Submitted by Michael Steil
2008-10-25
Microsoft
"If you disassemble a single binary, you can never tell why something was done in a certain way. If you have eight different versions, you can tell a lot. This episode of Computer Archeology is about
reverse engineering eight different versions of Microsoft BASIC 6502 (Commodore, AppleSoft etc.), reconstructing the family tree, and understanding when bugs were fixed and when new bugs, features and easter eggs were introduced. This article also presents a set of assembly source files that can be made to compile into a byte exact copy of seven different versions of Microsoft BASIC, and lets you even create your own version."
A Fedora user takes a
brief look at what he considers 13 of the prime
features in the upcoming Fedora 10 release on
end of November. "
Fedora has many a projects finished or in the queue for Fedora 10. It is a mammoth and obviously unimportant to take all of them out here. So I have sorted some to best of your interests. If you are a developer, then don't worry. You have your goodie too."
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.
ServerWatch
writes about the slow but sure death of UNIX by the onslaught of Linux and customers moving from older proprietary UNIX systems to commercially supported open source enterprise Linux distributions."Linux does have one killer feature that is driving the switch: lower cost. Many companies are discovering Linux to be extremely attractive from a cost perspective. Take the experience of Sabre, a travel company that replaced Solaris with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running on x86 machines, resulting in lowering costs 90 percent (with a three-fold speed gain to boot). These potential cost savings, which include hardware maintenance costs savings, are not to sniffed at."
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.
Apple has presented its financial earnings for the 4th quarter of the 2008 fiscal year yesterday. Despite an across-the-board slump in growth, spectacular iPhone sales more than made up for the lost growth, beating the ten million iPhones claim. You can read
all about it at Ars. What's more interesting were a number of remarks from Jobs
regarding netbooks and cheap computers.
Submitted by Adam Dunkels
2008-10-22
OS News
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.
Submitted by Norman Feske
2008-10-22
OS News
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.
Earlier this week we
reported on the court case between Apple and PsyStar, stating they went into settlement negotiations. Details, however, were sparse. The law firm representing PsyStar has now replied to the matter, and there's
good news for those of us who hope to see crazy EULA clauses tested in court.
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.
The legal battle between Macintosh clone maker PsyStar and Apple is still being waged, but it appears that the two companies are going to do what some of us had already predicted:
settle the whole thing out of court.
PolishLinux site
takes a look at KDE 4.2 based on the latest subversion branch and concludes:
"As it can be seen, the KDE4 development is running at full throttle. KDE4.2 will include much enhanced functionality and versatility than KDE 4.1, but still a lot of work has to be done in many areas, especially when it comes to the stability of the applications." Hopefully some of the long standing stability and maturity issues with KDE 4.x branch are resolved before the GA release.
The Linux Foundation is set to release a report on Wednesday estimating that the Linux ecosystem is now worth $25 billion. Despite the large number, Internetnews
seems to think that the number is low compared to IDG's predicted estimate of $49 billion by year 2011. We just have to wait and see, for more details.
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.
Mozilla's latest browser "Fennec", specifically designed for mobile devices has finally been
released. Currently, it is only available for the Nokia N810 platform. Support for other platforms is planned for the future. Ars Technica has a
review of the new browser. If you are interested in getting involved, but don't have a Nokia N810, you can
install it on your desktop (Windows, Linux and OS X) and experiment with it.
Qt Software today announced the porting of Qt to S60 on Symbian OS, the open smartphone platform. With the inclusion of the S60 platform, developers have an additional 80 million target devices that they can support with their Qt-based applications. An early technical preview of Qt for S60 is available for download from Qt Software
current website.
While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been
renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.
OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project originally based on Fedora 7 has done a revamp of its core system to Fedora 9 and added a number of new interesting features and many bug fixes. These
include updates on applications on the XO laptop called activities such as home view and journal, new control panel for common system settings, a update system, better backup integration and many others.
Computer world points out five major
new features , you might have missed out in the recent 2.6.27 release. These include briefly, better wireless and webcam support, UBIFS filesytem for embedded devices, Ext4 filesystem with better performance and scalability and increased support for network devices as well.
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