David Adams Archive

If you've got a Windows Phone, today is your lucky day. On April 1, Microsoft released DOS for mobile: "All the productivity you’ve come to expect from Microsoft in the simplest OS yet." Update: There's also a video ad.

SCO, which went bankrupt after an unfavorable ruling four years ago and has auctioned off all of its assets, exists now only as a vehicle for the quixotic lawsuit against IBM for misappropriation of its Unix source code. Apparently, the 2010 ruling left a small opening, because the suit is back. To the extent that they operate at all, the company's leader is now a well-respected former federal judge named Edward Cahn. Officially, he's a Chapter 11 trustee, which means that, in bankruptcy, the company's lenders or investors can appoint someone to oversee a reorganization and essentially direct the company toward activities that will maximize the recovery of the debt. Cahn's sole responsibility is to see if he can wring any money out of SCO's remaining asset (the lawsuit), which means that this circus will continue until the lenders decide that the likelihood of a settlement doesn't justify the legal costs.

Over the weekend, Pangu released their iOS jailbreak for the Mac, which is the capstone on a weeks-long journey of incremental releases that brought the wonders of non-Apple-approved software to iDevice users bit by bit according to their level of tinkering devotion. Last week, after an aborted attempt, I managed to jailbreak my iPhone 5S, and though I'm still dealing with some of my favorite tweaks not having been updated to work with the new OS, I'm pretty happy with the update, and I can recommend it for most users. Read more, for the rest.

Adrien Destugues sent an email to Haiku developers after the BeGeistert forum, addressing their inability to get R1 out the door, and proposed that they rededicate themselves to getting a beta out ASAP. He then asks a question that hangs above the heads of all developers of alternative and hobbyist OSes: is their goal "to create an operating system that specifically targets personal computing? Or have we evolved to the goal of a fun playground for OS-developers to play around with modern OS concepts?" He concludes ... "I do think that the PC-landscape has changed dramatically since the inception of the project, and I also underscore that there is a clear lack of focus when it comes to accomplishing our current mission. I would go so far as to say that the severe lack of interest of developers into finishing R1 is a great indication in that there really hardly seems to be any place for a new (mainstream?) desktop operating system anymore? Even the Linux on the desktop guys seem to have ceased preaching their gospel." That's some sober talk that's important for alternative OS fans to consider.

The ReactOS Project is pleased to release version 0.3.17. A major new feature for this release is the inclusion of NTVDM, which provides support for a wide range of 16bit applications, a long requested feature by the community. NTVDM is still undergoing work but we felt that it was ready enough to provide a sneak peak to the wider community. In addition, the leadup to the 0.3.17 release saw a very impressive round of testing by the community. Several regressions and bugs discovered in the release candidates were promptly fixed and incorporated into the final release. ReactOS is quickly approaching a stage where what the releases will offer is polish compared to previous releases. That will be an important milestone, as it is then that we can begin recommending to people that they try using ReactOS for day-to-day computing.

Take all the speed and efficiency of docker, and turn it into a full virtualisation experience. That's the goal of Canonical's new initiative to create the next big hypervisor around Linux container technologies. Imagine you could launch a new machine in under a second, and that you could launch hundreds of them on a single server. Hundreds! Now, imagine that you have hardware-guaranteed security to ensure that those machines can’t pry or spy on one another. Imagine you can connect them separately and securely to networks. And imagine that you can run that on a single node or a million, live migrate machines between those nodes, and talk to all of it through a clean, extensible REST API. That’s what LXD sets out to deliver. Update: a bit more about LXD from Dustin Kirkland.

Following hints earlier in the year, a beta of Red Hat Fedora Linux 21 has finally arrived in three incarnations: Cloud, Server, and Workstation. Fedora 21 also provides the first public glimpse of Project Atomic, Red Hat's initiative to produce a Linux distribution optimized as a Docker container host.

The new head of GCHQ , Robert Hannigan, has spoken out strongly against American Internet companies. The BBC reports: "His concerns appear to be twofold. Firstly the fact that militant organisations such as Islamic State (IS) are using Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to promote themselves and the increasing sophistication that extremists are showing in their use of such platforms. And secondly he is not happy about pledges from Microsoft, Google, Apple and Yahoo to make encryption a default option to protect users from government snooping."

Emil Kvarnhammar, a hacker at Swedish security firm Truesec, calls the vulnerability "rootpipe" and has explained how he found it and how you can protect against it. It's a so-called privilege escalation vulnerability, which means that even without a password an attacker could gain the highest level of access on a machine, known as root access. From there, the attacker has full control of the system. It affects the newest OS X release, version 10.10, known as Yosemite. Apple hasn't fixed the flaw yet, he says, so Truesec won't provide details yet of how it works.

The highly anticipated version 2.0 of AROS distribution Icaros Desktop is now available for download. AROS is now an almost-20-years old open source attempt to rewrite the original AmigaOS 3.x operating system from Commodore, starting with its API documentation. Icaros Desktop extends AROS features with many 3rd party programs and libraries, providing a full preconfigured environment to allow modern tasks. In this new version, which has been released 2 years after the latest one, AROS' Workbench clone "Wanderer" can be replaced by x86-native port of DirectoryOpus 5 Magellan, which has been configured to act like a modern GUI, old Amiga programs can run in a more polished emulation layer (AmiBridge) which does not require original Amiga ROMs and Operating System, and whole AROS system files have been replaced with a newer branch, which also includes a new, faster and more reliable TLSF memory manager. For full size screenshots and downloads, you can follow this link.

The reason the United States lags many countries in both speed and affordability, according to people who study the issue, has nothing to do with technology. Instead, it is an economic policy problem - the lack of competition in the broadband industry.

Linux has a good range of open source software which helps users to organise their e-book collection, catch up on a novel, and to create, validate and publish their own e-book.

China’s Xiaomi only sells its smartphones and other devices in a handful of markets… but they’re big markets with large populations including China and India. So even though you can’t easily buy a Xiaomi phone in the US or Europe, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the company is selling a lot of phones. In fact, with Xiaomi shipping 18 million phones in the third quarter of 2014, two different reports suggest the company just became the third biggest smartphone company in the world.

You can now run the latest version of Internet Explorer on your Android, iOS, OS X or non-Windows 10 Windows machine. Microsoft has built and released something it calls RemoteIE, which allows developers to run the company’s browser preview builds without requiring them to be on the most current version of Windows.