Monthly Archive:: April 2009

Robert Szeleny has given a short update on the status of SkyOS. "For the last weeks and as it looks like quite a few more weeks I'm in contact with a lot of people talking about their ideas to continue SkyOS development. Unfortunately many people completely underestimate the amount of work required to manage a development team for SkyOS, either an open or closed source version, or completely lack vision and or motivation and or seriousness. Anyway, I'm still reading through my inbox hoping to get in contact with people with real motives and knowledge being able to bring SkyOS to the next level."

"The Pip-Boy 3000 is by far one of the coolest gadgets I can imagine owning, and it's no surprise to me that some crafty guy with a little spare time on his hands might try to create the real thing. YouTube user larpcast uploaded a video of a fully functional Pip-Boy, created using the one that came with the Amazon.com exclusive version of the game and an iTouch . Mix throughly and tah-dah, your very own Pip-Boy!"

Two new architectures based on the FreeBSD-kernel have been added to the Debian Archive. This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time. "The two new architectures (well, better named OS i think, as they use a different kernel) are available in unstable and experimental. We do start out empty, importing only what is needed to get a build running. For this reason you will not be able to directly use it immediately. Please wait until they catched up, which I expect to happen soon."

We almost had another small riot over the EULA Google uses for its Chrome web browser. On Slashdot, the editors posted an anonymous submission that questioned Google's policies as defined in the EULA used by Chrome. Slashdot readers quickly corrected the wrong assumptions by the anonymous poster, and Google jumped in on its corporate blog to clarify the "issue".

Take a look at some systems that enable you to trace the execution of applications and work out what they are doing without having to make any modifications to the source code, and even without having to stop and restart the application. See how with tracing alone, you can find and diagnose problems with just a few commands.

We've been following the recent news about IBM potentially buying Sun, and the internet had more or less accepted that big blue was going to be the new owners of Sun Microsystems. However, the omnipresent "people close to the matter" have told the New York Times that IBM has withdrawn its offer, and that the deal is now off.

Microsoft's "You find it, you keep it" campaign, which directly attacks Apple, has seen another instalment. The first one, with Lauren criticising Apple for its pricing policy and lack of choice, was met with mixed reviews, and I'm sure the second one will not be received any differently. Giampaolo disses Apple for a lack of power and being all about aesthetics.

Over a year ago I posted a (non-OS news) article about this new geeky & underground, grass-root movement in videography -- similar to the artistic explosion digital photography saw a few years ago. We call ourselves "DV Rebels". Given a slow weekend, I decided to revisit the topic today with some newer videos shot with the Canon HV20/HV30 cameras, these $500 gems that have been the catalysts in the said movement. The HV lines of cameras are so popular that over 220 official music videos were shot with them, among other kinds of art. In the old article there has been criticism about the "motion photography without a story" nature of the videos that were sampled, but I think that since then these hobbyist videographers have come a long way. Have a look inside for some of my favorite HV20/30 videos available today, while you can check even more here.

This is the eleventh article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. After a rather long hiatus, this eleventh instalment will focus on bling, desktop effects, and compositing, and what they can contribute to the desktop experience.

"Firefly" is the best Joss Whedon work to date, but I always try to give the benefit of the doubt on new sci-fi shows. So tonight, as I was watching "Dollhouse" on TV with my ex-Be engineer husband, JBQ (currently at Android, along with many other ex-Be engineers), I noticed something familiar at the Dollhouse supervisor's computer screen. It seems that the Dollhouse's business runs on... BeOS. Click in for some snapshots of the scene. Update: mikesum32 tells us that they used a screenshot of BeOS full screen! In the screenshot BeShare and 'Jabber for BeOS' were open. I recognize quite a few names in their lists (some of them are OSNews readers to this day), so congrats for those who made it to... TV!

Thanks to Windows Server boss Bill Laing, we now know that Windows Server 2008 R2 will be released this calendar year. Since Windows Server 2008 R2 is the server version of Windows 7, we can deduce from this announcement that the successor to Windows Vista will certainly arrive before the end of the year. And what's up with the "quite major announcements" about Windows 7 Microsoft is talking about?

"Microsoft launched ASP.NET MVC 1.0 at the MIX09 event last month. This new ASP.NET enhancement brings a Rails-like model-view-controller framework to Microsoft's Web development stack. In a blog entry published on Wednesday, Microsoft developer division vice president Scott Guthrie announced that the framework is now open source. The source code is available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL), a permissive open source software license that has been approved by OSI and is characterized by GNU as a free software license. Microsoft's move to open the framework will enable third-party developers to modify the source code, incorporate it into their own software, and share it with other users."

Remember, back in the day, before USB drives became common place, you had to use those weird square disks? We called them floppies, and they had about as much storage capacity as my current computer has in its power switch alone. One of the problems with floppy drives was that it was impossible to determine whether there was a floppy in the drive without actually spinning up the drive. Windows 95 almost had a feature that could detect whether or not there was a floppy in the drive without spinning it up.

RPyC is a seamless library for integrating Python processes on many machines/processes. This article looks at the advantages or drawbacks RPyC has over other distributed Python frameworks such as XML-RPC and Pyro. A few simple examples of using RPyC are included to give you a feel for the library.