OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Qt Development Now a True Open Source Project

Guest post by jello 2011-10-24 Qt 14 Comments

"I'm happy to announce that the Qt Project officially went live today. Starting today, development of Qt will be governed as a true open source project. We now have qt-project.org - a website where all development of Qt will be centered, providing the same infrastructure and processes for everybody that wants to contribute to Qt."

A Note on Bias

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-24 OS News 76 Comments

Considering the polarising topic of software patents and related IP litigation is coming up a lot lately, I felt the need to write a few words on this thing called 'bias'. This word is being thrown around a lot, but I get the feeling many people are unclear as to what, exactly, it means. Because contrary to popular opinion, there's nothing wrong with being being biased. In fact, there's no such thing as unbiased blogging (or even unbiased journalism).

Apple Television with iOS, Siri, FaceTime?

Eugenia Loli 2011-10-24 Apple 32 Comments

Appleinsider writes: "An anticipated Apple high-definition television set, complete with iOS features including Siri voice commands, FaceTime video chat and access to the App Store, would be a strong product in a massive $100 billion market, according to a new analysis." Last year I explained my vision of a smart TV too (read the comment), and my ideas were pretty much the same thing AppleInsider discusses about today. Back then I was almost laughed at by most OSNews residents for these ideas. I have the feeling that the people who then found my ideas ridiculous, they'll now find a possible Apple smart TV "natural" and "revolutionary".

Guest post by diegocg 2011-10-24 Linux 11 Comments

Linux 3.1 has been released. The changes include support for the OpenRISC opensource CPU, performance improvements to the writeback throttling, some speedups in the slab allocator, a new iSCSI implementation, support for Near-Field Communication chips used to enable mobile payments, bad block management in the generic software RAID layer, a new "cpupowerutils" userspace utility for power management, filesystem barriers enabled by default in Ext3, Wii Controller support and new drivers and many small improvements. Here's the full changelog.

Microsoft Praises Its Own Patent Troll Behaviour

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-23 Microsoft 68 Comments

I'll just link to this. Microsoft chest-thumping about being a patent troll.

Submitted by Oliver 2011-10-23 FreeBSD 17 Comments

"The first RC build for the FreeBSD-9.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the architectures amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites. One of the many new features in 9.0 we would like to be tested is the new installer, so we encourage our users to do fresh installation on test systems. Alternatively, users upgrading existing systems may now do so using the freebsd-update(8) utility."

AmigaOne X1000 To Ship by Year’s End; Amiga Netbook Announced

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-23 Amiga & AROS 60 Comments

Big news from the Amiga world this weekend. That stubborn bunch are holding AmiWest 2011 this weekend, and it's been one heck of an eventful little, uh, event. Not only will the AmigaOne X1000 start shipping by year's end, Hyperion also announced something many in the Amiga world have been waiting for for a long time: an Amiga laptop. Update: Steven Solie, AmigaOS' team lead, also held a presentation about the past, present, and future of AmigaOS. The team is working on some pretty interesting stuff - protected address space, multicore support, USB3, new printing subsystem, and much more.

Nokia’s N9 Swan Song: Be Still, My Beating Heart

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-22 Wireless 118 Comments

Remember back when Nokia jumped to Windows Phone 7, abandoning all other platforms and future directions? Remember Elop's infamous 'burning platform' memo was coveniently 'leaked' to the web? Remember how Elop claimed Windows Phone 7 was the only way forward, since nothing else inside the company would be ready for prime time soon enough? Remember how I thought this was a very good and sane decision? Well, the first reviews of what will be the only MeeGo handset from Nokia (the N9) are in, and well... To whoever decided to go WP7 and ditch MeeGo: I don't like you. To myself: I'm an idiot for arguing this was a good idea.

Gnome 3: Go to Shell? Not Just Yet, Thanks

Guest post by Antonio Ospite 2011-10-21 Gnome 81 Comments

Antonio Ospite explores Gnome 3 in fall-back mode and tries to make it look and behave more like Gnome 2.32 again. This summer Linus Torvalds made it to the news for complaining about the gnome-shell design; Gnome fall-back mode is the solution for those like Linus who can't - or better, do not want to - use gnome-shell just yet.

