OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Apple Reports Second Quarter Results

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-20 Apple 6 Comments

Apple published the financial results for the latest quarter, and it's been stellar once again, best non-holiday quarter in company history. "Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2010 second quarter ended March 27, 2010. The Company posted revenue of $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $9.08 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.62 billion, or $1.79 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.7 percent, up from 39.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter's revenue."

Submitted by Governa 2010-04-20 Oracle and SUN 94 Comments

When Oracle announced its intentions to buy Sun Microsystems, many were worried about the future of Sun's large open source software portfolio, which includes things like Solaris, Java, MySQL, and more. It seems like Oracle is still struggling with what to do with the large body of products Sun entails; they've started charging 90 USD per user for the Microsoft Office ODF plugin.

Submitted by sjvn 2010-04-20 OS/2 67 Comments

Now this is one for the rumour pile. Yes, a rumour about a long-gone (mostly) operating system that lots of people have fond memories of. Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at SearchDataCenter.com, claims that IBM is mulling over a reintroduction of OS/2. Wait, what?

The Secrets of Windows Phone 7

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-20 Windows 38 Comments

We already know quite a lot about Windows Phone 7, but there's also a boatload of stuff we do not yet know. Dutch (oh yeah) technology news website Tweakers.net managed to get hold of a number of confidential internal Microsoft documents regarding Windows Phone 7, and they contain some intriguing stuff.

Introducing PCLinuxOS 2010

Guest post by Jesse Smith 2010-04-19 Linux 26 Comments

The PCLinuxOS distribution is the popular brain child of a man best known as Texstar. PCLinuxOS's website, which carries a pleasant blue theme with ads bordering the pages, claims the distro is "radically simple" and easy to use. If we stopped there, it would probably give the impression PCLinuxOS is aimed at newcomers to the Linux community, but that does not appear to be the case.

RT-Thread RTOS 0.3.0 Released

Submitted by midnight 2010-04-19 OS News 2 Comments

RT-Thread RTOS is an open source real-time operating system for 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, with components which include a hard real-time kernel, a command line shell, a device virtual file system, and a graphic user interface. RT-Thread RTOS 0.4.x series will be licensed under the Apache License v2.

Submitted by ciaran 2010-04-19 Open Source 8 Comments

The Free Software Foundation has released a medium length film which discusses the harms and the origins of software patents in the USA, using the ongoing Bilski case as a backdrop. There are interviews with Dan Bricklin, Timothy B. Lee, Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman, Dan Ravicher, and others. Now this is what the FSF ought to focus on. Great stuff. It explains how software patents came to be: a massive fail by the US justice system.

Synaptics Releases Gesture Suite for Linux OEMs

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-19 Linux 51 Comments

We all know Synaptics, the company that seems to produce just about every touchpad you can get your ~~hands~~ fingers on. Their touchpads also do a lot of multitouch and gesture stuff, but up until now, their set of gestures, the Synaptics Gesture Suite, was only available on Windows. Luckily, they've ported it over to Linux, and made it available for OEMs building Linux laptops.

Jamie Zawinski on iPhone Development

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-19 Apple 6 Comments

"I finally got the iPhone/iPad port working. It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the Mac OS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right? Oh ho ho ho. I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS."

Engadget: This Is the New iPhone

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-19 Apple 61 Comments

Engadget is 100% sure of it: they've pictures of the next iPhone, colloquially known as the iPhone 4G. It sports a more iPad-esque design, has a glass back, far higher pixel density, front-facing camera, and more. The story how they got their hands on the photos is interesting too. Update: Wow, Gizmodo has the found unit, disassembled it, and yeah, it's the real thing.

Submitted by Tom5 2010-04-18 OS News 5 Comments

"In 2007, OSNews ran an article about OPIUM, showing how to cast apt-get installation problems (choosing which of several possible dependencies to install) as a set of pseudo-boolean constraints which could then be solved mathematically to give the optimal solution. We have recently adapted this technique to Zero Install, addressing some problems experienced by the Sugar environment (One Laptop Per Child) and allowing better integration with distribution packages."

