Kroc Archive

The fabled Amiga X1000 has been spotted in the wild, in the homeliest of places--Station X, a.k.a Bletchley Park. "The AmigaOne X1000 is a custom dual core PowerPC board with plenty of modern ports and I/O interfaces. It runs AmigaOS 4, and is supported by Hyperion, a partner in the project. The most interesting bit, though, is the use of an 500Mhz XCore co-processor, which the X1000's hardware designer describes as a descendant of the transputer - once the great hope of British silicon." With thanks to Jason McGint, 'Richard' and Pascal Papara for submissions.

"For three years son Ben, and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We've searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory programming language BASIC to run on either my Mac or my PC. Why on Earth would we want to do that, in an era of glossy animation-rendering engines, game-design ogres and sophisticated avatar worlds? Because if you want to give young students a grounding in how computers actually work, there's still nothing better than a little experience at line-by-line programming." Looking beyond the immediate fear-inducing acronym BASIC, this article delves deeply into what it means to simply be in control--via a basic understanding of under the hood--of your own computer, and how our whiz-bang world of technology today is failing to bestow this understanding on this generation of would-be hackers.

Apple have updated the Mac Mini. It now sports an aluminium (no, I am not going to spell it "aluminum") enclosure, an HDMI port, an internal PSU (no power-brick!) and oddly, an SD card slot in the back. There's also an access hole on the bottom to change the RAM easily.

Hobbies. Where would the computer industry be without them? Arguably, there wouldn't be a computer industry had it not been for hobbyists in the first place. The ineffable need to scratch an itch does still percolate even in this closed down world of big mainstream technology from big companies opposed to the little guy innovating. OSNews asks, what are you working on? We want to hear from you about your hobby projects (technology related or otherwise) to get a sense of what the community is cooking up for love of it, rather than because you're paid to do so. Share and enjoy!

Andre Fachat has created a CPU add-in card for Commodore PET machines. "It speeds up your PET to up to 12.5MHz (at least that's the plan for the final stage, but it currently looks good!). The board uses a 65816 CPU that runs at up to 12.5MHz, plus a Xilinx CPLD as logic glue. It includes up to 1MByte fast RAM (run at CPU speed) plus 512k parallel Flash ROM, that can be used as boot ROM". Source code and schematics are provided. Via Commodore News Page.

"Dear Ubuntu, for the last couple years life has been good. Every time I've shown you to a friend or family member, they've compared you to what they're familiar with--Windows XP or Vista, mostly--and by comparison you've looked brilliant. Yeah, your ugly brown color scheme was a bit off-putting at first, but once people saw how secure, simple, and reliable you were, the response was almost universally positive. But recently, things have changed ..."

In 2009 ARM showed off prototype netbooks "capable of driving HD content, can surf the web for 8 hours, and will cost round and about 250 USD". Yet still, none have made it to the market. Why do you think this is so? Because ARM signed a deal with Adobe in 2008 to bring Flash and AIR to the ARM architecture, a promise they will finally deliver later this year. And you wonder why Apple won't have Flash on the iPhone when it can hold back an entire product category for two years.

Hello all. Over time we have had every imaginable claim of bias levied against us. We are routinely called pro-Apple, anti-Apple as well as pro-Microsoft and anti-Microsoft (even within the same discussion thread!). OSNews is an editorial site where the content is selected by a core team of volunteers who either write up news articles themselves, or take links or submissions from users on the site. Read More for the full statement.

"In order to ensure a consistently high quality browser across our most popular desktop platforms we have reluctantly decided to drop support for Solaris. This will allow our UNIX development team to focus all of their attention on bringing Opera for Linux and FreeBSD up to final release quality, meaning that a 10.5x release for these platforms will happen as soon as feasibly possible". Opera assure us that this will have no effect on the existing Linux and UNIX ports.

I think it's about time we got an Adobe category. Apple recently made public an API to allow OS X software access to hardware H.264 acceleration (albeit such acceleration is only available on chipsets since the Nvidia 9400M--early 2008) and Adobe have already baked this in to a beta preview of Flash 10.1 "Gala"! Update: Steve Jobs himself weighs in on Flash (via Engadget): "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

"To be clear about this article's intent, it's not to bash Microsoft, or Windows. Because to be fair, despite using Linux 95% of the time while I'm on the PC, I can find more faults with it than Windows. So, this article's goal is to highlight some of the major pluses of Linux, and also showcase where Windows could improve in the future, should Microsoft take heed of the suggestions."

Via Ha.ckers.org, we get news of a cross-domain flaw using Flash or Silverlight content that allows the attacker to use the victim's browser as a proxy, including access to the user's session. Erlend Oftedal, the developer, explains how the system works and demonstrates the concept with a video. The flaw stems from developers lackadaisically allowing cross-domain requests from Flash across their whole domain (which obviously includes the user-account interactions); even Flickr and YouTube were culprits at one point.

In November last year I stated that it would only be a matter of time before it happened. Also in November Joel Webber, a Google engineer had the inspiration to port Quake II to HTML5 from Jake2--a Java port of Quake II--using Google Web Toolkit; the same toolkit used for writing Google Mail | Maps | Wave in Java and compiling into JavaScript. With the help of two other Google engineers (Ray Cromwell and Stefan Haustein) in "20% time", it works! Just!

"Hot on the heals of Oracle's revamp of Solaris support, the licensing agreement for free downloads of Solaris 10 have changed. Here is the bit in question: "...Please remember, your right to use Solaris acquired as a download is limited to a trial of 90 days, unless you acquire a service contract for the downloaded Software". So far the OpenSolaris license has not changed, it's still CDDL."