David Adams Archive

Though the patent has only surfaced now, Microsoft has been working on this concept for quite some time. As far back as 2009 similar systems have been discussed on various Microsoft blogs. There was also the Midori OS project that had bloggers buzzing about its post-Windows potential and integration with Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure. Steve Ballmer himself has called Windows 8 Microsoft's riskiest bet yet -- could this streaming tech make make an appearance in the upcoming OS?

Joyent recently announced and released SmartOS. From their site, "SmartOS is comprised of the Illumos kernel (with ZFS, DTrace, OS-level virtualization and next-generation KVM) with BSD package management and a GNU toolchain." They've posted the source on GitHub and a live ISO is available for download as well.

Ever wondered how current Linux statistics compare to statistics from the '90s? Well, Gigaom has a nice infographic prepared by the Linux Foundation which compares the two eras. Also, props to Arch Linux for being most of the Other 15%; that's not bad for such a barebones distribution.

Ars Technica is reporting that US Retailer Best Buy has been able to sell less than 10% of the TouchPad tablets that it ordered from HP, and now wants HP to take them back. Similarly, deal-a-day site Woot offered TouchPads at a very aggressive price, and only managed to sell 612 of them. This is for a site that often sells out goofy tech widgets in hours. When the TouchPad was gearing up for release, there seemed to be a fair amount of interest among geeks. Is it just that it hasn't resonated the same way with the general public, or have people just been disappointed once they've put their hands on one?

Slashgear reports: "Hardware company Samsung today has been revealed to have acquired one of the single most notorious names in Android modification , that being Steve Kondik,aka "Cyanogen" of CyanogenMod 7." Could Samsung be planning to start working on a highly modified version of Android?

"Who is Microsoft fooling? Other than on the desktop, Linux is eating its lunch, and it's only going to get worse for Microsoft."

Hackers armed with a browser and specially crafted search queries are using botnets to generate more than 80,000 daily queries, identify potential attack targets and build an accurate picture of the resources within that server that are potentially exposed. By automating the query and result parsing, the attacker can carry out a large number of search queries, examine the returned results and get a filtered list of potentially exploitable sites in a very short time and with minimal effort. Because searches are conducted using botnets, and not the hacker's IP address, the attacker's identity remains concealed.

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

Researchers at the Virginia Commonwleth University have come up with . . . a circuit that requires such little power all it needs is the ambient energy in an environment to run. In other words, it can run without need of a power lead or battery, relying instead on some energy constant in the environment in which it functions e.g. the human body. In order to create something that can run on such low, ambient energy, you need to use electronics that require next to no power to function. So instead of the typical charge-based electronic switches used today, the researchers turned to spin transport electronics, more commonly known as spintronics.

The final ISO ballot on C++0x closed on Wednesday, and we just received the results: Unanimous approval. The next revision of C++ that we've been calling "C++0x" is now an International Standard! Geneva will take several months to publish it, but we hope it will be published well within the year, and then we'll be able to call it "C++11."

Google has released Chrome 14 to the Chrome beta testing channel, which includes, among other new features, the initial beta release of Google's "Native Client" technology, first announced in 2010 . . . Native Client is a set of open source tools that allow Chrome to run compiled C and C++ code the same way the browser currently runs JavaScript or other common web programming languages. Native Code offers both a security sandbox and a set of interfaces that provide C and C++ bindings to the capabilities of HTML5. That means web application developers will be able to tap into desktop libraries to create faster, more powerful web apps.

The Fedora developers have decided that Fedora 16 will not use Btrfs by default. The announcement was made by Josef Bacik, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat. Instead the switch to Btrfs filesystem has now been postponed to Fedora 17.

Microsoft no longer thinks Linux poses a threat to its desktop Windows business. Directions on Microsoft's Wes Miller pointed out via Twitter how Microsoft has changed the boilerplate "Competition" section in its last two annual financial filings with the SEC.

The lure of shiny toys has helped Apple's BSD-based Mac OS X operating system overtake Linux to become the operating system that is the second most used by developers, according to Evans Data.