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More Stuff Happens in Mobile Patent World War

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-17 Legal 43 Comments

And we have another interesting development in the ongoing and ever-expanding idiocy that is the ~~War of the High-Fiving Lawyers~~ Mobile Patent World War. Motorola, now a central player in this worldwide conflict that is hurting consumers' wallets and clogging legal systems all over the world, has come to HTC's rescue by seeking to invalidate the patents Apple sued HTC with earlier this year.

Guest post by lemur2 2010-10-15 Mozilla, Gecko 151 Comments

For its upcoming Firefox 4.0 release, Mozilla has been concentrating a great deal on what is often cited as the main shortcoming of Firefox ... its speed. For example, Firefox 4.0 will include GPU acceleration for both rendering and compositing on Windows 7/Vista, OSX and Linux, and it will have GPU acceleration for compositing only for Windows XP.

John Sculley: Steve Jobs Wanted to Be Sony

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-15 Apple 52 Comments

Is it an indication of Steve Jobs' (in)famous strive for perfection, or just stupid bone-headedness? The white variant of the iPhone 4 was first delayed for a few weeks, but those few weeks became 'end of the year'. Now we know why: the manufacturers Apple employs are apparently having issues matching the shades of white of the various components. This anecdote ties in nicely with a very interesting interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs' ways of doing business.

Engadget on Nokia N8: Hardware Good, Software Not so Much

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-14 Wireless 71 Comments

Nokia. The smartphone business is booming, and yet, the Finnish company - the quintessential phone maker - is getting pretty much none of the glitz and glamour. Their latest the device, the Nokia N8, is supposed to turn the tide, and Engadget has a thorough review of the device. Conclusion? It's getting repetitive, but hardware - awesome, software - not so much.

Submitted by addoula 2010-10-14 Opera 36 Comments

Opera Extensions have been confirmed as a feature of Opera 11. "Extensions in Opera is a way for you to easily add new functionality to your Opera browser experience. Developers can easily create extensions using open standards (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) and supported APIs. Extensions will be based on the W3C Widget specifications and this is being considered for an Open Standard effort."

Guest post by vivainio 2010-10-14 KDE 79 Comments

In his lengthy and interesting blog post covering the future of Plasma, KDE's Aaron Seigo proposes Qt Quick and QML (a declarative language that embeds JavaScript) as replacement of the Graphics View architecture currently used by Plasma. This holds a promise of massive speedups and cheap effects as all paint operations become candidates for OpenGL acceleration, contrary to the aging Graphics View architecture that is still stuck with various inefficiencies caused by the underlying QPainter approach. Expressiveness and easy programmability of QML is a nice bonus, of course.

Apple Announces ‘Back to Mac’ Event

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-13 Apple 85 Comments

In this day and age of iOS this and iPad that you'd nearly forget it, but the gadget maker from Cupertino actually makes personal computers and an accompanying operating system as well. It's been nearly three years since the last substantial release, so it's about time: Apple has just announced a press event titled 'Back to Mac', with a lion on the invite.

Submitted by diegocg 2010-10-13 Linux 22 Comments

Well, this is quite interesting. This is one of those items where I have to make sure everybody realises I'm no developer as to not make myself look like an idiot. Having said that - LinSched. It's a user-space program that hosts the Linux kernel scheduler, so you can create and test scheduling policies on arbitrary hardware topologies - without actually having to work with the real hardware.

IBM Joins OpenJDK Community

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-12 Java 64 Comments

"Oracle and IBM today announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment."

Chrome OS Hits Release Candidate Status

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-12 Google 18 Comments

Interesting little digging from TechCrunch's MG Siegler: as it turns out, Google's Chrome OS is nearing completion. The company is currently testing a release candidate build, and has reiterated that devices running Chrome OS will arrive later this year.

Palm Pre 2 Detailed

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-11 Wireless 31 Comments

More mobile phone news! Rumours of an upcoming Palm Pre 2 have been swirling for a while, but now a French carrier has jumped the gun and spilled all the beans. Clearly a transitional device to bridge the gap between the first true HP devices, the devices updates and streamlines the Palm Pre Plus with an updated case, display, and internals. Also, it will pack webOS 2.0.

Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-11 Windows 37 Comments

So, today was the big day for Microsoft. It's all or nothing. Die tot oder die gladiolen (cookie if you get that one without using Google). The software giant from Redmond officially launched its Windows Phone 7 operating system, alongside about ten handsets from different OEMs. Since Windows Phone 7 has been covered quite a lot already, leaving little to the imagination, did something actually new come out of all this? Yes, it did.

Submitted by Amix 2010-10-10 Morphos 17 Comments

So, yeah, as we already detailed almost two weeks ago, MorphOS 2.6 has been released. We've already discussed this one and its new features last time around, so I'm having a little trouble coming up with stuff to write about, but I'll do my best to find anything interesting in the detailed release notes - as inexperienced as I am with MorphOS.

Submitted by Extend 2010-10-10 Ubuntu 127 Comments

Yes, yes, it's that time of the year again - a new Fiona Apple album confirmed (which makes anything that happens between now and spring 2011 irrelevant and annoying), MorphOS 2.6 released (will be the next news item), and, of course, a new Ubuntu release showcasing the best of the best that the Free software world has to offer in the desktop world.

Rubin: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Platform”

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-09 Google 46 Comments

Google's big Android chief Andy Rubin has given an interview to PC Magazine, in which he touches on some interesting topics. Sadly, PC Magazine didn't ask about the patent situation and why Google is seemingly letting its OEMs fend for themselves, but there's still a lot of other interesting stuff in there.

US Library of Congress: Copyright Is Destroying Historic Audio

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-08 Legal 25 Comments

You think only "pirates" and "freeloaders" rail against current copyright laws? Well, think again - even the Library of Congress seemingly has had enough. The topic is recorded sound preservation, and in a 181-page in-depth study, the Library of Congress concludes that apart from technical difficulties, US copyright law makes it virtually impossible for anyone to perform any form of audio preservation. The painted picture is grim - very grim.

NYT: Adobe, Microsoft Discussed Apple, Possible Acquisition

Thom Holwerda 2010-10-07 Rumors 55 Comments

Well, this is interesting. The New York Times caught wind of a special and secret meeting between Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer and Adobe's frontman Shantanu Narayen. They claim the entire talk was dedicated to the fight against Apple, and one of the options discussed was... Microsoft acquiring Adobe.

Submitted by tyrione 2010-10-07 General Development 61 Comments

LLVM 2.8 has been released. The release notes describe this new, ehm, release in greater detail, so head on over and give it a read.

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-10-07 OS News 9 Comments

ScaraOS is a 32-bit, multiboot-compliant, monolithic OS kernel. It has the beginnings of a paged VM system and VFS. It supports PCI, DMA, AT floppies (read only), EXT2, and can do all the low-level stuff expected of an OS kernel (program the PIC, handle interrupts, control the timer, etc.). It was written primarily to learn OS fundamentals. It boots using any multiboot bootloader, and it has been tested with grub on qemu and KVM. Bootable floppy images are available.

The Death of GEOS?

Guest post by Michael Hill 2010-10-07 OS News 69 Comments

This is a painful article to write. I've been a longtime fan and user of what is affectionately known as PC/GEOS over the years. However, I'm fearing we're nearing the end of GEOS.

More Stuff Happens in Mobile Patent World War

Firefox No Longer Not Fast?

John Sculley: Steve Jobs Wanted to Be Sony

Engadget on Nokia N8: Hardware Good, Software Not so Much

Opera 11 To Have Extension Framework

Aaron Seigo: Plasma Overhaul Planned, Using Qt Quick, QML

Apple Announces ‘Back to Mac’ Event

LinSched, a Userspace Linux Scheduler Simulator

IBM Joins OpenJDK Community

Chrome OS Hits Release Candidate Status

Palm Pre 2 Detailed

Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7

MorphOS 2.6 Released

Ubuntu 10.10 Released

Rubin: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Platform”

US Library of Congress: Copyright Is Destroying Historic Audio

NYT: Adobe, Microsoft Discussed Apple, Possible Acquisition

LLVM 2.8 Released

ScaraOS 0.6 Released

The Death of GEOS?