Windows 8 HTML5/JS Comment Causes Panic Among Developers

Windows 43 Comments
There's a full-blown panic going on in Microsoft's core third party developer community. After the big Windows 8 demonstration earlier this month where HTML5 and JavaScript were touted as a new way to create applications for Windows 8, speculation has gone through the roof - with developers panicking in the streets about the end of Silverlight and .NET and a HTML5/JS-only Windows 8 release. Looking more closely at the whole situation, though, it would seem that what we're dealing with here is a miscommunication - one that Microsoft desperately needs to address since the web is blowing it way out of proportion. The tl;dr: no, HTML5 and JS are not going to be the only ways to write applications for Windows 8.
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The OS-periment’s Service Model, RC3

OS News 7 Comments
Lots of feedback from Alfman in the previous article's comments meant that it was time for another version of my article on my RPC-based daemon model, and as such another iteration towards a final design of my OS' core IPC mechanism. Not a full rewrite this time, but rather incremental improvements on specific points, which include a choice of naming (nonblocking RPC it is), an improved coverage of pointers, shared memory, and the currently envisioned design limits of those, and explicit support for dynamic setup of RPC calls and graceful server death handling.
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The iPad 2: Some Short First Impressions

Apple 86 Comments
So, yeah, uhm, I bought an iPad 2 today. I still don't think anyone really needs a tablet, but that doesn't mean I didn't want one. I wanted to wait until the HP TouchPad was announced, but now that it has, it seems it won't be coming to The Netherlands any time soon. As such, the iPad 2 it was. A few quick fist impressions.
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Plankton Android Trojan Found in 10 Apps on Android Market

Google 3 Comments
Ten more applications have been pulled from the Google's official Android Market following a notification that they contained a new kind of Android malware. The malware was discovered by Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor at the NC State University, and his team. As we have already witnessed before, the malicious code is "grafted" onto legitimate applications, and once the app is installed, it works as a background service whose goals is to gather information and transmit it to a remote server. The server takes the information in consideration and returns a URL from which the malware downloads a .jar file that, once loaded, exploits Dalvik class loading capability to stay hidden by evading static analysis.
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Fedora 16 To Use Btrfs by Default

  Submitted by Debjit Fedora Core 10 Comments
"When it comes to adopting the newest technologies, Fedora is always at the front among the major Linux distributions. Well, Fedora might very well do it again by adopting a new file system for its next release. According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' - it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."
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Microsoft Loses Appeal in Patent Case

Legal 29 Comments
"The Supreme Court ruled against Microsoft on Thursday in its appeal of a record $290 million jury verdict for infringing a small Canadian software firm's patent. The justices unanimously upheld an appeals court's ruling that went against the world's largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i Limited Partnership. The smaller company had argued that Microsoft Word had infringed its method for editing documents. Microsoft contended that i4i's patent was invalid."
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Interview: FreeNAS 8’s Project Lead

BSD & Darwin 24 Comments
"FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release. I caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7."
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Windows Thin PC Goes RTM

Windows 12 Comments
After the end of business on Monday I received the following in an email from Microsoft: "We appreciate your feedback and enthusiasm throughout the Windows Thin PC Community Technology Preview. Today, we are happy to announce that Windows Thin PC has been released to manufacturing (RTM), and will be available for our SA customers to download starting July 1, 2011." Anandtech published a brief but concise review of Windows Thin PC but here's a quick summary of my experience of this 32-bit only OS based on Windows Embedded Standard 7.
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The Netherlands Second Country to Codify Net Neutrality After Chile

Internet 37 Comments
I've been keeping you up to date about the situation around net neutrality in The Netherlands - and today, everything finally came to its logical conclusion. During a debate in our lower house, most of the kinks were ironed out, and our minister of economic affairs, Maxime Verhagen, will now turn net neutrality into law. This means that after Chile, The Netherlands will be the second country in the world to do so.
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E3: Cows, Cows, Cows

Games 52 Comments
So, the E3 is well under way, and all the major players have had their press conferences. To summarise. Microsoft: Kinect. Really. Kinect. Please Kinect. We'll do anything. For the love of god, Kinect. Sony: wait, what is this? What am I doing here? Oh, here's a 24" 3D TV for $500 and yet another PSP. Nintendo: we slapped every possible shiny object onto a tablet and made the Wii capable of rendering halfway decent graphics. Here's another load of Mariozelda Kart, and a bunch of EA games that Xbox/PS3 players already own. Yes, this year's E3 has been a massive letdown - save for a few exceptions. Update: Epic fail for Nintendo. The company has admitted that it has used footage from the Xbox 360 and PS3 to spice up the press reel for the Wii U.
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iCloud’s Real Purpose: Kill Windows

Editorial 99 Comments
Bob Cringeley makes a bold statement in a blog post responding to Apple's iCloud announcement: "Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows." He says, "The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps."
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