OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Gazelle: Applying Operating System Concepts to the Browser

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-07 Internet 11 Comments

Web browsers have become ever more important for our computers. Instead of the browser displaying static HTML pages, they now handle complex web applications, ranging from social networking to text editors to online banking, and everything in between. While some browsers have finally started treating the browser more like an operating system (Chrome and Internet Explorer 8), those are just baby steps. The real thing is coming with Microsoft's Gazelle, a research project which applies operating system concepts to the browser.

VLC Media Player 1.0.0 Released

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-07 Multimedia, AV 24 Comments

After an 8 year long development process, the team behind the VLC Media Player has released version 1.0.0 of their popular and capable media player. Even though previous versions weren't necessarily unstable, reaching version 1.0 is still somewhat of a milestone.

Submitted by google_ninja 2009-07-07 Google 9 Comments

It almost sounds like a joke, but it's true enough. Ever since Gmail was instituted in April of 2004 with the invitation scheme, it and many other of Google's Apps have been wearing the beta tag. At long last, however, Google's ripping it off like a bandage.

Palm Announces Pre for Europe, Arrives Before End of Year

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-07 Wireless 2 Comments

Finally, the Palm Pre has been announced for European markets. The Pre will arrive via Telefonica to some European countries (O2 in the UK/Ireland/Germany, and Movistar in Spain) before the end of the year. This Pre will obviously be GSM/HSDPA variant of Palm's saviour (at least, it hopes so).

PC-BSD 7.1.1 Released

Submitted by Arthur Koziol 2009-07-07 PC-BSD 2 Comments

The PC-BSD team has pushed out a bug-fix release of their operating system. "Version 7.1.1 contains a number of bugfixes and improvements from PC-BSD 7.1, including KDE 4.2.4, improvements to printing support, Xorg Server 1.6.1, and much more." Get it from their download page.

CompuServe Signs Off

Submitted by Dale Smoker 2009-07-07 Internet 4 Comments

"CompuServe, the first commercially successful online and email provider in America, has been shut down by AOL after 30 years of service. The original CompuServe â€” later renamed CompuServe Classic â€” was laid to rest July 1, 2009. In a message sent to its remaining subscribers, AOL urged customers sticking with cheap dial-up to move on to the company's surviving sub-brand ISP, CompuServe 2000."

Create a Mobile Application for Android Using Scala, Eclipse

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-07 General Development 7 Comments

The Android operating system provides a powerful, open platform for mobile development. It leverages the power of the Java programming language and the Eclipse tools platform. Now you can add the Scala programming language to that mix. In this article, see how you can use Scala as the primary development language on Android.

KDEnLive: Most Promising, But Not Quite There Yet

Eugenia Loli 2009-07-07 Multimedia, AV 18 Comments

KDEnLive 0.7.5 was released a few days ago, so I installed it on my Ubuntu machine to see how the app has been progressed since the last time I tried it. KDEnLive is the most actively developed, and easiest to use Linux video editor. Its UI resembles Sony Vegas in many ways; if you know how to use Vegas, you won't have trouble with KDEnLive.

Submitted by PLan 2009-07-07 Mono 131 Comments

We've already seen some heavy discussion on Mono and C# here on OSNews the past few weeks, as it became clear the patent situation regarding the ECMA parts of Mono was anything but faith inspiring. This issue seems to be resolved now: Microsoft has made a legally binding promise not to sue anyone who uses or distributes implementations of said ECMA standards. Following this news, Mono will be split in two; the ECMA standard parts, and the rest.

DOJ Said To Launch Antitrust Probe Into US Telcom Market

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-06 Legal 22 Comments

It was more or less not a question of if, but when, and now we're here: the US Department of Justice is said to launch an investigation into the US telecommunications industry to see if the two biggest players, AT&T and Verizon, are abusing their market position. Even though Apple is not a target for the probe, the usually trustworthy Wall Street Journal states that the iPhone/AT&T deal will also come under scrutiny .

