OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

HP To Spin Off PC business, Buy Autonomy Corp

David Adams 2011-08-18 In the News 16 Comments

Hewlett-Packard Co. , the world's largest computer maker, is in talks to buy Autonomy Corp. for about $10 billion and plans to spin off its personal-computer business, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Is this an indicator of the Post PC Era?

AMD’s Open-Source Radeon Driver After Four Years

Submitted by Michael 2011-08-18 Graphics 28 Comments

While the BFS scheduler is getting ready to celebrate its second birthday, in just three weeks AMD's open-source Radeon graphics driver strategy for Linux will be turning four years old . . . which has ended up being a game-changer in the Linux world. AMD continues to support open-source hardware enablement on their latest graphics processors and recently even hired more developers to work on the code and documentation. How far have they come though in four years?

Genode 11.08 Blurs the Lines Between Different Kernels

Guest post by Norman Feske 2011-08-18 OS News 10 Comments

The microkernel developer community uses to be extremely fragmented. There exists a high variety of advanced microkernels each being developed with a different focus. However, since each kernel comes with its own minimalistic user land that is usually geared towards the special needs of its developers, none of those kernels has taken off in the domain of general-purpose computing. Genode has the mission to change that. Thanks to the tooling infrastructure that comes with the new version 11.08, the use of different microkernels has finally become a seamless experience. Those kernels including OKL4, L4/Fiasco, L4ka::Pistachio, NOVA, Codzero, and Fiasco.OC can be combined with the framework's steadily growing functionality such as a its new AHCI driver and Qt4.

Researchers Identify First Flaws in AES

Submitted by HAL2001 2011-08-17 Privacy, Security 23 Comments

Researchers have found a weakness in the AES algorithm. They managed to come up with a clever new attack that can recover the secret key four times easier than anticipated by experts. In the last decade, many researchers have tested the security of the AES algorithm, but no flaws were found so far. The new attack applies to all versions of AES even if it used with a single key. The attack shows that finding the key of AES is four times easier than previously believed; in other words, AES-128 is more like AES-126.

Microsoft Patent Covers Streaming OS Plans

David Adams 2011-08-17 Microsoft 6 Comments

Though the patent has only surfaced now, Microsoft has been working on this concept for quite some time. As far back as 2009 similar systems have been discussed on various Microsoft blogs. There was also the Midori OS project that had bloggers buzzing about its post-Windows potential and integration with Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure. Steve Ballmer himself has called Windows 8 Microsoft's riskiest bet yet -- could this streaming tech make make an appearance in the upcoming OS?

Joyent Releases Illumos-Based SmartOS

Submitted by Chris Brentano 2011-08-17 OS News 7 Comments

Joyent recently announced and released SmartOS. From their site, "SmartOS is comprised of the Illumos kernel (with ZFS, DTrace, OS-level virtualization and next-generation KVM) with BSD package management and a GNU toolchain." They've posted the source on GitHub and a live ISO is available for download as well.

GNOME Designer Jon McCann About the Future of GNOME3

Submitted by suka 2011-08-17 Gnome 40 Comments

In an extensive interview with the Austrian tech site derStandard.at/web GNOME3 designer Jon McCann talks about the future of GNOME3 - and why it's all about the apps - why he is convinced that KDE and Ubuntu are actually different operating systems and also reacts to the outspoken criticism against GNOME 3 which has been making the rounds lately.

Submitted by Flatland_Spider 2011-08-17 Linux 3 Comments

Ever wondered how current Linux statistics compare to statistics from the '90s? Well, Gigaom has a nice infographic prepared by the Linux Foundation which compares the two eras. Also, props to Arch Linux for being most of the Other 15%; that's not bad for such a barebones distribution.

Best Buy Tells HP to Take Back Its TouchPads

David Adams 2011-08-17 Wireless 115 Comments

Ars Technica is reporting that US Retailer Best Buy has been able to sell less than 10% of the TouchPad tablets that it ordered from HP, and now wants HP to take them back. Similarly, deal-a-day site Woot offered TouchPads at a very aggressive price, and only managed to sell 612 of them. This is for a site that often sells out goofy tech widgets in hours. When the TouchPad was gearing up for release, there seemed to be a fair amount of interest among geeks. Is it just that it hasn't resonated the same way with the general public, or have people just been disappointed once they've put their hands on one?

