Mozilla develops new mobile OS, web app store

Mozilla, Gecko No Comments
"Mozilla discussed its mobile operating system and app store during last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. At the same time, Telefonica, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, chipset giant Qualcomm, and Deutsche Telekom announced they were cooperating in the effort. This is all part of Mozilla's 'Boot to Gecko' project, designed to develop an open-source mobile operating system based on Web standards."
Read More

How to Dual-Boot Windows 8

Windows No Comments
Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system is available in beta "Consumer Preview" edition as a free download, but that doesn’t mean you should stop using Windows 7 as your main OS just yet. Here’s a simple way to install the new beta operating while making sure that your computer still boots into Windows 7 by default.
Read More

Next Android OS Called Jelly Bean

Wireless 4 Comments
It's definitely a few months away from being released, but Google has plans for the next mobile Android operating system on the table. It will be called "Jelly Bean", which follows the alphabetic naming monikers previous such as Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich. The version will likely be 'Android 5.0', according to a comment made by Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google VP of engineering, who stated "After Android 4 comes 5, and we haven’t announced the timing yet, which we’re still sorting out. There’s a lot of engineering work behind it still, and there’s also just the question of how to time it"
Read More

“Deep” layoffs at Yahoo

In the News 24 Comments
I ran across a business news story about Yahoo's impending layoffs today, and if you're a deep-into-the-internet person like me, it certainly comes as no surprise to read yet again that Yahoo is on the skids. In fact, you're more likely to be surprised to learn that Yahoo has more than 14,000 employees and made something like $6 billion in revenue last year. Yahoo ceased to be relevant a long time ago, and even the Yahoo services that still get some love, like Flickr, seem to be tainted by association. But the question I asked myself when I read the article was, "why didn't Yahoo become a technology leader?"
Read More

Real Proof of WP8 NT Kernel:

  Submitted by BloopFloop Wireless 1 Comment
There were lots of rumors and leaks indicate that Microsoft will use NT kernel as the operating system of Windows Phone 8 'Apollo'. Now we see some real hard evidence inside Windows 8 Consumer Preview bits. There is a string says 'PhoneNT' inside the binary image of NT kernel: ntoskrnl.exe file. Apparently its a new 'ProductType' of NT system. We've seen 'WinNT'/'ServerNT'/'LanmanNT'/'EmbeddedNT' before, and will see 'PhoneNT' in the future.
Read More

First impressions: Windows 8 consumer preview

Windows 111 Comments
Wednesday was the big day for Microsoft - the largest overhaul of its operating system since Windows 95 (heck, I'd argue the overhaul is far larger than Windows 95) went into consumer preview. I've been running it on my Asus ZenBook since its release, and in all honesty, it's not as arduous as I expected. I'm not planning on doing a full review, but I do want to mention a number of things - both positive and negative - that stood out to me.
Read More

Trusting Your Hardware

Privacy, Security 16 Comments
When was the last time you reverse-engineered all the PCI devices on your motherboard?. . . Enters the game-changer: IOMMU (known as VT-d on Intel). With proper OS/VMM design, this technology can address the very problem of most of the hardware backdoors. A good example of a practical system that allows for that is Xen 3.3, which supports VT-d and allows you to move drivers into a separate, unprivileged driver domain(s). This way each PCI device can be limited to DMA only to the memory region occupied by its own driver.
Read More

Microsoft Azure Outage: Leap Year?

  Submitted by judgen Microsoft 28 Comments
The outage on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform that caused the government's G-Cloud service to go offline was the result of a calculation error caused by the extra day in February due to the leap year. Writing on the Azure blog the firm's corporate vice president for service and cloud, Bill Laing, said while the firm had still to fully determine the cause of the issue, the extra date in the month appeared the most likely cause.
Read More

Building Bridges: Open source according to Microsoft

  Submitted by Fabrice Mous Open Source 29 Comments
The Dutch LinuxMagazine translated an interview (direct PDF link) from their magazine with Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director Open Source Communities at Microsoft into English. Many of your readers are probably wondering, is Microsoft really involved in open source these days, or is there more to it? Fabrice Mous started his conversation with Mr. Rabellino to get to know him better, but also to ask him some pressing questions about Microsoft's policies towards open source and open standards. It turned out to be an interesting, but certainly quite critical conversation, that will probably lead to some discussion.

We would very much like to hear your opinion on the open source policy of Microsoft.

Read More

Slashdot Video Interview With Raspberry Pi Project Leader

  Submitted by Robin Miller Hardware 19 Comments
Raspberry Pi project leader Eben Upton talks about the state of Raspberry Pi, and tells us that yes -- finally -- they now have distributors in the U.S. and other countries instead trying to ship every unit from the U.K. Even better, instead of buying a batch of boards, selling them, and only then ordering another batch, the new distribution agreements mean they can keep a steady flow of orders coming in and going out.
Read More

Oracle working on Haiku port of VirtualBox?

  Submitted by kallisti5 Haiku 6 Comments
Back in September 2011, the Haiku project sponsored a Google Summer of Code student (Mike Smith) to develop guest additions for VirtualBox. The project was a success and was submitted to the VirtualBox project. The unofficial Haiku Google+ group just reported a Mailing List post by an Oracle engineer mentioning a "Haiku Port": "The biggest pending change is waiting for build tools integration, and this is simply time consuming. The quality of this contribution is very high." Lets hope this may be a sign that VirtualBox may officially run *under* Haiku at some point. On the other hand, this could just mean a "Haiku Port" of the VirtualBox guest additions. Judge for yourself.
Read More

Android-x86 4.0 RC1 Released (Based On Ice Cream Sandwich)

  Submitted by Anonymous OS News 13 Comments
The Android x86 team has released Android x86 4.0 RC1, based on Android 4.0.3 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and features support for multi-touch, Wifi, audio, bluetooth, G-sensor and camera, OpenGL hardware acceleration for AMD Radeon and Intel chipsets, Kernel 3.0.8 with KMS enabled and more. Android-x86 is a project that provides Android support for x86, making it easy to install it on netbooks or laptops. You can use it like any other Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich device: install applications from the Android Market, add widgets and so on.
Read More