Archive

As REBOL has been referenced several time on OSNews, I thought that some here may be interested to know that its author has announced that REBOL will be open-sourced. The R3 source code will most likely be released under the GPLv2 license.

"So this news is a couple of days old now, but I wanted to write a blog entry about the exciting release of GStreamer 1.0. When we released GStreamer 0.10 about 7 years ago we did not expect or plan the 0.10 series to last as long as it did, I think if we had it would have been called 1.0 instead of 0.10. Our caution back then was that 0.10 was a quite revolutionary version with the core of GStreamer extensively re-designed around effective use of threads and thread safety."

"Gnome 3 has received a lot of disapproval of late, from the Gnome foundation being charged with not taking care of its users, or losing mindshare, to Gnome 3 itself being an unusable mess. I've been using Gnome 3 myself for a few months to sort the truth from the fiction, and to try and understand just how the Gnome foundation expects their newest shell to be used. I will end with some thoughts on how Gnome 3 can be improved. The review will require a fairly lengthy preface, however."

"For the past several years we've been working towards migrating from GCC to Clang/LLVM as our default compiler. We intend to ship FreeBSD 10.0 with Clang as the default compiler on i386 and amd64 platforms. To this end, we will make WITH_CLANG_IS_CC the default on i386 and amd64 platforms on November 4th."

"Bill Moggridge, the London-born industrial designer credited with creating the first laptop computer,died on Saturday aged 69 after a battle with cancer. Moggridge is best known as the creator of the GRiD Compass, a device which introduced many of the design traits used in modern laptops, including the hinged case, the flat display and the low-profile keyboard. Moggridge said that when he tested the device prototype in 1981, it was the first time he had used a computer."

Following the leak of a million Apple UDIDs, a US app developer has come forward saying it is the source of the leak. It says the FBI never had the data, and the full set is "only" 2 million entries rather than the 12 million AntiSec claimed.

"Windows Server 2012 probably won't have the adoption lag in the enterprise that Windows 8 is bound to face. That's because, aside from the Metro GUI, Server 2012's biggest changes are in substance rather than style, building upon what the company delivered with Windows Server 2008 Release 2 three years ago. In particular, Server 2012 takes two management features Server 2008 R2 admins will be familiar with - Server Manager and PowerShell - and expands on them considerably."

After more than a decade, Lazarus has reached version 1.0. For those that don't know Lazarus - it's a Delphi-like IDE for the Free Pascal Compiler and has widget sets for win32/64 GTK2, Qt, and others. It's very very much like Delphi and instead of the VCL it has the LCL which is cross platform. Syntax is almost exactly the same as Delphi. You can create stand-alone win32/64 executables that require no .NET runtime or even an installer.

The just released version 12.08 of the Genode OS Framework comes with the ability to run Genode-based systems on ARM hardware without an underlying kernel, vastly improves the support for the NOVA hypervisor, and adds device drivers for the OMAP4 SoC. Further functional additions are a FFAT-based file system service, the port of the lighttpd web server, and support for on-target debugging via GDB.

" tonight Apple entered into evidence in its trial with Samsung a document showing that it offered the South Korean company a licensing deal on some of its key technologies. Specifically, Apple offered to license the portfolio of patents if Samsung would pay $30 per smartphone and $40 per tablet." $30-40 per device is a lot of money for some trivial features (rounded corners, slide-to-unlock etc). No wonder Samsung declined.

BeOS may be dead, but over a decade after its lamentable demise the open source Haiku project keeps its legacy alive. Haiku is an attempt to build a drop-in, binary compatible replacement for BeOS, as well as extending the defunct OS's functionality and support for modern hardware. At least, that's the short-term goal - eventually, Haiku is intended significantly enhance BeOS while maintaining the same philosophy of simplicity and transparency, and without being weighed down with the legacy code of many other contemporary operating systems. Computerworld Australia recently caught up with Stephan Assmus, who has been a key contributor to the project for seven years for a lengthy chat about BeOS, the current state of Haiku and the project's future plans.

"Mojang is one of ten companies, including Electronic Arts, GameLoft and Square Enix, that have been named in the lawsuit. The patent that Uniloc claims Mojang and others are using without permission describes a way to check that a person wanting to play a game has the right to do so. If not, that person is locked out of the game. In its court papers, Uniloc says the version of Minecraft for Android mobile phones violates its patented technology. Throughout the court papers, Uniloc misspells the name of the hugely popular game as 'Mindcraft'." Markus Persson, known as Notch, has this to say: "Software patents are plain evil. Innovation within software is basically free, and it's growing incredibly rapid. Patents only slow it down." Notch added that he will throw piles of money at this case to make sure the trolls don't get a cent.

"I read earlier this week about a developer who made their Android version free after the $1 game was extensively pirated. Stories like this come as no surprise, but the industry press rarely deals with the core problem - and nor does Google. Whilst the aforementioned story about the Android game didn't surprise me, it did horrify me. Android is designed to be difficult to make money from, and the core issue is that it's open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness."

Linux kernel 3.5 has been released. New features include support for metadata checksums in Ext4, userspace probes for performance profiling with systemtap/perf, a simple sandboxing mechanism that can filter syscalls, a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat, support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections, support for TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827), support for android-style opportunistic suspend, btrfs I/O failure statistics, and SCSI over Firewire and USB. Here's the full list of changes.