OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Video of OGD1 VGA Emulation, Booting in PC

Submitted by theosib 2009-04-23 3D 9 Comments

You may recall the recent OSNews article about Linux Fund getting donations to supply developers with OGD1 boards. (OGD1 is a what you might call an "open source graphics card," with all designs, documentation and source code available under Free Software licenses. Technically, however, OGD1 is an FPGA-based prototyping platform with memory and video encoders on it. See the wikipedia article.) Since then, the FSF got involved and is asking for volunteers to help with the OGP wiki. The OGP had shown OGD1 driving a graphics display back in 2007 at OSCON. And now, the OGP has just announced technical success with the rather difficult challenge of emulating legacy VGA text mode. They even put up a video on YouTube of a display, driven by OGD1, showing a PC booting into Gentoo.

Apple Weathers Economic Storm Quite Well

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-22 Apple 26 Comments

Apple has presented its financial results for the first quarter of 2009 (which is the second quarter of the fiscal year 2009 for Apple), and despite suspicions that Apple might see a sharp decline in Macintosh sales in face of the economic slowdown, the company has managed to weather the storm quite well.

Massive Windows Botnet Uncovered

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-22 Privacy, Security 30 Comments

Researchers at security firm Finjan have uncovered a massive botnet of Windows machines. The botnet is 1.9 million machines strong, with many of the machines located in the United States: 45% of them are located in the US. The researchers detailed their findings at the RSA Conference in San Fransisco.

OSNews Asks: Uses for Multitouch on Desktops, Laptops…?

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-22 Graphics 39 Comments

I's time for another "OSNews Asks", a blatant rip-off of just about every other website in existence. Anyway, today we want to focus on multitouch. The technology behind it has existed for a long time, but only recently have companies like Apple (iPhone, trackpads) and Microsoft (Surface, Windows 7) begun promoting it. We have a question for you, about multitouch in desktops and laptops.

Submitted by orfanum 2009-04-22 Geek stuff 40 Comments

A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains. The "Blue Brain" has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory. Scaling the simulation to the human brain is only a matter of money, says the project's head. The work was presented at the European Future Technologies meeting in Prague.

Submitted by linuxmag 2009-04-22 Linux 32 Comments

"Btrfs holds the promise of giving Linux many enterprise class file system features similar to ZFS but with even more features and better performance. In fact, many Linux experts think that btrfs is one of the keys to the future of Linux. While btrfs is not quite ready to be your only file system, it is in the kernel ready for testing and is still undergoing very heavy development. In this article we will introduce the key features of btrfs find out how it compares to existing file systems."

Submitted by karijes 2009-04-22 Desktop environments 5 Comments

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop environment for UNUX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. "This is the first major 2.0 release, after three years of working on it. It comes with a lot of the new stuff and code, but the most important are replacing eFLTK usage with FLTK, introducing brand new edelib library and syncing with the freedesktop.org standards."

Submitted by Hakime 2009-04-22 Hardware 16 Comments

In the current economic climate, it's hard to make any sane predictions one way or the other. While we receive continuous reports that netbooks are the saving grace of the PC market, the light at the end of the tunnel, the beacon of hope, the Fiona Apple among the rest of the mediocre musician crowd, the, err, (okay I'm out of metaphors), we are now getting a report which states that during the first quarter of 2009, netbooks have not met their sales estimates.

Instant-On to Any PC with Xandros’ Presto

weildish 2009-04-22 Oracle and SUN 30 Comments

Instant-On is an attractive to have for any system, but most commercial OSs haven't been able to accomplish this. Users are generally left waiting the few minutes to boot, and for some people in a hurry, that's simply not good enough. The aptly named program known as Presto is available for $19.95, and is installable on most any Windows computers. It installs a Xandros-based partition and boots up quite instantly. "Presto allows on-the-fly computing to check email, browse the web, chat with friends, make Skype calls, create documents, download media, apps and games, or enjoy music, videos, and movies stored in a user’s Windows folders." I'd say that's worth $20, and they're also offering to work with OEMs to get it on new computers on a mass scale.

Chinese Skytone Offers First Android Netbook

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-21 Google 30 Comments

We've already seen numerous rumours about Google's Android making a move into netbooks, only fuelled by companies expressing serious interest in the concept and by Google's CEO making some hints about it not too long ago. Well, the rumours are now no longer rumours, as a Chinese company is now the first to offer an Android-based netbook, at USD 100-200.

