Wild Fox: Firefox Fork with H.264 Support

  Submitted by mrsteveman1 Internet 49 Comments
Mozilla, sticking to its ideals of the open web, decided long ago that support for the patent-encumbered H264 codec would not be included in any of its products. Not only is H264 wholly incompatible with the open web and Free software, it is also incredibly expensive. Mozilla could use one of the open source implementations, but those are not licensed, and the MPEG-LA has been quite clear in that it will sue those who encode or decode H264 content without a license. Software patents, however, are only valid in some parts of the world, so an enterprising developer has started a project that was sure to come eventually: Firefox builds with H264 support.
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Commodore PET 65816 CPU Card

Hardware 2 Comments
Andre Fachat has created a CPU add-in card for Commodore PET machines. "It speeds up your PET to up to 12.5MHz (at least that's the plan for the final stage, but it currently looks good!). The board uses a 65816 CPU that runs at up to 12.5MHz, plus a Xilinx CPLD as logic glue. It includes up to 1MByte fast RAM (run at CPU speed) plus 512k parallel Flash ROM, that can be used as boot ROM". Source code and schematics are provided. Via Commodore News Page.
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Why OSNews Is No Longer OSNews

OS News 177 Comments
There's one complaint we here at OSNews get thrown in our faces quite often: what's up with the lack of, you know, operating system news on OSNews? Why so much mobile phone news? Why so much talk of H264, HTML5, and Flash? Where's the juicy news on tomorrow's operating systems? Since it's weekend, I might as well explain why things are the way they are. Hint: it has nothing to do with a lack of willingness.
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Why Flash Dissatisfies Me, and What Adobe Can Do About it

Internet 79 Comments
It annoys me that Flash is required for most video sites. Especially when Flash isn't available on a lot of devices or at least not the latest, required version. Whenever I try to use my Internet Tablet to watch shows on sites like Hulu, Veoh, Crackle, Joost, etc., I can't, because they require a newer version of Flash, and I'm stuck with what I have. Thankfully not every site uses the latest version. At least not yet anyways.
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Btrfs Possibly Default File System Next Ubuntu Release

Ubuntu 60 Comments
"UDS is over! And in the customary wrap-up I stood up and told the audience what the Foundations team have been discussing all week. One of the items is almost certainly going to get a little bit of publicity. We are going to be doing the work to have btrfs as an installation option, and we have not ruled out making it the default. I do stress the emphasis of that statement, a number of things would have to be true for us to take that decision."
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Apple ‘Responds’ to Adobe’s Ad Campaign

Humor 29 Comments
Every now and then, you come across things that make the internet worthwhile. So yeah, there's this whole genitalia length comparing competition going on between Adobe and Apple, where both companies are actually arguing, with straight faces, which of the two is more open (which to me comes across as Mario and Zelda arguing over who's less of a sell-out). Luckily, though, there's the internet to make us laugh.
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A Sneak Peek at the Native Client SDK

Google 14 Comments
"Today, we're happy to make available a developer preview of the Native Client SDK - an important first step in making Native Client more accessible as a tool for developing real web applications. When we released the research version of Native Client a year ago, we offered a snapshot of our source tree that developers could download and tinker with, but the download was big and cumbersome to use. The Native Client SDK preview, in contrast, includes just the basics you need to get started writing an app in minutes."
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Hulu: HTML5 Not Ready for Us

Multimedia, AV 45 Comments
According to Hulu, HTML5 is not yet ready for its needs. "We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs," Hulu writes, "Our player doesn't just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren't necessarily visible to the end user."
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Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook

  Submitted by cmoraes Internet 38 Comments
"A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn't force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support." They call the project Diaspora and have managed to raise $100K in just 20 days.
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The Music Experience: MPD vs AppleTV

Multimedia, AV 29 Comments
For over 9 months now we use our Apple TV as our music entertainment system in our home. And when I mean "music entertainment system", I mean just that. We don't use our Apple TV for anything else, not even video (our much more video-capable Sony PS3 bears that task). We used to use CDs, in a 250 CD-changer device, but the experience was not nearly as good as when dealing with files that have metadata. So we got ourselves an Apple TV. On the other side of the country, a friend of ours uses the open source MPD solution. In this article I'll try to figure out which one of the two is the best solution for my household's usage pattern.
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