Open Source Search Engine Benchmarks

Submitted by Sean Fargo 2009-07-06 Benchmarks No Comments

An interesting article, this details the experiments and procedures Vik Singh performed to test the latest versions of several open source search engines, particularly Lucene, Xapian, zettair, sqlite, and sphinx. It tests them by indexing Twitter results in varied categories as well as the amount and relevancy of medical journals for a certain query, providing comparative system stats and relevancy scores. All of the benchmark code is open source as well.

CrunchPad Tablet Hopefully Set for Summer Release

weildish 2009-07-06 Hardware 7 Comments

We all remember the saliva-inducing CrunchPad whose photos were "leaked" back in April; the tablet has a yummy 12" touchscreen, boots straight into a customized Webkit browser running atop a Linux core, has an Intel Atom processor, and is designed to be sold for under $300. As it turns out, it's nigh on to be released as Michael Arrington, the one behind the idea, will be debuting the device at "an event" later in July or early in August. After that, the tablet is supposed to be available "as soon as possible," though just when and where is still unknown. Hopefully "as soon as possible" is a matter of a few weeks after the event. The sub-$300 idea is giving me itches for it to be on sale now.

Submitted by fsmag 2009-07-06 General Development 6 Comments

"Lately, the Falcon Programming Language has attracted growing interest and excited a deal of curiosity. In this article I'll document some unique features of Falcon that allow users to build easily what I define as a 'second order virtual machine'."

Maemo To Switch To Qt

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-06 Qt 34 Comments

As some had already anticipated when Nokia acquired Trolltech, the next version of the Maemo platform will have its application framework based on Qt instead of Gtk+. This news was announced at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. While the switch to Qt may seem a major defeat for the GNOME community, this isn't exactly true, as many of the underlying technologies will still be GNOME-centric.

Submitted by s1oan 2009-07-06 ReactOS 26 Comments

The team behind ReactOS, the NT-compatible open source operating system, have released ReactOS 0.3.10, which comes with many improvements aimed towards making it easier to run ReactOS on real hardware.

Clones, Pirates, Browsers

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-05 OS News 11 Comments

Time for another Week in Review. We had a fairly regular week this week, with the focus somehow being Mac cloners, The Pirate Bay, Mono, and Browsers were also in the spotlight this week with the release of Firefox 3.5, disagreements on the video tag codec, and talking about KHTML.

PearC Mac Cloner Expands to France, The Netherlands, Belgium

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-04 Hardware 113 Comments

Now this is interesting news that hit my inbox at 2:22 AM (don't ask). It seems like the concept of selling Mac clones is more lucrative than many have anticipated, as I've just been informed via email that the German PearC has expanded its business into the BeNeLux (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg) and France. Together with the news that Psystar emerged from chapter 11, it looks like the market for Mac clones is more lucrative than many of us had imagined.

AmigaForever 2009 Released

Thom Holwerda 2009-07-03 Amiga & AROS 14 Comments

While I'm still chipping away at my AmigaOS 4.1/sam440ep review (try writing a thesis and a large review at the same time), Cloanto released AmigaForever 2009. AmigaForever is a very full-featured AmigaOS emulation tool, packed with various different ROMs and AmigaOS versions (1.3-3.x), as well as tons and tons of included games, software, and demos. This new version comes with even more stuff.

iPhone Hole Found, Getting Patched

weildish 2009-07-03 Wireless 6 Comments

There haven't been too many iPhone exploits, it seems, despite the popularity of said devices. However, Charlie Miller, a security researcher, recently uncovered a vulnerability in the iPhone OS that could possibly "allow an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator's network. The malicious code could include commands to monitor the location of the phone using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a distributed denial of service attack or a botnet." Scary, isn't it? They say it's not very likely that others will exploit it even on a small scale before Apple issues the patch, but having a hole like that just sitting there makes me glad right now that I don't own an iPhone.

Thoughts of a Linux Game Porter

Submitted by Michael 2009-07-03 Games 12 Comments

The folks over at Phoronix had an interesting interview with Linux game porter, Frank Earl. Despite the apparent decline in PC gaming, Earl has worked for Linux Game Publishing for several years and was seeking input from the community at large for game suggestions at Phoronix. He's also done work independently on porting various software over from Windows. The interview covers work that Earl has done, difficulties that arise in porting commercial games to Linux, successes they've had, his views on Linux in general, and his thoughts on the future of gaming in Linux.