Palm Foleo First Thoughts

"Late this spring, Palm, Inc. took the wraps off the Foleo, the first device in its new third product category. When it debuts in the next few months, this won't be a handheld or smartphone, instead it will something Palm is calling a mobile companion. I recently spent some time with a prototype unit, and I'd like to share my first impressions." More here.

LGPL Issue Parallels Solved

The issue between WINE and Parallels has been solved. "On July 2nd, Parallels sent the modified sources to me (Stefan Dosinger). I looked at them, and they are functionally mostly unmodified, except of some changes to get wined3d to compile on Windows(nameless unions, and similar things). What is yet to be verified is if these are the sources used to build the libs shipped in Parallels Desktop for Mac."

Slackware 12.0 Released

Patrick Volkerding has released Slackware 12.0. From the changelog: "Released as Slackware 12.0 with no changes since the last batch. Big Thanks again are due to the CREW, without whom this just wouldn't be possible to do with the level of quality that Slackware users demand. We had a lot of help this time, and I hope it shows in project output that you'll enjoy. Thanks for the support of the Slackware community, because without your support I wouldn't be able to keep leading this project."

Syllable Dev Build with New ABrowse Released

The Syllable team has released a development build which includes the new ABrowse. "This week's development build is now available and includes the new version of ABrowse. It will only run on 0.6.4, so if you've been waiting to try it, now is your chance! Note that there is no way to upgrade from a previous release of Syllable using a development build, so unless you're happy to replace your existing installation, wait for the official release of 0.6.4 or use a virtual machine i.e. VMware or Qemu."

Microsoft Document Formats Gain Massachusetts’ Favour

Massachusetts has proposed changing its standards policy to make room for Microsoft Office document formats. The state's Information Technology Division on Monday posted a draft proposal, part of a periodic revision to its overall technical architecture, to its Web site where it will be under review until July 20. If accepted, the policy update would list Office Open XML as acceptable 'open formats' for use by executive-branch state agencies. Office Open XML, also referred to as Ecma-376, are the XML-based file formats in Office 2007 that Microsoft standardized at Ecma International late last year.

Microsoft Ending Vista Family Discount

Five months after its introduction, Microsoft is discontinuing a program that offered some Windows Vista purchasers the ability to buy additional copies of the operating system at a substantial discount. Since Windows Vista went on sale to consumers at the end of January, US and Canadian buyers of Vista Ultimate have had the option of buying up to two additional copies of Vista - albeit the Home Premium version - for an additional USD 50 apiece. The company had said it would re-evaluate the 'Windows Vista Family Discount' after 30 June. In a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Microsoft product manager Nick White said the program would 'sunset' as of 11.59pm PDT on 30 June.

ASUS Eee PC Hands on Preview

"One of the biggest news stories out of this year's Computex wasn't of a new chipset, GPU, or graphics card, but rather of the announcement of the ASUS Eee PC, a small, slim, and light portable computer that is priced at USD 199. Introduced by Jonney Shih, Chariman and CEO of ASUS at Intel's keynote address the first day of the show, the Eee PC has already made headlines world wide. Not only have we had the chance to actually use the ASUS Eee PC, we can also confirm some important new specifications of the notebook."

What Are the ‘Usability Experts’ Doing?

Sometimes, Apple's (or any other software maker's) complete lack of respect for usability never ceases to amaze me. Take today for example. Apart from the close, minimise, and "maximise" widgets Apple places on window decors, there is also a fourth widget programmers on the Apple platform can use. This widget resembles a sort of dash, and is placed on the top right corner of the window decor. This widget is used in many applications, both from Apple as well as from various third parties. It has one function: toggle the visibility of the window's toolbar.

Parallels Accused of LGPL Violation

SWSoft, the company behind Parallels Desktop for Mac, is possibly violating the LGPL license by using LGPL libraries from the WINE project without providing access to the source code. The WINE project first discovered the violation early this June, and after several failed attempts at getting the source code to the libraries, they set up a wiki page to keep track of the ongoing violation. The WINE project wants to resolve the issue "without starting legal action". Thanks to MacWereld for pointing this out .

Nouveau: Where It Stands Today

"The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA's NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems."

Anatomy of the Linux Networking Stack

"One of the greatest features of the Linux operating system is its networking stack. It was initially a derivative of the BSD stack and is well organized with a clean set of interfaces. Its interfaces range from the protocol agnostics, such as the common sockets layer interface or the device layer, to the specific interfaces of the individual networking protocols. This article explores the structure of the Linux networking stack from the perspective of its layers and also examines some of its major structures."

iPhone Unleashed

The iPhone is out and about, and everyone waiting in line for hours/days got one (including Woz, and the mayor of Philadelphia who apparently had nothing better to do). Unboxing pictures here, dissecting pictures here, PDF manual, and one of the best-designed iPhone web apps can be found here: the iPhoneAppsManager (requires a Safari/Webkit browser to work). Update: Reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Update 2: It is claimed Apple UK will announce a 3G iPhone on Monday, as well as deals with Vodafone and T-Mobile. Update 3: Lots of screenshots reveal no "weekend/weekday" recurrence in the alarm app.

GPL Version 3 Released

The FSF today released version 3 of the GNU GPL, the popular free software license. "Since we founded the free software movement, over 23 years ago, the free software community has developed thousands of useful programs that respect the user's freedom. The programs are in the GNU/Linux operating system, as well as personal computers, telephones, Internet servers, and more. Most of these programs use the GNU GPL to guarantee every user the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute the program," said Richard Stallman, founder and president of the FSF. This article has some interesting replies from the BSD community (right in the middle).

How Power Consumption Will Shape the Future of Computing

"At the Research@Intel day last week, Intel had a huge array of technologies and active research initiatives on display for press and analysts. As I toured the company's Santa Clara offices, I was able to piece together a few major themes and directions by stepping back and looking at the places where Intel is currently focusing its forward-looking research. In my next few articles, starting with this one, I'll take an in-depth look at each of these themes and at what it tells us about where computing is headed in the next decade."

Review: eComStation 2.0 RC1

Recently, Serenity Systems released the second first release candidate of eComStation 2.0, the successor to IBM's os/2. Mensys, the online distributor of eComStation and other os/2-related products, was so kind as to provide OSNews with a review copy of this release candidate, and since my experience with os/2 and eCS is not much more than a few failed attempts at installing Warp 4, I was eager to try it out. Read on for a short history of os/2 and eCS and a review of the release candidate.

Vista Vulnerability Report ‘Debunked’

On Full Disclosure, there's a negative analysis of Jeff Jones' six-month vulnerability report. "Conclusions that are drawn are built on a lack of understanding by the Microsoft researcher. I highly encourage him to go back and take another look, and pare down the results to essential information that is absolutely critical to the conclusions, rather than just 'Other OS's have more bugs, see, look at my graphs'."