Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review

  Submitted by Hakime macOS 17 Comments
Ars Technica's John Siracusa has published his in-depth review of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. As always, this is the only review you really need to read. Great stuff, as usual - even if you don't care about or don't use Mac OS X. He concludes: "Snow Leopard is a unique and beautiful release, unlike any that have come before it in both scope and intention. At some point, Mac OS X will surely need to get back on the bullet-point-features bandwagon. But for now, I'm content with Snow Leopard. It's the Mac OS X I know and love, but with more of the things that make it weak and strange engineered away."
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Haiku-Files Releasing ISO Images

  Submitted by Alexander Bisogiannis Haiku 9 Comments
With the imminent release of the Haiku Alpha, Haiku-Files is now releasing ISO images for testing. Note that these are not the actual alpha release, but only daily builds of the branch which will eventually become the alpha! "With the upcoming release of Haiku R1Alpha1, we are providing candidate imagefiles. They are X86 GCC2 Hybrid images and provided as Raw HD, VMware, and ISO images. As per the R1Alpha1 specifications, they are built from the releases/r1alpha1 branch code and utilize the alpha-* build profile."
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The Story of a Simple and Dangerous Mac OS X Kernel Bug

  Submitted by waid0004 macOS 3 Comments
"Among other things, the update for Mac OS X 10.5.8 also fixed an interesting kernel bug related to the way the fcntl call is handled. The bug was identified as CVE-2009-1235 and the first exploit seems to be from June 2008. The variant that I discovered is much simpler and is, as far as I know, the one that really convinced Apple to solve the issue. The oldest kernel I was able to test the problem was Darwin 8.0.1 which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. The Tiger was announce in June 28, 2004 but was released to the public on April 29, 2005 and it was advertised as containing more than 200 new features. The bug was closed on August 5, 2009 so the number of days the vulnerability was alive was 1599 days (4 years and 3 months)."
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Remotes and Connectivity: Reason No. 6 Why We’re Fat

Internet 36 Comments
While browsing the ever-wider world web today, I came across a story about IBM's patent of a sort of "Facebook Remote Control." It was appalling. Do we seriously need more single-purpose devices that will enable us to sit around more wasting more time than we already do? Does anyone really need to seclude themselves from the world even more to publish their lives on yet another teen-infested network? Must we really always be connected to the net? Read on for my ramble concerning a dark side of technology.
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Eee Keyboard Delayed, Hopefully Launches October

Hardware 2 Comments
It was a sad day when the Eee Keyboard's initial release date of sometime in August was (which, unless it magically appears for sale today, it's not going to happen) was delayed. The drool-worthy piece of work, which we detailed some months ago, just arrived at the FCC. "Interestingly, the test reports indicate the presence of a UWB radio in addition WiFi and Bluetooth, so it looks like we'll see the planned wireless HDMI model even after the spec pretty much hit the skids earlier this summer. We'll see how it goes -- and if we get that interesting Moblin version alongside the Windows edition when this thing eventually ships." Rumors have been floating around about an October release. Hopefully that's the case (or sooner). Pocketbooks at the ready, gentlemen and ladies.
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eComStation v2.0 Silver Released

OS/2 7 Comments
Serenity Systems International and Mensys BV have announced the immediate availability of eComStation 2.0 Silver Release for download on August 28th, 2009. This beta release RC7, codenamed "Silver Release", is available to Software Subscription subscribers. This release of eComStation 2.0 has been under development for a long time. This is demonstrated in the amount of issues resolved and the amount of code committed. For example, 259 bugs were resolved, of which 174 were "fixed" since the previous beta release (eCS 2.0 RC6a). Over 1450 commits were made since the release of eComStation v2.0 RC6a (beta).
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Best Open Source Software of 2009

Open Source 3 Comments
InfoWorld has announced its 2009 Best of Open Source Software winners, spotlighting its top 40 picks among open source enterprise software, application development tools, networking and network management software, and platforms and middleware projects. The package also includes a 'Hall of Fame' for the 10 most indispensable open source projects of all time. InfoWorld's top picks among desktop productivity tools builds on its recent 'Best Free Open Source Software for Windows,' adding GIMP, Blender, and Audacity, among others.
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Mac OS X 10.6 Brings Serious Performance Gains

  Submitted by Michael Larabel macOS 36 Comments
Some detailed benchmarks of Snow Leopard. "The performance improvements we encountered in Mac OS X 10.6 through our benchmarks we were quite astonishing. Thanks to the introduction of the Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit migration, OpenCL support, and other refinements made "under the hood" of Snow Leopard, this is one hell of a fast operating system. We were quite appalled with multiple tests exhibiting nearly 50% performance boosts over Mac OS X 10.5.8. While that was an extreme improvement, many other tests ran 10~16% faster. In a few tests, the performance was the same or the delta was statistically insignificant, but in a couple tests, there were regressions."
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Canonical Unveils New Ubuntu Software Store

  Submitted by John Mills Ubuntu 51 Comments
"With the Ubuntu Software Store, Canonical is hoping to unify all of the different package management needs into a single, unified interface. While this will not be achieved in Ubuntu 9.10, Canonical is hoping that all of the capabilities of the update-manager, Synaptic, the computer janitor application, gdebi, and other package management-related programs will be merged into Ubuntu Software Store. When this has occurred, it will be easier on the new end-user having to just deal with a single program to provide all of this functionality."
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A New, Secure Operating System?

  Submitted by Mirko OS News 23 Comments
"Newmium is currently developing iXRIOS, a high-speed, multi-processor, multi-operative, real-time operating system based on the workstation-server model. Users log on to a specific machine on which their operatives execute by default. They can request remote execution of their operatives via automatic and transparent load balancing of operatives and processors. Coupled with transparent load balancing, the iXRIOS system is loading only required services and drivers. iXRIOS is going to be restricted to commercial USA corporations. All government and non-profits are excluded from the program."
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Microsoft Opens Popfly Source Code

  Submitted by poundsmack Games 1 Comment
"Popfly, a platform developed by Microsoft to help people create and share games with their friends, was shut down this week, according to a blog post on the project's Web site. It's not a total loss to the gaming community, however, since Microsoft decided to open source the code and host it on CodePlex for anyone who still wants to tinker with the game engine."
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Theora: Thusnelda Project Update

  Submitted by exien Multimedia, AV 1 Comment
"Since the last update from around the time of 1.1alpha2, Thusnelda has moved to the SVN trunk where work has concentrated on final features, cleanup and testing for the Theora 1.1 (Thusnelda) final. We're very close to the complete 1.1 and have already released two 1.1 release candidates. We'd optimistically scheduled final 1.1 release for last week, however we're taken some additional time to do more testing/tuning of the two-pass rate control."
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HTML 5: Can the Center Hold?

Internet 10 Comments
Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the ideal of a truly standards-compliant Web will ever be possible given ongoing disagreements over HTML 5, including those most recently set in motion by Microsoft's latest concerns over the spec. "While some items on Microsoft's list seem like quibbles, others are valid issues," McAllister writes. And with others in the working group supporting the proposed additions in question as they stand, an impasse could conceivably be the end result. "Disagreements are an inevitable part of any standardization process. But if disagreements lead to irreconcilable differences, it calls in to question the validity of the final standard." So where does that leave HTML 5?
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Safest Web Browser

Internet 74 Comments
Another instalment of Ask OSNews. A reader sent us in a question about browser security and privacy. "Could you please advise me and your readers on what you consider to be the safest web browser? I am considering the term 'safe' from both a privacy and security stand point."
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