OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Services Instead of Subsystems?

Adam Scheinberg 2008-09-23 Windows 21 Comments

According to Microsoft beat writer Mary Jo Foley, word is that "Windows 7's mail, photo-management and movie-maker subsystems applets are all being replaced by optionally installable Windows Live equivalents." To many, replacing subsystems with services is a good thing. But what will the self-professed geeks think? Cnet seems to think that "Windows 7 must appeal to geeks--or else!"

Review: AmigaOS 4.1

Thom Holwerda 2008-09-23 Amiga & AROS 12 Comments

AmigaOS 4.1, which recently finally got a whole lot more accessible, has been reviewed by Ars Technica's Jeremy Reimer. "Long after most people had given it up for dead, companies such as Hyperion Entertainment Inc. are hard at work improving and enhancing the operating system. I had a change to look at a preview copy of the latest release, AmigaOS 4.1, and it is an impressive piece of work." Hardware 3D compositing, memory protection, virtual memory, a modern browser, and performance improvements are among the new features of AmigaOS 4.1. As a sidenote, OSNews will review AmigaOS 4.1 on the Sam440ep in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Microsoft, Mozilla, Google Talk Browser Futures

David Adams 2008-09-23 Internet 20 Comments

From eWeek: "In a session billed as the browser wars up close and personal, key Microsoft, Mozilla and Google representatives spoke about the past present and future of the browser platform as they see it . . . one of the issues that stood out to me was that of developer discontent. When the Ajaxians opened up questioning to the audience, an attendee stood up and said Google's announcement of its new browser "was greeted with shock and horror," by him."

Delayed New Palm OS, Due End of Year

David Adams 2008-09-23 Wireless 9 Comments

Palm's planned Linux-based Palm OS, called "Palm OS II," is "on track" to be ready by the end of the year, with a target of early 2009 for devices running the new OS to be on sale. The new Palm OS is being developed independent of Access, the company that owns the current (old) Palm OS, which is acquired with PalmSource in 2005.

Microsoft Expands High Performance Computing

David Adams 2008-09-23 Windows 14 Comments

Microsoft just released Windows HPC Server 2008, with support for thousands of processors. A NYTimes article takes a closer look at Microsoft's ambitions in supercomputing, and current trends in the HPC field, where Microsoft has almost no current presence. Microsoft's strategy is probably a recognition that with the price of high-powered hardware decreasing, many new companies and organizations are finding application for high-powered systems, and they hope to be able to take a portion of that new business using people's familiarity with the Windows brand as a foot in the door.

SGI and Khronos Group Publish OpenGL with New License

Submitted by zz 2008-09-23 3D 16 Comments

SGI and the Khronos Group published a new license for OpenGL. "The license, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org, further opens previously released SGI graphics software that has set the industry standard for visualization software and has proven essential to GNU/Linux and a host of applications." New new license is shorter than the the FreeB license in version 1.1, which wasn't an Open Source license.

Economy Suffers Another Blow: Peggle Nights Released

Thom Holwerda 2008-09-22 Games 9 Comments

OSNews doesn't really do games all that often, but for some, we I make an exception. We're a few days late, but last week PopCap Games, makers of Bejeweled, released its sequel to one of the craziest and most addictive games ever made: Peggle. The sequel is called Peggle Nights, and is basically more of the same. Peggle users around the world, rejoice! Another opportunity to become a Peggle Grand Master!

Submitted by Rahul 2008-09-21 Linux 145 Comments

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code. Update by TH: Rebuttals are appearing all over the web, like this one by Canonical's Matt Zimmerman ("He's refuting a claim which has, quite simply, never been made. When this sort of thing happens on mailing lists, it's called trolling."), or this one by another Canonical employee, Dustin Kirkland.

Microsoft and Novell Deliver on Virtualization Interoperability

amjith 2008-09-19 OS News 35 Comments

Microsoft and Novell have made good on their 2006 interoperability pact. Microsoft and Novell jointly announced that Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise has been optimized to run as an "enlightened" guest on Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor platform. Windows Server 2008 customers have been able to run as a virtualized guest on SUSE since last June, when SUSE became the first member of Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, which Novell has helped to fine-tune. Now SUSE is optimized to run on Microsoft's Hyper-V as well.

The A-Z of Programming Languages: Haskell

Submitted by Ward D 2008-09-19 General Development 7 Comments

Computerworld chats to Simon Peyton-Jones about the development of Haskell. Peyton-Jones speaks in depth about his desire to 'do one thing well', as well as interest in lazy functional programming languages and their place in a world with rapidly increasing multi-core CPUs and clusters.

awesome 3.0 Released

Submitted by Julien Danjou 2008-09-19 Desktop environments 14 Comments

After 6 months of development and more than 1000 change sets, the final version of awesome 3.0 has been released. 'awesome' is a frame-work window manager, which also supports tiling window management. This major release brings a lot of new features. The whole configuration file is now write in the Lua language and use a simple API. This allows to modify and control every corner of the window manager. This version is based on XCB, a new low level library which communicate with the X server. Pango usage also enhances text rendering.

