Archive

The Rise (And Fall?) of Application Stores

Guest post by Kostis Kapelonis 2011-05-14 General Development 43 Comments

Application stores are growing everywhere like mushrooms. While users have initially embraced application stores because of the ease they offer with application installation, developers have several complaints. Division of profits from paid application and ineffectiveness of the screening process are among the major issues. Are application stores the best distribution channel possible? Can they satisfy both developers and users?

Adobe Confirms WebM Support in Flash, No Release Date

Guest post by RichterKuato 2011-05-10 Multimedia, AV 15 Comments

" Gourdol confirmed tonight would get the full WebM support, which also includes the Vorbis audio encoding technology and a container to bundle the data together. 'We don't have a timetable for it,' Gourdol said of WebM support in Flash. Important factors include hardware support, just getting under way today, and broad use of the technology, he said."

Of OpenBSD 4.9, Linux and Licenses

Guest post by fvillanustre 2011-05-06 Rumors 42 Comments

When comparing the evolution in market share of Linux and OpenBSD, two operating systems that were born around the same time, a question comes to mind: why is there such a difference in market penetration? Linux, on one side of the spectrum, with a license that supposedly impairs commercial venues, has enticed companies and organizations to adopt and support it under varying commercial models, while the BSD derivatives (FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD), with a larger history and an allegedly more commercial friendly license haven't been as successful to gather a large installed base and widespread adoption.

Using a RISC Accelerator Chip to Speed up Smartphones

Guest post by anonymous 2011-05-04 Hardware 2 Comments

Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets. The RISC-based processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications. The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, but is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU.

Microsoft Drawbridge: OS Modularity

Guest post by Dan Massameno 2011-05-04 Microsoft 31 Comments

Microsoft has released new details on an experimental operating system concept named Drawbridge. In early March Microsoft researchers presented a paper entitled Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down. The paper describes a new interaction between a user-level application and its OS. The paper can be found at the ACM Digital Library . It describes an ambitious plan to separate the traditional API parts of an OS from the underlying kernel of the OS. But a full analysis requires some background.

Jeff Johnson About to Fork rpm – Again

Guest post by Sebastien Onglis 2011-05-02 Linux 54 Comments

Like Britney Spears, Jeff Johnson did it again and decided to fork rpm once more. Following a week long outage of the main website, he announced on the Mandriva development mailing list the launch of rpm6.org, without giving much explanation. Without more information, some people speculate this was caused by an intrusive merge by a Mandriva coder without discussing beforehand, while some others speak of the heavy criticism due to the migration, which still causing issues after several months.

OpenBSD 4.9 Released

Guest post by vermaden 2011-05-01 OpenBSD 9 Comments

OpenBSD 4.9 release is ready, now with enabled NTFS by default (read-only), SMP kernels can now boot on machines with up to 64 cores, maximum allocation size for i386 bumped to 2G, added support for AES-NI instructions found in recent Intel processors, further improvements in suspend and resume and much more.

Review: Qubes OS Beta 1

Guest post by fvillanustre 2011-05-01 Linux 17 Comments

"Qubes OS comes from an elegant concept: if you can isolate functional components within disposable containers, and you can separate those components that can be tainted through their interaction with the outside world from the core subsystems, you stand a good chance to preserve the integrity and security of the base Operating System at the possible expense of needing to jump through some hoops to move data around the system. All in all it sounds like a good proposition if it can be demonstrated to be practical." Read the full review.

Google Cuts Back Free Google Apps User Limit

Guest post by mrhasbean 2011-04-28 Google 23 Comments

In a move touted as one to "make Apps easier to adopt and manage", Google has announced that it will reduce the number of free users from 50 down to just 10 before businesses have to sign up for its paid service. This follows a previous reduction from 100 to 50. Google claims that existing users won't be affected, but we'll just have to wait and see how long that lasts. And if you don't want your whole life tracked and sold off to the highest bidder by Google's "free" and "open" technologies but would like access to actual free or low cost services there is a decent article here that shines some light on your options.

Nokia Hands off Symbian Development

Guest post by Bill Shooter of Bul 2011-04-27 Wireless 12 Comments

Nokia announced yesterday that they will transfer the Symbian Developers to Accenture. Regardless of what one feels about the merits of Symbian, this does seem like the end of the road. The proverbial selling of the horse to the glue factory.