RISC OS 6 in Pictures

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-21 RISC OS 11 Comments

"RISCOS Ltd gets fired at from all sides, it seems. There are those who have RISC OS 5 and are fed up with RISCOS Ltd saying: "Yes, we want to do RISC OS Select on Iyonix, but..." Then there are those who have subscribed to ROL's Select scheme, but the features they want have not been implemented or they are frustrated by a lack of progress. It is fair to say ROL has made a large number of improvements to the OS over the years and many of these are 'under the hood' that are not always immediately obvious to users. There have been a few obvious user-facing improvements since the release of RISC OS 6, as part of Select 5, so let's take a look at these."

Apple Jumps 32 Spots Into Fortune 100

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-21 Apple 11 Comments

"Reflecting a strong 2008 in which its sales - if not its stock price - jumped sharply, Apple this week made its first appearance in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 since Steve Jobs' return. Apple became a Fortune 500 company in 1983, but it fell off Fortune magazine's list of America's 500 largest companies (ranked by revenue) in 1995, while Jobs was running NeXT. Apple climbed back onto the list in 2005, eight years after Jobs' return. It vaulted an impressive 32 spots this year to land at No. 71, thanks in part to the declining fortunes of some of the firms that were above it, but mostly to revenues that grew 35.3% to $32.479 billion in 2008."

Google Joins Effort for 3D Web Standard with New Plugin, API

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-21 Google 11 Comments

"Google has released an experimental browser plugin that will make it possible to display rich 3D graphics in Web content. Google hopes that the plugin will stimulate discussion within the Web development community and contribute to a nascent effort headed by the Khronos group to bring 3D graphics to the Web. The plugin provides an implementation of O3D, a new API conceived by Google that facilitates the development of interactive 3D Web applications. It can be used to programmatically create and manipulate 3D graphics with the JavaScript programming language. The source code of the plugin is distributed under the open source BSD license, which broadly permits third-party developers to study, modify, and redistribute the plugin software."

Sharp Mebius Netbook with Multitouch LCD Touchpad

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-21 Hardware 20 Comments

Most netbooks and laptops are bland and boring, with none of them having any unique selling points that make them stand out from the crowd. Every now and then, however, a device comes along that looks like any other, but comes with something special that makes it stand out. The Sharp Mebius is one of those netbooks: it comes with an LCD touchpad.

Red Hat Maps Open Source Activity

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-21 Open Source 7 Comments

Red Hat today published a new study together with Georgia Tech mapping open source activity across 75 countries. Officially called the Open Source Index (OSI), the final score is made of a number of factors including policies, practices in the Government, Industry, and Community. Topping the list current is France with a score of 1.35. Spain is second at 1.07, Germany third at 1.05.

Submitted by davidiwharper 2009-04-21 Windows 40 Comments

Windows Vista wasn't exactly a success, and as such, Microsoft needed different people to manage the development of Windows 7. One of those new people is Julie Larson-Green, who made a very good showing with Microsoft Office 2007, which took the bold move of replacing the menu-driven interface with the newly designed Ribbon interface. The Sydney Morning Herald (awesome name) decided to take a look at who, exactly, Larson-Green is.

Prof Hawking Admitted to Hospital; Hawking Now “Comfortable”

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-20 In the News 12 Comments

After being admitted to the hospital earlier today, the health situation of Professor Stephen Hawking has improved, and he is now "comfortable" according to a spokesperson of the University of Cambridge in the UK. He was admitted into the hospital today after "chest problems", and university spokespeople stated he was "very ill".

What’s Going to Happen with OpenOffice, MySQL, SPARC?

Thom Holwerda 2009-04-20 Oracle and SUN 94 Comments

With today's surprise announcement that Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems, several questions were raised as to some Sun products, including MySQL, Solaris, and OpenOffice.org. Browsing around the net, there are several viewpoints on the future of these Sun products, and the OpenOffice.org team has even issued a statement itself.

Mobile Computing and Law Enforcement

David Adams 2009-04-20 Wireless 13 Comments

Most people probably wouldn't think of the local police as one of the vanguards of mobile computing technology, but the Police in Memphis, Tennessee are pushing the envelope, and its saving them time and money.

Submitted by tsedlmeyer 2009-04-20 Oracle and SUN 122 Comments

We've been debating the merits of a possible IBM-Sun deal for a while now, and even Sun itself seemed to be in the dark as to if it would be a good idea to be bought by IBM. These debates are now all moot: in a surprise move (at least, I didn't see any speculation about it) Oracle has bought Sun Microsystems, at USD 9.50 a share, which equates to a total of 7.4 billion USD. The news got out through a press release.