Google Removes http:// from Chrome

Submitted by Anonymous 2010-04-18 Google 101 Comments

Now this is something that I find really interesting. We all know and love Google Chrome/Chromium (and if you don't, you're demonstrably wrong), but Google recently made a change in the developer version that ruffled some feathers: the URL field will no longer show the "http://". This made a lot of people very upset.

Submitted by twitterfire 2010-04-18 Multimedia, AV 22 Comments

"In summary, it's possible to play full-screen Ogg Theora videos on the N900 at full frame rates with low CPU use by off-loading video decoding to the DSP and colour-space conversion and painting to the GPU. There are opportunities for optimization left, tuning for battery life needs to be investigated, and the integration into Firefox still needs to be done."

Anatomy of Linux Kernel Shared Memory

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-18 Linux No Comments

An interesting change in the 2.6.32 kernel is Kernel Shared Memory. KSM allows the hypervisor to increase the number of concurrent virtual machines by consolidating identical memory pages. Explore the ideas behind KSM (such as storage de-duplication), its implementation, and how you manage it.

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-04-18 IBM 4 Comments

"IBM has radically improved the bang for the buck on its Power7-based Power Systems 701 and 702 blade servers this week, and is expected to soon deliver similarly priced entry rack and tower servers. And now it has a new, lower-cost AIX 6.1 Express Edition that will match the less expensive hardware and therefore help Big Blue's AIX platform better compete against Windows, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris alternatives. The new AIX Express Edition takes the special low-cost pricing that was available only on JS series blade servers and now makes it available across the Power Systems line, including logical partitions on the largest Power 595 (and before too long Power 595) servers."

Microsoft RTMs Finished Office 2010

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-18 Microsoft 15 Comments

"Businesses will get their hands on web and desktop Office 2010 in just under two weeks. The company's Office team has released code for Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 to manufacturing. Customers on Microsoft's volume licenses - 250 or more PCs - with Software Assurance can download from the Volume Licensing Service Center on April 27. Volume-licensing customers without SA can get the software May 1. Microsoft began accepting pre orders on April 15."

ClangBSD Is Selfhosting, We Need Testers Now

Kroc 2010-04-17 FreeBSD 44 Comments

Roman Divacky on behalf of the ClangBSD team writes "ClangBSD is a branch of FreeBSD that aims at integrating clang into FreeBSD, replacing GCC as a system compiler. Recently, we've achieved the state when clang can compile all of FreeBSD world on i386/amd64 platforms (including all the C++ apps we have and itself) and a bootable kernel. Thus we feel that the time has come to ask the FreeBSD community for wider testing on i386/amd64 (you sure can help with other platforms too :))."

What We Can Learn From MovieOS

David Adams 2010-04-16 OS News 52 Comments

Dan Hon makes a thought-provoking assertion in his blog: remember all the ridiculous, unrealistic computer interfaces that Hollywood characters are always using, showing "hackers" infiltrating systems by flying through virtual reality worlds of strange codes, and cutesy animations accompanying every task? Hon's point is that instead of ridiculing these unrealistic interfaces, maybe we should try to emulate them. He makes a pretty good case.

Google Unveils Google Cloud Print

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-16 Google 50 Comments

One of the major problems Google is facing with its Chrome OS is printer support. It was reported earlier that Google is working with manufacturers on making printers act similar to for instance digital cameras, so you won't need to fiddle with drivers any longer. It turns out Google has indeed been working on this, but I don't think the solution they unveiled today is what everyone had in mind - despite that, I'm seeing the value here.

OpenSolaris Leaders Unnerved by Oracle Silence

Thom Holwerda 2010-04-16 Solaris 30 Comments

Frustrated by Oracle's delay in releasing the latest version of OpenSolaris, the OpenSolaris Governing Board is growing uneasy over Oracle's lack of communication regarding the future of the Unix OS code. At least two members of the board have even said they would be open to forking the code base from the Oracle version.