OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Linux: The Completely Fair Scheduler

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-22 Linux 32 Comments

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the 'Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler'. He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads."

Xmonad: a Tiling Window Manager Written in Haskell

Submitted by ryan 2007-04-22 Desktop environments 19 Comments

Xmonad was announced today on the haskell-cafe mailing list. It supports multiple monitors through xinerama. The unique part of this window manager is that it is written in Haskell in under 500 lines. Haskell is a purely functional programming language with very strong static typing to ensure correctness.

Submitted by BluenoseJake 2007-04-22 Legal 59 Comments

Little-known intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC and its parent Technology Licensing Corporation this week became the latest to claim that Apple had abused a patent they hold. Filed April 18th in a US district court in Marshall, Texas the four-page formal complaint purports that Apple has engaged in 'willful and deliberate' infringement of a computer control patent by selling its current Tiger operating system. On a related note, Microsoft has similar problems.

Broadcast Your Application’s Content with iChat Theater

Submitted by Hakime 2007-04-22 macOS 23 Comments

"Since its introduction iChat has become the de facto Instant Messaging client on Mac OS X, allowing users to communicate using text, audio, and even video chat. The new version of iChat in Leopard opens up these capabilities to other applications on the system, allowing those applications to provide content through an iChat session." My take: Now, if Apple would implement support for MSN and other protocols for those of us (especially in Europe) who do not use AIM/ICQ, this could be a whole lot more interesting.

C++ Polymorphism; Vector Programming with GCC

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-22 General Development 8 Comments

There is an interesting but rarely mentioned technique in a C++ context: signature-based polymorphism, a more permissive variation of subtype polymorphism, usually called duck typing. Two objects having nothing in common can share an implicit interface and be commonly manipulated by such an interface with no inheritance involved. Part I and Part II. Also, making use of SIMD units such as MMX, SSE, or AltiVec is usually a tradeoff of portability for speed. Recent versions of GCC include an extension that allows you to write vector code without sacrificing portability. Take a look at how to use it.

C# Callback and Event Mechanisms

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-22 .NET 9 Comments

All too often, source code spends a lot of time on basic housekeeping, monitoring the state of many objects. This is wasteful, and with C# it is unnecessary. Software expert Stephen Morris shows how C# provides a range of callback mechanisms that obviate the need for polling objects for state information.

Ubuntu 7.04 – Time to Switch?

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-22 Ubuntu 101 Comments

"Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) arrived just a few days ago with promises of better hardware compatibility, included proprietary software and drivers, and more user friendliness. Was it wort the wait? And more importantly - Is it finally time to "Make the Switch"?" Read the review here. Elsewhere, "First thoughts on Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn" was published at ZDNet. Update: A reply article to the two linked above.

Burning CDs with Gnome

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-22 GTK+ 55 Comments

FreeSoftwareMagazine has an article about burning software available for Gnome. Two more interesting choices are the GTK-based Graveman! and Nero which released NeroLinux 3.0 beta very recently.

MacBook Hacked in Contest at Security Event

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-21 macOS 50 Comments

Macaulay, a software engineer, was able to hack into a MacBook through a zero-day security hole in Apple's Safari browser. The computer was one of two offered as a prize in the 'PWN to Own' hack-a-Mac contest at the CanSecWest conference. The successful attack on the second and final day of the contest required a conference organizer to surf to a malicious Web site using Safari on the MacBook - a type of attack familiar to Windows users.

Submitted by alcibiades 2007-04-20 Hardware 37 Comments

Having Michael Dell back at the helm of his namesake company hasn't paid any quick dividends when it comes to market share. According to Gartner Research, Dell continued its slide both in the US and worldwide during the first quarter of 2007, while HP opened up an even-wider lead. Interesting in these results is that you can clearly see that Apple's strongest market is still the United States.

Submitted by Rahul 2007-04-20 Linux 85 Comments

A recent discussion on the lkml examined the possibility of a Linux implementation of Sun's ZFS. It was pointed out that the file system is released under the GPL-incompatible CDDL, and that Sun has filed numerous patents to prevent ZFS from being reverse engineered. Max Yudin pointed out, "according to Jeff Bonwick's blog Sun issued 56 patents on ZFS, but I have no idea what they patented. Sorry, binary compatible ZFS reimplementation with GPL license might not be legal."

Apple Patch Tackles Two Dozen Mac OS Vulnerabilities

Submitted by fiji2 2007-04-20 macOS 28 Comments

Apple on Thursday plugged over two dozen security exploits within the client and server versions of its Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther' and Mac OS X 10.4 'Tiger' operating systems that could potentially expose Mac users to a variety of malicious attacks.

Submitted by danwarne 2007-04-20 Windows 60 Comments

Lots of Windows-related news today. Firstly, responding to customer demand, Dell has restarted selling new PCs with Windows XP installed on them. Secondly, Microsoft software will sell for just USD 3 in some parts of the world in an attempt to double the number of global PC users (probably not at all unrelated to this interesting figure). Lastly, Vista may only be three months old in the retail marketplace, but Microsoft is already seeking participants in the beta testing program for the next version of Windows Media Center, codenamed Fiji. Update: Microsoft denied the sales figures in China to News.com.

Submitted by ghen 2007-04-20 NetBSD 5 Comments

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2007Q1 release. Pkgsrc is the primary package management system for NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD, but also supports AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, OSF1, OpenBSD, and SunOS. Apart from a lot of new and updated packages, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support, and also for enhanced security.

GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative Launched

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-19 Gnome 32 Comments

The GNOME Foundation announced today the GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative (GMAE) today at the Embedded Linux Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. The initiative is aimed at bolstering GNOME usage as an embedded and mobile development platform. The initiative has been in development since last year, says GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh. The platform will be distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In the next 12 months the group plans to add a mobile email framework called Tinymail, the GeoClue geolocation service, Java Mobile & Embedded (Java ME), PulseAudio audio management, and the HAL hardware information system.

Ubuntu 7.04 Released

Eugenia Loli 2007-04-19 Ubuntu 191 Comments

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce version 7.04 of the Ubuntu family of distributions (more info here and here). Ubuntu 7.04 is also the basis for new 7.04 releases of Kubuntu (screenshots) and Edubuntu. Ubuntu 7.04 will be supported for 18 months on both desktops and servers. Here is a review of Feisty Fawn, and it also seems that Michael Dell has it installed too. Get it while it's hot.

Active Desktop Feature for Mac OS X Leopard?

Submitted by fiji 2007-04-19 macOS 40 Comments

An enhancement to the Mac OS X operating system under development by Apple looks to pave the way for active desktop pictures, or desktop backgrounds that can include motion graphics and alter themselves based on user actions or the time of the day.

Submitted by shykid 2007-04-19 Mozilla, Gecko 64 Comments

Thunderbird 2 is now available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux in over 35 languages. It offers easy ways to manage and organize your email with message tags, advanced folder views, message history navigation, find as you type, and improved new mail alert notifications. Thunderbird 2 also includes a refreshed user interface and support for Microsoft Vista.

Browser Wars Over, Say Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Google

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-18 Internet 49 Comments

The browser wars are over, and now Microsoft, Mozilla and other vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform. That was the consensus of a panel of representatives at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo who help develop Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and the Google Reader.

MINIX 3.1.3 Released, Weekly Snapshots Available

Thom Holwerda 2007-04-18 OS News 13 Comments

"An early preview of the next version has been released under version number 3.1.3, an interim release intended for developers who want to see the bleeding edge of MINIX and perhaps then track the current source. For more information, see the 3.1.3 release notes and the download page." MINIX3 will now also release weekly snapshots.