OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Raspberry Pi To Embrace RISC OS

Submitted by Martin H Hansen 2011-10-31 RISC OS 59 Comments

Sometimes, on a rather boring and run-of-the-mill Monday, I get news in the submission queue which just puts a gigantic smile on my face. We've talked about the Raspberry Pi before on OSNews, and other than reporting that everything's on track for a Christmas launch, it has also been announced that the Raspberry Pi will be able to run... RISC OS. A British educational ARM board running RISC OS? We have come full circle. And I couldn't be happier. Update: Theo Markettos emailed me with two corrections - Markettos isn't actually a representative of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the quoted bits are transcribed, they're not Markettos' literal words. Thanks for clearing that up!

The Right to Dual-boot: Linux Groups Plead Case

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-31 Linux 40 Comments

"Red Hat, Canonical and the Linux Foundation have laid out a set of recommendations for hardware vendors in hopes of preserving the ability to install Linux on Windows 8 machines. Windows 8 machines should ship in a setup mode giving users more control right off the bat, the groups argue." Group hug-cheer combo for Red Hat, Canonical, and the Linux Foundation please.

“Fun with ‘Fragmentation’ Charts”

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-30 Google 43 Comments

"Let's not mince words here: This 'Android and iPhone Update History' chart is not a good chart. Oh, it's a pretty chart, to be sure artfully illustrated and researched. But this chart - done up by Michael Degusta at The Understatement and reposted by anyone unable to think clearly, apparently - is not a good chart. Or at the very least, it fails to recognize a fundamental difference between Android and iOS and the iPhone."

Visopsys 0.71 Released

Guest post by N.P. Brandt 2011-10-28 OS News 4 Comments

Version 0.71 of Visopsys has been unleashed into the wild. "The bulk of this release consists of general bug fixes, and improvements to hardware detection and device drivers, with particular focus on USB. New features include the ability to boot from a USB device (a new USB image is available for download) and the ability to power down the system."

pfSense 2.0 Released

Guest post by Goyuix 2011-10-28 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

After three years of hard work and many enhancements, pfSense 2.0 has been released. Of the more impressive stats, more than 108,000 unique IP addresses have downloaded the snapshots during 2011, resulting in some amazing testing, feedback and now reliability with the 2.0 release. Among the many notable features and enhancements: Based on FreeBSD 8.1, Enhancements to IP Aliases, dashboard and widgets, SMTP and growl alerts, new traffic shaper, Layer 7 protocol filtering, major improvements to NAT engine and configuration, certificate manager, VPN improvements, virtual wireless AP support and many others.

ARM To Move to 64bit with ARMv8

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-28 Hardware 63 Comments

Big news from ARM over the past few days. The processor architecture, once strictly an embedded affair for low-power devices, is going big. Not only has ARM announced it's going 64bit, HP has announced it's going to build servers with ARM processors. It seems all the pieces are now in place for ARM.

Submitted by poundsmack 2011-10-28 Apple 28 Comments

Apple has open sourced ALAC. "The Apple Lossless Audio Codec is an audio codec developed by Apple and supported on iPhone, iPad, most iPods, Mac and iTunes. ALAC is a data compression method which reduces the size of audio files with no loss of information. A decoded ALAC stream is bit-for-bit identical to the original uncompressed audio file. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec project contains the sources for the ALAC encoder and decoder. Also included is an example command line utility, called alacconvert, to read and write audio data to/from Core Audio Format and WAVE files. A description of a 'magic cookie' for use with files based on the ISO base media file format (e.g. MP4 and M4A) is included as well. The Apple Lossless Audio Codec sources are available under the Apache license."

Guest post by snydeq 2011-10-28 Privacy, Security 3 Comments

Taunting tweets, provocative pics, iPad-spam chats -- InfoWorld's JR Raphael sheds light on the stupid slip-ups that led to five recent high-profile hacker arrests. 'Clever as they often are, hackers can turn boneheaded pretty quickly and slip up in silly ways, leaving authorities a virtual road map pointing right to their doorsteps.'

Samsung Surpasses Apple as World’s Top Smartphone Seller

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-28 Wireless 81 Comments

Remember when Apple surpassed Nokia to become the world's best-selling smartphone manufacturer? Well, Apple only had one quarter to enjoy this title, since Samsung just soared past them by quadrupling its smartphone shipments, making Samsung the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Update: As was noted in the comments, Apple also uses shipments - they just call them sales. Straight from their SEC filing.

Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-27 Google 84 Comments

"The announcement that Nexus One users won't be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google's support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I've been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers." I'm happy the modding community takes care of orphaned devices, but a solution it is not. I'm hoping the crop of Android phones released this past year - which were not included in this analysis - fair better. If there's one thing Google should steal from Apple, it's their iOS update support.

Interview: Pavel Fedin, AROS Developer

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-26 Amiga & AROS 1 Comment

Obligement has an interview with Pavel Fedin (the original French version is also available), a key AROS developer. "Current pace of AROS' development can be perceived on www.ohloh.net/p/aros. Though as can be seen here, the Russian developer Pavel 'Sonic' Fedin is alone responsible for more than 3400 commits in eleven years, while the other four most important AROS contributors are inactive or almost since five years (apart of Georg Steger who was still active one year ago)... One can then see how much Pavel is important in current AROS evolution." Note that the English version is a translation by a non-native speaker.

Mozilla, Microsoft Launch Bing-ified Firefox

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-26 Mozilla, Gecko 22 Comments

"In a move that will raise eyebrows, Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited - the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site - but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users." Test pilot or not, I'm stockpiling more baked beans.

Nexus One Won’t Get Ice Cream Sandwich

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-26 Google 17 Comments

"Google's Hugo Barra confirmed that the latest version of Android will be delivered as a free upgrade to the existing Nexus S handset 'within weeks'. He said the search giant was aiming to get the software to owners of the previous flagship phone shortly after the release of the new Galaxy Nexus handset next month, well in time for Christmas. Owners of the first official Google phone, the Nexus One, will not be getting the upgrade, however. Barra said the hardware was simply too old to run the new operating system." Can someone enlighten me - the Nexus One has 512MB of RAM, a 1Ghz processor, and a 480x800 AMOLED or SuperLCD. Why on earth isn't this thing upgraded to ICS? Lameballs.

Did Android Really Look Like BlackBerry Before the iPhone?

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-26 Google 100 Comments

"As an online discussion about iOS vs. Android grows longer, the probability of someone bringing up this link approaches 1." The argument goes that before the iPhone, Android looked like a BlackBerry clone, and after the iPhone, it suddenly turned into an iOS clone. While this argument, with its pictures, is snappy and easily digestible, it doesn't actually seem to be supported by the facts.

Nokia Announces First Windows Phone 7 Devices

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-26 Wireless 79 Comments

Today is the start of Nokia World 2011, the event where Nokia would unveil its first Windows Phone 7 device(s). And so they did. The Finnish mobile giant unveiled two Windows Phone 7 smartphones, as well as four new Series 40 phones for emerging markets. The most interesting thing? Pricing. Pretty aggressive. Update: Anybody want a kidney?

Windows XP Turns 10

Thom Holwerda 2011-10-25 Windows 83 Comments

Ten years ago today, Microsoft launched what would become the world's most popular desktop operating system - for better or worse. Its interface colours were... Interesting (trying hard to avoid bias here, folks, bear with me now). Its early performance was... Not always entirely up to par. Its security track record was... Well, it sucked hard in that department (I tried). We're ten years down the line, and thanks to Vista, way too many people are still using this relic.

Guest post by twitterfire 2011-10-25 Multimedia, AV 35 Comments

ABC.net.au has published an article titled "The Case for Piracy". The writer shows how copyright has been hijacked by corporations and that publishers are their own worst enemies. "One of the main reasons we all have anti-piracy slogans embedded in our brains is because the music industry chose to try and protect its existing market and revenue streams at all costs and marginalise and vilify those who didn't want to conform to the harsh new rules being set."

Submitted by JAlexoid 2011-10-25 General Development 19 Comments

The news already hit HackerNews late last night, but at that time there was no confirmation so I decided to wait until we knew for sure. Well, after Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs, the technology world lost another great mind yesterday. Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, the creator of LISP and the father of artificial intelligence, has passed away, age 84.

Guest post by twitterfire 2011-10-24 General Development 80 Comments

"Looking past the Metro hype, the Build conference also revealed promising road maps for C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net platform as a whole. Perhaps the most exciting demo of the conference for .Net developers, however, was Project Roslyn, a new technology that Microsoft made available yesterday as a Community Technology Preview. Roslyn aims to bring powerful new features to C#, Visual Basic, and Visual Studio, but it's really much more than that. If it succeeds, it will reinvent how we view compilers and compiled languages altogether."

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."