ARMini Wakes Up Wakefield

Guest post by Martin H Hansen 2011-04-26 RISC OS 10 Comments

This year's Wakefield RISC OS computer show has given enthusiasts of the niche platform much to talk about. The show featured the release of new hardware in the form of the ARMini, a 'Beagleboard inside' computing system optimised to run RISC OS. A full account of the show has been published on RISCOScode, one of the RISC OS rolling news websites. Note from Thom: Sorry for the headline.

Intel CEO Confirms Honeycomb-on-x86 Port

Guest post by fran 2011-04-21 Intel 18 Comments

"Intel has confirmed that it has received the Android 3.0 Honeycomb code from Google, and that it is 'actively' working on porting the tablet-centric platform to run on x86 chips like its Atom processors."

Microsoft Makes Portable Anti-Virus Tool Available

Guest post by fran 2011-04-20 Microsoft 11 Comments

"Microsoft has released its free Microsoft Safety Scanner. This scans for and removes malware from Windows systems without requiring prior installation. According to AV-Test's Andreas Marx, the on-demand anti-virus scanner appears to be based on the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), but with the addition of a complete signature database. MSRT used a mini database of widely distributed threats and is distributed monthly via the automatic update function."

Open Invention Network Gets Boost from Facebook, HP

Guest post by fran 2011-04-20 Legal 4 Comments

"Facebook, HP, Rackspace, Juniper, Fujitsu and dozens of other organizations have joined a group building a defensive patent portfolio to protect Linux-using members from potential lawsuits. Seeking to boost membership, the patent group said Wednesday it has added 74 new licensees in the first quarter of this year, bringing its total number of corporate supporters to 334."

Open Source Programming Tools on the Rise

Guest post by snydeq 2011-04-18 General Development 16 Comments

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a look at 13 open source development projects making waves in the enterprise. From Git to Hadoop to build management tools, "even in the deepest corners of proprietary stacks, open source tools can be found, often dominating. The reason is clear: Open source licenses are designed to allow users to revise, fix, and extend their code. The barber or cop may not be familiar enough with code to contribute, but programmers sure know how to fiddle with their tools. The result is a fertile ecology of ideas and source code, fed by the enthusiasm of application developers who know how to 'scratch an itch'."

Systemd Update: Improved chroot, Boot Time Analysis

Guest post by diegocg 2011-04-17 Linux 4 Comments

systemd, the new init system created by Lennart Poettering, has added a couple of interesting features. First, he has added support for chroot-style isolation capabilities, but instead of chroot he used the powerful per-process filesystem and PID namespaces supported by the Linux kernel. Second, he has added a new tool, systemd-analyze, which shows how much time took each service to start, so you can optimize your bootup time easily. It can even create simple bootchart-style graphs.

PCC Compiler Version 1.0 Released

Guest post by lucas_maximus 2011-04-12 General Development 23 Comments

No April Foolery: The Portable C Compiler version 1.0 was released on April 1st! As with so many things BSD, this project proves that good code is timeless and can benefit from literally generations of review. It can build the majority of the BSD base systems (C++ code aside) and is undergoing continuous improvement.

Red Hat’s Future Linux Desktop

Guest post by fran 2011-04-11 Red Hat 22 Comments

"San Franciscoâ€“Red Hat is the strongest Linux company in the world when it comes to servers, but it has almost no presence on the desktop. That will be changing in 2012 with the reintroduction of a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments-based virtual desktop infrastructure."

Windows 8 App Store Images Leaked?

Guest post by fran 2011-04-11 Windows 25 Comments

"Microsoft's Windows App Store screenshots appear to have leaked for the first time on Monday. The screenshots show Microsoft's new application store for Windows. The store appears to be running in Windows 7, hinting that the software giant may also be planning to offer its app store for legacy versions of Windows."

Thunderbird Returns to Mozilla as Labs Project

Guest post by imtiaz 2011-04-08 Mozilla, Gecko 26 Comments

Mozilla announced on Monday that it will reabsorb Mozilla Messaging and integrate it into Mozilla Labs, a team within Mozilla that incubates experimental projects.