OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Support Ends for Windows Vista RTM, XP SP2, 2000

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-26 Windows 99 Comments

All good things come to an end, eventually, and operating systems are no different. Microsoft has reminded the public that support for several Windows versions will end over the coming months, which could likely have significant consequences if you or your company are still running these Windows versions.

Joo Joo Delayed Due to Manufacturing Issues

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-26 Wireless 14 Comments

The Joo Joo tablet has been delayed by one month. "Just a day after we pondered the shipping status of Fusion Garage's JooJoo tablet, the company's come clean and told us shipping will delayed to March 25 because of a manufacturing issue with the tablet's 12.1-inch capacitive screen. Yep, it looks like it's going to be at least 27 more days until you've got a JooJoo of your very own - which means, of course, that Fusion Garage will now be trying to launch this thing during the same week Apple's scheduled to launch the iPad."

Parallels Cuts Virtualisation Down to the Bare Metal on Xserve

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-26 Apple 9 Comments

"Parallels, known for its virtualization solutions for both desktops and servers, has announced another option for creating virtual servers on Apple's Xserve. The recently announced Parallels Server for Mac Bare Metal Edition lets admins create Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux virtual servers without the overhead of running Mac OS X Server as a host OS."

Microsoft: Oracle Will Take Us Back to 1970s Hell

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-26 Oracle and SUN 24 Comments

Microsoft's server and tools chief Bob Muglia has chided Oracle for peddling a return to '1960s computing', accusing its rival of going against industry trends and backing a dying and expensive operating-system architecture. "There are some things that Oracle is doing that I just shake my head at," Muglia told financial analysts attending the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, California, "I don't understand what's going to happen - what they think they're going to do with Sparc. I don't see how Sparc can live long-term."

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-02-26 Multimedia, AV 97 Comments

The debate about HTML5 video is for the most part pretty straightforward: we all want HTML5 video, and we all recognise it's a better approach than Flash for online video. However, there's one thing we just can't seem to agree on: the codec. A number of benchmarks have been conducted recently, and they highlight the complexity of video encoding: they go either way.

Submitted by kragil 2010-02-26 Gnome 61 Comments

GNOME hacker Seth Nickell has written a lengthy PDF and accompanying blog post with a number of very interesting ideas for GNOME 3.0. I pondered putting this up on the front page, but since that usually only attracts the "It's not what I'm used to so it sucks"-crowd, I decided to put it up here. Be sure to read the blog post, the PDF, and the comments on the blog post to get the entire picture.

Palm Lowers Sales Expectations, Shares Plummet

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-25 Wireless 28 Comments

The result of a market crowded by bigger competitors. Palm has taken a thorough beating today on the NASDAQ, as shares plummeted nearly 20%. The reason? Palm had to adjust its sales forecasts downward for the third quarter of the 2010 fiscal year, and, well, investors don't like that.

Guest post by snydeq 2010-02-25 General Development 13 Comments

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about the no-win scenario facing today's independent programmers: "In a knowledge economy, programmers rank among our most valuable workers, yet the current legal and regulatory climate makes a career as an independent software developer virtually a dead-end prospect." Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the hurdles and costs of obtaining health care for one's own family, a hostile legal climate in search of accountability for any defects in code - these harsh realities make it "easy to see why software developers would give up on entrepreneurship. For many, the risks simply don't match the potential rewards. Better to keep their heads down, not rock the boat, and hope they can hang onto their jobs until retirement."

Where Is Mozilla Ubiquity?

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-25 Mozilla, Gecko 10 Comments

"One of the most interesting Mozilla Labs projects has now stagnated. Is the project dead? Does it have a future? The Mozilla developer who led the project tells all. Back in the summer of 2008, Mozilla began development of an experimental add-on called Ubiquity, providing new command mash-up capabilities for the Firefox browser. After just over a year of development, Mozilla is now pulling back on the effort, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been successful. The current release of Ubiquity is version 0.1.9.1, and was released on January 20th of this year. To date, Ubiquity has garnered more than 420000 downloads, according to the Mozilla add-ons site. So what is happening with Ubiquity now?"

US IP Enforcement Coordinator Asks for Input

Submitted by Troy Farrell 2010-02-25 Legal 16 Comments

On Tuesday, the US IP Enforcement Coordinator made a request to the public for input on how IP enforcement should work in the current administration. After the business with ACTA, and yesterday the IIPA, this could be a great opportunity for our American readers to voice their concerns tot he Obama administration.

