Thom Holwerda Archive

The netbook and MID (mobile internet device) markets are all the rage these days, and Intel is betting big on these markets with its Atom processor line. However, Intel doesn't stop there - the company is even buying wireless networks. According to Intel's CEO Paul Otellini, it's all part of bringing the Internet to new places and people.

The proposed new standard for the C++ programming language, C++0x, has reached feature completeness. "This is 'it', feature-complete C++0x, including the major feature of 'concepts' which had its own extensive set of papers for language and library extensions (if you get the impression that concepts is a big feature, well, it is indeed easily the biggest addition we made in C++0x)."

Windows 7 is out and about. Microsoft has been unusually secretive about Vista's successor, but now that PDC is under way, they have unveiled the various enhancements to the user interface. Windows 7 might not have any significant under-the-hood changes (in fact, all your applications and devices will still work), but on the outside, Windows 7 represents the biggest change for the Windows user interface ever since Windows 95 came out.

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 only a few days away, Phoronix decided to take a look at the performance figures over the past releases - from Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. Phoronix used its own extensive test suite on fresh installations, with the same parameters, on the identical hardware. The results are rather surprising. Update: I've added some more information about this, gathered from the Ubuntu mailing list. You can find it in the 'read more'.

El Reg reports: While Intel's Moblin 2.0 platform has been delayed from November 2008 to the first half of 2009, it looks like its arrival will provide quite the boost to the netbook scene. "Start-up Good OS has announced a relationship with MiTAC International to deliver its gOS Gadgets Linux operating system on a netbook based on Intel's Moblin 2.0. David Liu, founder and chief executive of gOS, told The Reg the machine planned with MiTAC would be among the first to be released on the as-yet unfinished Moblin 2.0. Ahead of completion, vendors have been working with Moblin 1.0 and so-called 'Moblin optimizations'. These are portions of the Moblin spec that have been picked up and incorporated into either hardware or software design. Xandros and Asus have, for example, added changes to their systems from Moblin that provide a 25 per cent improvement in battery life. Liu said Moblin was 'getting more and more ready for mainstream use' with features such as an extra-fast boot time of five seconds."

In a rather unusual move, both Google and Apple have publicly backed the fight against "Proposition 8", both by words as well as by donation. Proposition 8 is an initiative measure in the state of California that would ban same-sex marriages in California by amending the Constitution of the state to include that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California". Both companies gave out their reasoning for supporting the fight against 'Prop 8'.

It seems like only yesterday when due to a combination of hubris, bad business decisions, and pressure from Apple and Microsoft, Be, Inc. went under, with its assets - including the BeOS - bought up by Palm, who now store it in a filing cabinet somewhere in the attic of the company's Sunnyvale headquarters. Right after Be went under, the OpenBeOS project was started; an effort to recreate the BeOS as open source under the MIT license. This turned out to be a difficult task, and many doubted the project would ever get anywhere. We're seven years down the road now, and the persistence is paying off: the first Haiku alpha is nearer than ever.

Netbooks use various types of processors, but most of them are built around Intel's Atom processor and architecture. There are more exotic options, such as the Chinese Longsoon processor, but those are quite rare and hard to come by - and certainly not as powerful. Apparently, another contender is preparing to enter the netbook processor market. Say hello to ARM.

A week ago the Contiki embedded operating system announced uIPv6, the world's smallest compliant IPv6 stack, developed by Cisco, Atmel, and SICS. Contiki now releases the first snapshot release that contains uIPv6, released under a 3-clause BSD-style license.

Genode is a new OS architecture that is able to align high security, robustness, and deterministic system behaviour with dynamic application workload. The project has now released its first ready-to-boot Live CD that demonstrates the key ideas of the architecture in an interactive fashion using a custom GUI and a number of example applications. It runs on Qemu, VirtualBox, and a range of native PC hardware.

Since its release, the steady stream of updates have made Windows Vista noticeably less annoying to use. The biggest stride forward was the release of the operating system's first service pack, back in March of this year. Neowin.net now claims that the second service pack is on its way, with the first beta being dropped on testers in the coming four weeks.

It's official, Google has Open Sourced Android. The initial release of the source code is available via Google's Git repository with bugs, FAQs, documentation, etc. handled via Android's Google Code project page. Android's licensing structure and project organization seems to be trying to create something akin to the Eclipse Foundation, mixing individual and commercial interests into a development pot for the collective benefit of the platform on a whole.

Here at OSNews, we use a moderation system where your peers rate your comments, and where the OSNews staff rarely intervene. This system was put in place after realising that the editorial moderation was failing miserably; it had become too much work. Sifting through ten reported comments a day is one thing, sifting through 100 of them each day is another. The result was that editorial moderation had become willy-nilly, which led to understandable user frustration, and pointless email rants back and forth between users and staff members (mea culpa). The answer to this problem turned out to be a two-step process: banning anonymous commenting, and our peer moderation system. While the moderation system has its flaws, it has exceeded all of our expectations in making sure that our comments' sections are free of spam, and relatively fun to read. Still, we realise problems exist, but we also see a lot of misinformation floating around. The treat we have in store for you today will help in fixing some of that.

Even though Snow Leopard is supposed to be all about tweaking and performance, AppleInsider claims to have some information regarding new features coming in Snow Leopard. They claim Apple is working on bringing Exchange support to iCal, Address Book, and Mail, a feature called ImageBoot, and - insert drum roll - a new Finder written in Cocoa. Testers also claim that other bundled applications are written in Cocoa. This isn't all that weird seeing Carbon doesn't come in a 64bit flavour.