Submitted by Hakime 2008-09-19 Internet 29 Comments

Just three months ago, we announced SquirrelFish, a major revamp of our JavaScript engine featuring a high-performance bytecode interpreter. Today we’d like to announce the next generation of our JavaScript engine - SquirrelFish Extreme (or SFX for short). SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance. Benchmarks can be found Squirrelfish Extreme benchmarks can be found on the "Summer of Javascriptcore" blog. As seen, it claims to be faster than both Squirrelfish, Google's V8, and the upcoming Firefox javascript engine, Tracemonkey.

Ribbons, Ribbons, Ribbons

Thom Holwerda 2008-09-18 Windows 114 Comments

We all know that Windows 7 is on its way, planned for release somewhere late 2009 or early 2010. We already know it will have a multitouch framework, no major kernel and/or driver framework changes, and a new taskbar people at Microsoft are not supposed to talk about right now. The firs two milestone releases didn't appear to be very exciting, but now there is - supposedly - a milestone 3 (build 6780) release, and there is a screenshot, and more information on UI changes. According to Microsoft blogger Stephen Chapman, the ribbon will make its way to Windows 7.

Dirac 1.0.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2008-09-17 Multimedia, AV 50 Comments

Dirac is an advanced royalty-free video compression format designed for a wide range of uses, from delivering low-resolution web content to broadcasting HD and beyond, to near-lossless studio editing. The v1.0.0 version was released yesterday, and the new VLC version supports playback of .ts/.drc Dirac files.

Submitted by afxgroup 2008-09-17 Amiga & AROS 37 Comments

"Hyperion Entertainment VOF and ACube Systems SRL are pleased to announce that they have entered into an OEM license agreement which will allow ACube to offer its customers an OEM version of Hyperion's AmigaOS 4.1 operating system for their SAM440 range of motherboards. Prospective customers wishing to beta-test the near final OEM version of AmigaOS 4.1 for the SAM 440ep will be afforded the opportunity to do so and will subsequently receive the full version. Orders can be placed as of now with ACube. A first public demonstration of AmigaOS 4.1 for SAM440ep is scheduled for the upcoming exhibition Pianeta Amiga in Empoli, Italy on September 27-28, 2008." Update by TH: Due to all the massive cheering and excitement going on in the OSNews Boardroom and our company yacht, we actually forgot to link to the official announcements here and here.

Review: ‘EFI-X Dongle Perfectly Transforms PC to Mac’

Submitted by Andrew Youll 2008-09-17 macOS 76 Comments

If you want to run Mac OS X on a standard, non-Apple-labelled x86 box, you have various options. You can go all creative and build and install one yourself, and then be weary when installing updates from Apple. You can also buy a Mac clone from PsyStar, and then be weary of Apple's crack team of lawyers. A third option has just become available: EFI-X.

Review: Asus Eee PC 4G 701

Eugenia Loli 2008-09-16 Hardware 19 Comments

Our friends at Geeks.com, known for their cheap laptops offers, sent in one of the most popular netbooks around: the Asus Eee PC. The model is the 701 4G, with 512 MB RAM, and Windows XP in it. Read through for a review of the product.

Submitted by snydeq 2008-09-16 OS News No Comments

Paul Venezia offers an in-depth review of Citrix XenDesktop 2.0, touching on the growing importance Virtual Desktop Infrastructure as a whole. 'Citrix has married VDI to its existing stable of application and desktop delivery mechanisms, and it continues to leverage the stellar ICA protocol to assist in speed, user experience, and manageability,' Venezia writes. 'If the company can continue to improve XenServer, XenDesktop could become the showcase VDI implementation. As it stands now, coupling XenDesktop with VMware VI3 is probably the best of both worlds.'

VMWare Fusion 2.0 Released

Submitted by Andrew Youll 2008-09-16 OS News 8 Comments

"VMWare has released Fusion 2.0, which is a free upgrade for 1.x owners, new features / improvements of the Intel Mac virtualization software include: Multiple Snapshots & AutoProtect, Shared Folder, Improvements & Mirrored Folders, URL Handling, Application Sharing, True Multiple Display Support, Unity Improvements, Graphics Improvements. For details on all the above and more visit the Fusion website for the release notes."

Submitted by Flatland_Spider 2008-09-16 Windows 39 Comments

Builder Au looked closely at Windows Server 2008 and then listed the 10 things about the OS that left an impression on them. They looked at 64-bit compatibility, NT domain migration, and the licensing terms, just to name a few.