Opera 10.5 Beta Hits the Mac, Beta 2 Hits Windows

Submitted by Idefix 2010-02-25 Opera 6 Comments

Windows users were already enjoying the Opera 10.5 beta for a while now, but the Mac and Linux versions weren't yet available. Mac users can now rejoice, as the beta is now available for their platform as well. In the meantime, Windows users can already upgrade to beta 2 if they so desire; Linux users will have to remain patient a while longer.

Funeral Being Held for Internet Explorer 6

Kroc 2010-02-25 Humor 64 Comments

BBC News reports "Mark your diaries for 4 March because in Denver the funeral arrangements are well underway for the planned passing that day of Internet Explorer 6". There's a phobia of being buried alive but I think in this case, it's the living that are all too quick to be shoveling the dirt over as IE6 doesn't officially die until 2014 when Microsoft pull the life-support.

Google Does Not Have a Monopoly on Search

David Adams 2010-02-25 Google 48 Comments

My colleague Thom wrote an excellent evaluation of the European antitrust investigation of Google yesterday. I agree with much of what Thom says in his article, including the statements that the investigation isn't surprising and that it's fishy that the complaining companies have ties to Microsoft. What I don't agree with is the offhanded comment that Google has "pretty much a monopoly in search." There was a lively discussion on this point in the comments, but I thought that rather than join the fray there, I'd exercise my monopoly power and put my thoughts into an editorial.

US Copyright Lobby: FOSS “Weakens Software Industry”

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-24 Open Source 129 Comments

The world is slowly and surely going crazy. I'm sure of it now. The US copyright lobby has officially gone totally and utterly nuts. Get this: they are trying to lobby the US government to equate encouraging the use of Free and open source software to undermining intellectual property rights, and to weakening the software industry. I wish I was making this stuff up.

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-02-24 Windows 10 Comments

"Back in November, we officially announced a new Windows product called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. Today we are launching Windows MultiPoint Server around the world. Windows MultiPoint Server is available for purchase through OEMs and Microsoft Academic Volume Licensing customers on March 1, for schools and educational institutions (mainly for use in classrooms, labs and libraries)."

Submitted by diegocg 2010-02-24 Linux 15 Comments

Linux 2.6.33 has been released. This version features Nouveau, Nintendo Wii and Gamecube support, DRDB (Distributed Replicated Block Device), TCP "cookie transactions", a syscall for batching recvmsg() calls, several new perf subcommands (perf probe, perf bench, perf kmem, perf diff), support for cache compression and other improvements. See the full changelog here.

Xerox Sues Google, Yahoo Over Search Patents

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-24 Legal 8 Comments

Xerox Corp has sued Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, accusing them of infringing the document management company's patents related to Internet search. In a lawsuit filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, Xerox said Google's Web-based services such as Google Maps, YouTube and AdSense advertising software, as well as Web tools including Yahoo Shopping, infringe patents granted as far back as 2001. Xerox seeks compensation for past infringement and asked the court to halt the companies from further using the technology.

On MicroSD Problems

Kroc 2010-02-24 Hardware 10 Comments

"Normally, the story would end there; you'd RMA the material, get an exchange for the lot, and move on. Except there were a couple of problems. So I kicked into forensic mode. Very low serial numbers are a hallmark of the "ghost shift", i.e. the shift that happens very late at night when a rouge worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off the books." A fascinating in-depth peek into the grey-market of China.

Submitted by Michael Oliveira 2010-02-24 Haiku 35 Comments

This is news that makes me very, very happy. Stephan "stippi" Assmus has written a lengthy blog post detailing the progress made on Haiku's WebKit port, and they're quite far along. Thanks to the help of several community members, the test browser, enticingly named (euh...) HaikuLauncher, is already relatively stable, supports tabbed browsing, and a whole lot more.

EU Launches Antitrust Inquiry Into Google

Thom Holwerda 2010-02-24 Google 66 Comments

Well, this was pretty much inevitable. With Google having pretty much a monopoly in search, it's not surprising to see authorities putting the company under a microscope, and this is exactly what the European Commission is doing. The EC has launched a fact-finding antitrust probe into Google. However, looking at where the probe originates from, some might have a sense of "ah!". Update: more bad news for Google.