The Facebook Login Thing: Blown Out of Proportion

Editorial 86 Comments
Recently, a story about people mistaking a news story for the Facebook login page has received considerable media attention. It's currently being seen by many as justification for the recent trend in locking people out of their computers for their own protection - but anyone with even basic mathematical skills and a calculator should come to the conclusion that this story has been blown way out of proportion.
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Windows Phone 7 Series To Finally Bring CE 6.0 to Users

Windows 24 Comments
Since I'm a little under the weather at the moment, posting is a bit slow on OSNews (yes, a story about Notion Ink's Adam is upcoming!). I'm kind of picking the simple and easy-to-write items for now, and this is most certainly one of them. As some of you might know, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 7 Series yesterday, a complete reboot of its mobile operating system. While little is known about its internals, it's most likely based on Windows Embedded CE 6.0.
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Biggest Mobile Operators Join Forces on App Store Project

Wireless 10 Comments
"Twenty-four mobile network operators have formed the Wholesale Applications Community to avoid fragmenting the apps market and to give developers one point of entry to all the members, the GSM Association announced on Monday. The operators will now start working on uniting their existing developer communities, so developers will be able to go to one place to get their applications distributed instead of having to go through multiple application approval processes. The community will also start working on a common development standard that should be ready within the next 12 months. The standard will be independent of phone type and operating system, according to the members."
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NVIDIA Has Gallium3D Support in Fedora 13

  Submitted by Zifre 3D 6 Comments
"Fedora started out by shipping the Nouveau DDX driver, then turned to kernel mode-setting support that has matured and is used by default with the current Fedora 12 release. With Fedora 13, Red Hat is again shipping with the latest free software NVIDIA bits, which now includes 3D support. Thanks to an update to the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package, there is 3D/OpenGL support enabled for NVIDIA hardware. This 3D support is coming from Nouveau's Gallium3D driver for most of the NVIDIA graphics hardware while there is also a classic Mesa driver for old NV hardware that recently came about. Yes, there is finally a deployed Nouveau-NVIDIA Gallium3D driver that will be easily deployable out in the wild with Fedora 13."
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OSnews Podcast Now Available in OGG

OS News 106 Comments
We fought you off for as long as possible, but in the end we had to give in :) What decided it was that OSnews is not a mainstream source of news like Engadget or even sites where they actually employ people, we are not an entity like AOL that fails to grasp the reality of the web today and the issues surrounding the technology landscape. We have the technical background, and the community to boot to know that when we criticise others, we had better be doing the right thing ourselves. Get the feed here.
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Microsoft Unveils Windows Phone 7 Series

Windows 114 Comments
So, after much, much speculation and many, many rumours, Microsoft finally took the wraps off Windows Phone 7 Series, its newest mobile operating system. Hold on to your hats, because uncharacteristically for the Redmond giant, they've rebuilt everything from the ground up - this system has little to no connection to the Windows Mobile of yore. I don't say this lightly - but dear lord, Windows Phone 7 Series is full of win. Update: Hands-on video from Engadget inside. Update II: There is no sync application. It's all done over-the-air, to the internet. Only videos and music are synced via the Zune software. Update III: Since I didn't mention it clearly, here it goes: Windows Phone 7 Series is a clean break. There is no backwards compatibility at all. Update IV: Channel9 has a 22-minute in-depth demonstration of Windows Phone 7 Series.
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Teacup, Meet Storm, pt. IV: Adobe Blocking HTML5?

Internet 38 Comments
There's a bit of ruckus going on at the moment in the world of HTML5. A number of people are claiming that Adobe has blocked the latest publication of the HTML5 standard. However, after diving into the actual mailing list threads, it becomes obvious quite quickly that it's nothing but a misunderstanding. Update: Masinter replies: "No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, 'blocked' in the W3C HTML Working Group - not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video - not by me, not by Adobe."
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Samsung Unveils Wave, First Bada Handset

Wireless 21 Comments
While the world outside of OSNews is wondering whether we really need yet another mobile operating system, we here are of course happy with another contender - the more, the merrier, as it equals to competition, which keeps everybody on their toes. A day before the Mobile World Congress kicks off in Barcelona (finally a tech event in my time zone!), Samsung unveiled its Wave handset, the first sporting Samsung's new Bada operating system.
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Linux Not Fully Prepared for 4096-Byte Sector Hard Drives

Linux 65 Comments

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we'll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.

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Who Is Developing KVM Linux Virtualisation?

OS News No Comments
"Five years ago, the open source Xen hypervisor was the primary technology that big vendors like IBM and Red Hat were adopting and pushing. In 2010, that's no longer the case as the rival KVM effort is now getting the attention of both IBM and Red Hat, as well as many others in the Linux ecosystem. So what does this mean for the KVM community and the future of Xen? An IBM study looking at who's most involved in KVM may provide some answers."
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The Ars Technica Guide to Virtualisation

  Submitted by SReilly OS News No Comments
This is part three of Ars' guide about virtualisation. "Part 1 described three ways in which a component might be virtualized; emulation, "classic" virtualization, and paravirtualization, and part 2 described in more detail how each of these methods was used in CPU virtualization. But the CPU is not the only part of a computer that can use these techniques; although hardware devices are quite different from a CPU, similar approaches are equally useful."
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Office for Mac 2011 To Feature Co-Authoring, Ribbon Interface

Microsoft 21 Comments
"Microsoft on Thursday detailed some of the new features in its forthcoming Office for Mac 2011 suite, including co-authoring tools, Web apps, and a redesigned ribbon interface more consistent with its Windows counterpart. Microsoft is a part of Macworld 2010 expo in San Francisco this week, and has used the event to divulge details on its forthcoming update to Office for Mac, expected to arrive later this year."
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