Google: ICS Will Be Open Source

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-21 Google 28 Comments

Ah, this is the news we've all been waiting for (well, it's old news already but I had more urgent matters to attend to today): Ice Cream Sandwich is definitely going to be released as open source. I still think not releasing Honeycomb's source code is a massive cop-out, but at least this is something.

Submitted by jello 2011-10-21 Apple 171 Comments

So, how serious is the legal battle between Apple and the various Android phone makers, really? Surely, it's just logical business sense that's behind it, right? Calculated, well-planned precision strikes designed to hurt Android where simply making better, more innovative products isn't enough? Well, no, not really. We already knew Steve Jobs took this personal - now we know just how personal.

iOS Has Siri, Android Has Iris

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-20 Wireless 44 Comments

"XDA member vari9 points us to an app developed by a few devs over at dexetra that basically does the same exact thing as Siri. Total development time? 8 hours, according to the devs. Needless to say, this little amount of time put in the app almost guarantees that it is in alpha stage and as such you are likely to receive weird answers or no answers at all, but as with everything in the world of Android, this is a work in progress, which will flourish rather soon due to the large interest that was generated on this technology thanks to Apple's marketing efforts." It's quite clearly not on the same level as Siri, but the fact these developers managed to get this far this quickly is pretty impressive. Then again, as long as Iris keeps interpreting 'Fiona Apple' as 'Fianna Apple', 'owner Apple' or 'George Bush' (?!), it's completely pointless to me. In any case, it's free on the Android Market.

Samsung, Google Announce Android Ice Cream Sandwich

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-19 Google 78 Comments

So, somewhere in the middle of the night (at least for me) Samsung and Google held a joint event, in which they announced both the new Nexus phone, the Galaxy Nexus, and Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. While the Galaxy Nexus is a pretty impressive phone, what we got to see from Ice Cream Sandwich surely didn't drop too many jaws.

FSF Warns About the Danger of Secure Boot

Submitted by Dirge 2011-10-18 Open Source 62 Comments

"The Free Software Foundation released a statement open for public signing, titled 'Stand up for your freedom to install free software'. The statement is a response to Microsoft's announcement that if computer makers wish to distribute machines with the Windows 8 compatibility logo, they must implement a system called 'Secure Boot'. The FSF statement warns against the danger that, if done wrong, this system would have to be called Restricted Boot, because it could make computers incapable of running anything but Windows." Signed.

Research In Motion Brings QNX to Smartphones

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-18 Wireless 46 Comments

What many of us wondered the moment Research In Motion announced the PlayBook's QNX-based operating system has now transpired: the Canadian smartphone and tablet company has announced BBX, their QNX-based operating system for both smartphones and tablets - in other words, the expansion of the PlayBook operating system into smartphones.

Icaros Desktop 1.3.2 Released

Submitted by Ola Jensen 2011-10-17 Amiga & AROS 35 Comments

Version 1.3.2 of the Icaros Desktop is now available. Icaros Desktop is one of the prime AROS distributions, ready to be used on your desktop today - no fancy PowerPC hardware required (like with AmigaOS or MorphOS). If I can get this running, it might be about time we took a closer look at this, don't you think? Thoughts?

Guest post by snydeq 2011-10-17 General Development 32 Comments

Just-in-time compilers, browser wars, and developer enthusiasm are just a few of the trends separating today's hot scripting languages from the pack. InfoWorld's Peter Wayner surveys programmers, commit logs, search engine traffic, and book sales data to provide a barometer of scripting languages -- JavaScript, ActionScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, R, and PHP -- providing a best-guess forecast of which languages are rising and falling in scripting hipness.

Windows 7 Installed Base Finally Exceeds XP

Submitted by Debjit 2011-10-17 Windows 43 Comments

Well, its not official yet, but Microsoft's Windows 7 has now become the most widely used operating system. . . Windows 7 now has a strong 40.21% share of all desktop operating systems around the world whereas, the usage share of Windows XP has slipped to 38.64%. All this happened a couple of days back (in October). The rise in usage of Windows 7 and the drop in usage of Windows XP has been consistent since the time Windows 7 was first launched.

Submitted by twitterfire 2011-10-17 Unix 6 Comments

The groundbreaking work he did with Ken Thompson led to the operating system behind everything from set-top boxes to the iPhone, but who sings the praises of the late Dennis Ritchie?

Submitted by judgen 2011-10-14 Office 41 Comments

"The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week's LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed."