 concurrent tasks, handling everything from USB to GPS. It runs on an ARMv5 processor.
Sony, June this year:
"PlayStation 4 won't impose any new restrictions on used games. This is a good thing," said Tretton, to huge applause from the audience in attendance. "When a gamer buys a PS4 disc, they have the rights to that copy of the game."
Sony's Software Usage Terms, updated today:
6.3. You must not lease, rent, sublicense, publish, modify, adapt, or translate any portion of the Software.
7.1. You must not resell either Disc-based Software or Software Downloads, unless expressly authorised by us and, if the publisher is another company, additionally by the publisher.
Liars. Similar language has been found on the boxes of previous PlayStation models, but that's hardly a comfort.
Tizen holds the promise on shipping on lots of different devices. Samsung has already been shipping the Samsung NX-300M Camera for the last month or so but Today at the Tizen Developer Summit, Samsung has officially announced that this camera is actually running Tizen!
So, Tizen is now shipping... On a camera. On a related note, Samsung has let out some details of Tizen 3.0, planned for next year. It's going 64bit, will gain multiuser support, and will switch from X to Wayland.
This is a quick demonstration of the QNX 1.4 megabyte floppy disk demo.
QNX is an advanced, compact, real-time operating system. This demo disk, released in 1999, fits the operating system, the "Photon MicroGUI", and the HTML 3 capable Voyager Web browser all on a single 1.4 meg disk!
So far no emulator or virtualizer I have tried will run this QNX demo 100%, so this is running on real hardware. The video is captured with a VGA capture device.
QNX is one of the most intriguing operating systems of all time. This demo disk is one of those things that, even today, blows my mind. Be sure to watch through the whole video, especially the part where extensions are downloaded and run from the web, all on a single 1.44 MB floppy.
The recent news, pictures, and reports about the prototype Steam Machine got me thinking. Since the SteamOS platform is a simple x86 computer, without the kind of restrictions that regular consoles come with, you can simply build the prototype Steam Machine today. However, the big issue is that Valve has done some magic to make sure that the hefty processor and videocard are properly cooled in the tiny prototype enclosure.
For years now, I've been looking for a way to build such a powerful PC in such a tiny package. The problem is that building such a small, powerful PC yourself is not easy - especially not for someone like me, who doesn't have the time to keep up with the honestly irresponsibly large amount of options available in the processor, videocard, cooler, and case markets. It's a mumble-jumble of version numbers, and in the case of video cards, cooling designs, card lengths, and god knows what else.
So, I have a simple question. Say I want to build a small, powerful gaming PC like the Steam Machine prototype, using off-the-shelf parts, for a reasonable price (I would say EUR 600-800). It needs to be properly cooled and as silent as possible, and it needs to be a small console form factor - so a small, horizontal case. Building a powerful, cool gaming PC in a tower is easy. Building it small and console-like, however, is not.
So, if you were to build something like that, which components would you pick? I might - no guarantees! - take up the advice given here and actually build it, if I can justify the spending. Even if I don't - it seems like a nice exercise for the PC builders among us. The laptop, smartphone, and tablet explosion has pushed custom PC building to the sidelines, but I still think it's an incredibly fun and satisfying activity - and if you're good enough, it is, most certainly, an art.
While Microsoft has demonstrated early versions of the Xbox One user interface and base operating system in the past, previous demos have been carefully choreographed affairs operated completely by company representatives. So I was very excited to get my first actual hands-on (and voice-on) test of the Xbox One's underlying platform at a Microsoft-hosted event last week (even if it was partially guided by two Xbox representatives who sometimes took control or suggested what I should try).
While an hour is hardly enough time to get a comprehensive feel for all of the console's system-level controls and features, I came away from the demo surprisingly enthusiastic about the multitasking and voice control features that I had come in rather pessimistic about.
Looks impressive, but I'm not sure any of this actually enhances the, you know, games.
It's fair to say that Android went through some chaotic years in the beginning. The pace of development was frantic as the operating system grew at an unprecedented rate. An as-yet undetermined future led to decisions that were made to conform to existing hardware and architectures, the available development tools, and the basic need to ship working code on tight deadlines. Now that the OS has matured, the Android team has been giving more attention to some of the components that haven't aged quite as well. One of the oldest pieces of the Android puzzle is the Dalvik runtime, the software responsible for making most of your apps run. That's why Google's developers have been working for over 2 years on ART, a replacement for Dalvik that promises faster and more efficient execution, better battery life, and a more fluid experience.
This will be one of the defining changes in Android over the coming years. Android 5.0, perhaps?
Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company.
He estimates that the Android revenue has a 95% margin, so it's pretty much all profit.
This money, says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash.
Microsoft has not written a single line of Android code, yet rakes in the profits through scummy software patents. Crime does pay.
Dieter Bohn, for The Verge:
So for a long time now, we've found ourselves asking the two questions again and again: what exactly is Google trying to accomplish with the Nexus program and what's the strategy with these Android updates? We sat down with three of the four main leaders of the Android team to ask those questions yet again. "Nexus stands for high specs at a really fair price," says Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for Android. "The other thing is the updates come directly from Google. Those are the attributes of Nexus that I think people have really enjoyed and we're not changing that strategy."
Yet while Google's answers to these two questions have been remarkably consistent over the past couple of years (and remains consistent today), the Nexus 5 and KitKat themselves seem to give us a different answer than their predecessors. The hardware and the software tell a more ambitious story: older Nexus devices were Android phones, but the Nexus 5 is the first true Google phone.
Something is happening in the Android world.
Several publications got to play with Valve's upcoming Steam Machine and the awesome new controller, and as The Verge reports, it's essentially nothing but good news.
Valve's steel and aluminum chassis measures just over 12 inches on a side and is 2.9 inches tall, making it a little bigger than an Xbox 360 and smaller than any gaming PC of its ilk. And yet the box manages to fit a giant Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan graphics card and a full desktop CPU - and keep those parts quiet and cool - without cramming them in like a jigsaw puzzle.
That's a tall order, but they've managed it: despite the massive amount of CPU and GPU power crammed into that tiny box, it's quiet and cool. According to Valve, they're still working on this, and the device will get even cooler and quieter as it nears release. Considering Valve is aiming for the living room, this was a major concern.
The big question: how does the controller perform?
The touchpads are surprisingly accurate, and they make first-person shooters and other mouse-friendly games far more accessible than any analog stick can afford. You can sweep your thumb across the pad to turn on your heel, then move it a tiny bit more to line up a headshot without having to compensate for a joystick's return motion. You can push a thumb to the very edge of the pad to keep moving continuously. You can even use both touchpads simultaneously in cursor-driven games to move the mouse cursor faster than with either alone.
This is all in a long line of first-hand reports that all say more or less the same: it takes some getting used to, but it's far more accurate than analog sticks. It seems like Valve's whacky idea phase (the pictures in The Verge's article make clear just how whacky it was) is already paying off. I'm also very excited about how you will be able to download new controller configurations and adjust all the settings in case you're into that sort of thing. Steam Controller users will be able to vote on these, too.
The final question: SteamOS. How does the Linux-based platform perform compared to Windows?
As far as performance is concerned, Valve's Steam Machine with SteamOS certainly seemed up to snuff, at least with these high-end components. The team switched between a Windows and SteamOS box halfway through our demo, and I couldn't tell the difference.
Coming January, at CES, Valve will share more about the partners it has signed up with. Valve has been working with game makers on this Linux project for three years now, and thanks to many underlying engines already supporting Linux anyway, getting games to run on Linux isn't as hard as it seems.
Valve seems to be on the right track. I can't wait to hear just which partners will be supporting SteamOS.
We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 5.4. This is our 34th release on CD-ROM (and 35th via FTP). We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than ten years with only two remote holes in the default install.
That track record remains impressive - no matter how often I see it.
Submitted by 
Guest post by 
Submitted by 
Submitted by