Archive

This article provides a brief overview of the Haiku operating system from a programmer's point of view, with sample code for an inter-application communication application. The Haiku API is simple and powerful and by the end of this article you will be able to use a variety of objects to write your own Haiku applications. Some C or C++ coding experience is useful.

"InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard uncovered the fact that Microsoft is paying some organizations to adopt its Office 365 cloud service, mostly in funds that Microsoft earmarks for their customers' migration costs and other required consulting. Although this raised the eyebrows of some bloggers - and I'm sure Google wasn't thrilled - I think this is both smart and ethical. Here's why."

I've described how to refurbish mature computers in several articles. The emphasis has been on machines in the four to ten year old range -- Pentium IV's, D's, M's, III's and Celerons. But what if you have a really old computer, like a Pentium II, I, or even a 486? Can you use it for anything worthwhile? A vintage distro named Damn Small Linux answers "yes." This article describes DSL and tells how to make 1990's computers useful again. Screenshots follow the article.

"After an initial round of testing we've declared build 147 to be the first Release Candidate of JDK 7. There are only thirteen changes in this build. Over half of them are administrivial updates that don't affect the actual code; the remainder are true showstoppers, including several hard VM crashes and a JIT correctness bug identified by an Eclipse unit test. If no new showstopper issues are reported, and if JSR 336 and the component JSRs pass their Final Approval Ballots in the JCP, then this will be the GA build for release later this month per the schedule posted back in January."

Red is a new programming language inspired by REBOL, but compiled and open source. The language is currently being bootstrapped by first implementing a lower level dialect, in which the high level, dynamic language will be written. This C class dialect for systems programming, Red/System, has reached beta status after only half a year of development. It now supports using dynamic libraries on Syllable. Also, a new version of Syllable Desktop's FTP client, Transferrer, was released (screenshot accessing Syllable Server).

OpenJDK had been released as GA for OS/2 and eComStaion. This allows eCS-OS2 users to run modern Java apps on their platform. The development is open source and had been in part sponsored by donations of the community.

A remarkably well reasoned editorial by Peter Bright at Ars discusses the implications of the new Firefox release schedule. The Crux of the argument is that by complaining about the "new" Firefox release, corporate customers are fundamentally misunderstanding the web and their place in it. He also reflects on historical reasons for their attitude and what they should do in the future to maintain parity with the evolution of the web.

"In the first part of this analysis we looked at how the polymorphic side of object-oriented programming was implemented in the Linux kernel using regular C constructs. In particular we examined method dispatch, looked at the different forms that vtables could take, and the circumstances where separate vtables were eschewed in preference for storing function pointers directly in objects. In this conclusion we will explore a second important aspect of object-oriented programming - inheritance, and in particular data inheritance."

We've taken the next step in Internet connectivity, and have IPv6-enabled this site for testing purposes. Of course, this will only work if your ISP or some third-party gateway provides you with IPv6 connectivity, which you can check here. If you're all set, try the IPv6 OSnews out at http://ipv6.osnews.com/ and let us know if you have any trouble with it.

Since the opening up of the RISC OS source code, developers have been experimenting with the OS on modern ARM hardware. Recently, work has progressed on porting some vintage Acorn games to other platforms, including iOS and Windows. Paradise Games has released an iOS port of Inferno, and TBA Software has rendered BHP in OpenGL on Windows. TBA has also ported its TBAFS filing system to ARMv7 hardware and is investigating its TAG games engine and the modernisation of BBC BASIC. The Icon Bar has further details.

Just as Apple wraps up one lawsuit with Nokia, they have been hit with another one by a Phoenix based company named iCloud Communications. iCloud Communications, a VoIP vendor, claims that Apple's new iCloud causes confusion with competing products, and has harmed their image because anytime someone hears the name 'iCloud', they will now think of Apple instead of iCloud Communications. Super-Instant Pre-publication 5000W Turbo Update from Thom: ...and we have another one.

The Syllable project has released a live CD for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6. It has been a long time since the last live CD, so Syllable 0.6.5 was skipped. The creator of the original live CD left the project, without releasing the build scripts. Further it turned out that a needed patch to Syllable wasn't available, either, so the project had to create a whole new live CD, including a modified kernel. Also, some eighty SDL programs were recently ported to Syllable (video of the Power Manga game).

"Google has released a research paper that suggests C++ is the best-performing programming language in the market. The internet giant implemented a compact algorithm in four languages - C++, Java, Scala and its own programming language Go - and then benchmarked results to find 'factors of difference'."

Ten more applications have been pulled from the Google's official Android Market following a notification that they contained a new kind of Android malware. The malware was discovered by Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor at the NC State University, and his team. As we have already witnessed before, the malicious code is "grafted" onto legitimate applications, and once the app is installed, it works as a background service whose goals is to gather information and transmit it to a remote server. The server takes the information in consideration and returns a URL from which the malware downloads a .jar file that, once loaded, exploits Dalvik class loading capability to stay hidden by evading static analysis.