Silverlight OS

Submitted by cromat 2011-08-17 OS News 39 Comments

SilveOS is a familiar-looking desktop "operating system" within a silverlight app. Just fire it up using any browser with Silverlight installed and start poking around.

Submitted by fran 2011-08-17 Wireless 8 Comments

Slashgear reports: "Hardware company Samsung today has been revealed to have acquired one of the single most notorious names in Android modification , that being Steve Kondik,aka "Cyanogen" of CyanogenMod 7." Could Samsung be planning to start working on a highly modified version of Android?

EU-wide Ban on Galaxy Tab 10.1 Lifted

Thom Holwerda 2011-08-16 Legal 44 Comments

So, the shadiness factor of the German EU-wide injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 seems to continue. Not only has Apple been caught supplying the court with tampered evidence, it now seems the court in Duesseldorf didn't have the authority to ban the Galaxy Tab EU-wide - at least, according to a German court which has just lifted the EU-wide ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Submitted by sjvn 2011-08-16 Rumors 72 Comments

"Who is Microsoft fooling? Other than on the desktop, Linux is eating its lunch, and it's only going to get worse for Microsoft."

How Linux mastered Wall Street

David Adams 2011-08-16 Linux 37 Comments

When it comes to the fast-moving business of trading stocks, bonds and derivatives, the world's financial exchanges are finding an ally in Linux. As late as 2007, Wall Street exchanges were still largely run on Unix . . . Over the past few years however, Linux has crept into this market, showing up first in ancillary systems and then running a few core exchanges.

Guest post by snydeq 2011-08-16 Web 2.0 54 Comments

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner discusses the 11 hard truths Web developers must accept in making the most of HTML5 -- especially those who are looking to leverage HTML5 in hopes of unseating native apps. 'The truth is, despite its powerful capabilities, HTML5 isn't the solution for every problem. Its additional features are compelling and will help make Web apps formidable competitors for native apps, but security issues, limitations of local data storage, synchonization challenges, and politics should have us all scaling back our expectations for the spec.'

Search Engine Hack Innovation

Submitted by HAL2001 2011-08-16 Privacy, Security No Comments

Hackers armed with a browser and specially crafted search queries are using botnets to generate more than 80,000 daily queries, identify potential attack targets and build an accurate picture of the resources within that server that are potentially exposed. By automating the query and result parsing, the attacker can carry out a large number of search queries, examine the returned results and get a filtered list of potentially exploitable sites in a very short time and with minimal effort. Because searches are conducted using botnets, and not the hacker's IP address, the attacker's identity remains concealed.

Two Years With Linux BFS

Submitted by Michael 2011-08-16 Linux 9 Comments

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

IE 9 Best Option Against Web-Based Malware Attacks

Submitted by HAL2001 2011-08-16 Internet Explorer 9 Comments

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 has proved once again to be the best choice when it comes to catching attacks aimed at making the user download Web-based malware. This claim was made by NSS Labs in the recently released results of a test conducted globally from May 27 through June 10 of the current year, which saw five of the most popular Web browsers pitted against each other. Windows Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), Google Chrome 12, Mozilla Firefox 4, Apple Safari 5 and Opera 11 were tested with 1,188 malicious URLs - links that lead to a download that delivers a malicious payload or to a website hosting malware links.

Submitted by sawboss 2011-08-16 Hardware 2 Comments

Researchers at the Virginia Commonwleth University have come up with . . . a circuit that requires such little power all it needs is the ambient energy in an environment to run. In other words, it can run without need of a power lead or battery, relying instead on some energy constant in the environment in which it functions e.g. the human body. In order to create something that can run on such low, ambient energy, you need to use electronics that require next to no power to function. So instead of the typical charge-based electronic switches used today, the researchers turned to spin transport electronics, more commonly known as spintronics.

Apple Tampered with Evidence in German Apple v Samsung Case

Thom Holwerda 2011-08-15 Legal 65 Comments

Dutch news website WebWereld.nl investigated the claim that Apple supplied the German court with tampered evidence, and their research is pretty self-explanatory. I don't have the time to translate the article for you, but the images speak about ten thousands words; Apple has changed the aspect ratio of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in a side-by-side comparison (while also showing Android's application drawer open instead of showing the home screen, but the article doesn't mention that). Come on, Apple. Update: As Gusar notes, Apple also Photoshopped the Samsung logo off the bezel. Real classy, Apple.