Monthly Archive:: December 2008

Consider the following a little Christmas gift. Some of you may have already noticed, but for a few months already OSNews has seen a shift in content. Not necessarily in the subjects we cover, but more in the way we present our news. We've experimented for long enough now - we have settled on a definitive change in our content type. Read on for the details.

The legal back-and-forth between PsyStar and Apple is slowly but surely moving into the twilight zone. Not too long ago we had Apple going all black helicopter on PsyStar claiming people and/or companies other than PsyStar are involved in the clone maker's unlawful practices, even though Apple could so far not name any of them because, well, they don't know who they are yet. If that wasn't enough, PsyStar now claims that Apple's copyright on Mac OS X is invalid.

Most Firefox users don't realize that Firefox's current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox's search bar. This revenue amounts to tens of millions of dollars. Internet users the world over, who are currently reaping the benefit of a renewed browser war with exciting innovation instead of Microsoft-dominated stagnation, can thank Google for that state of affairs. But now that Google has itself entered the fray with Chrome, what does that mean for the Firefox/Google relationship?

The struggle within companies between their software and hardware business can lead to interesting co-opetition, and sometimes disaster. (A most extreme example being Sony's ignominious fall from the top the portable music device heap as a result of its reluctance to disturb its music production arm's legacy business). IBM, of course, is probably the canonical example, with its various partnerships with Microsoft ending up not only with Microsoft on top, but with its own PC hardware business suffering a long decline into oblivion as a result. Big Blue, presumably trying to avoid a replay, has entered into software licensing agreements with, among others, arch-rival Sun. Now, it seems they're backing off on plans to offer Solaris support for GPFS, their shared disk cluster file system.

Devzones, short for development zones, is a type of virtualization found in the Nexenta distribution. It can be used to define a base developer environment, which can be easily cloned many times. These copies can easily be destroyed and recreated.Devzones are built upon Opensolaris Zones, which are extensions of a chroot-like environment for the entire installed system. In other words, it allows for virtualization of an Opensolaris environment (and variants of Linux), without the performance hit that is generally associated with virtualization.This article gives a practical introduction into using Devzones.

Not too long ago, I was convinced that the modern day gaming world was a rather empty and shallow one. If you grew up with games like The 7th Guest, the Keen series, Metroid, adventure games like Monkey Island or Full Throttle, and so on, more modern games seemed to have little to offer, besides yet another nameless hero in a grey space suit killing aliens in a grey world with the same set of twelve weapons. However, a little speck of hope was flickering on the horizon, a game seemingly made by people who could read my mind; a game about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, filled with quests and epic stories, where you were free to do whatever you wanted. Yes, I looked forward to Fallout 3, and since my computer was too old to run any game more recent than Wolfenstein, I decided to buy a game console. Read on to see how my venture into the world of modern gaming turned out.