Monthly Archive:: May 2009

Yes, it's been one busy week here at OSNews. We published a guide on how to build a computer that can run Mac OS X using an unaltered retail disc, and this guide became one of the most often-visited stories in a matter of days. On top of that, we had countless interesting and insightful discussions about Mono and Moonlight, the Linux Unified Kernel, switching to Mac OS X, the future of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, and lots of other interesting stuff. Due to me being engulfed in university work, there is - again - no My Take this week. It might take a few weeks before I can get My Take back into the game - my apologies for that.

Back when the whole netbook thing started, Asus was king of the hill with a focus on netbooks with Linux pre-installed. Since they were kind of popular, it didn't take Microsoft long to start working together with Asus to 'port' Windows XP to the Asus line of netbooks, and with that, to other netbooks as well. The result was that Linux netbooks are now harder to find for many people. While Dell committed itself to Linux on netbooks, Asus has decided to just skip the first date and jump right into bed with Microsoft.

If there is one technology in the Linux world that ruffles feathers whenever it's mentioned, it's Mono, the open source .Net clone. Since .Net comes out of Microsoft, and has some patents encircling it, it is said to be a legal nightmare. Supposedly, you can obtain a "royalty-free, reasonable and non-discriminatory" license from Microsoft regarding the patents surrounding Mono. iTWire decided to look at just how easy (or hard) it is to get such a license. Turns out it's kind of hard.

The pairing of Sprint and Palm for the launch of the Pre was romantic. Don't laugh, you thought it too. Erstwhile smartphone leader Palm put its best hope for survival in the underdog wireless carrier who, without the Pre, has no ultra-competitive exclusive touchphone. Both companies have endured declining market share, and together they could take on the world and get some of it back. Well that romance is over, and it ended a little more than a week before the Pre even hit consumer availability. Lowell McAdam, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless, yesterday announced that his company will offer the Pre "in the next six months".

Lots of people who are testing the various Windows 7 builds have already reported that Windows 7 is faster and snappier than Windows Vista, and some even say that it approaches Windows XP. Apparently, web browsers in particular will benefit from running on Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista SP2. BetaNews ran tests of all the major browsers on both Vista SP2 and Windows 7, and concluded that in general, browsers are round and about 12%-18% faster on 7 than on Vista.

Let's get thoroughly British! What what. Digital Planet, BBC's technology podcast walks through the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (Home to code-cracking Station-X during WWII), taking a simultaneous trip down memory lane discussing the general history of home computing. The podcast also talks to "Pixelh8" a chip-tune composer who has put together "Obsolete?" 'composed using some of the oldest and rarest computers in the world such as the WWII code-breaking machine Colossus Mark 2 Rebuild'.

Looking at the amount of ex-Apple people working at Palm, this shouldn't be a surprise: the Palm Pre works with iTunes on the Mac (not Windows), out-of-the-box. You can plug it, and the iTunes Store will treat as any iPod or iPhone. It obviously can't handle iPhone applications, and songs encumbered with Apple's DRM won't work either, but for the rest you're on your merry way. Apple didn't want to comment on this little tidbit.

"The heap in user mode has a number of different measures built in to make exploiting heap overrun vulnerabilities more challenging. Similar checks have been in debug versions of the kernel pool for some time to aid driver debugging. Windows 7 RC is the first version of Windows with some of these integrity checks turned on in release builds."

Here at OSNews we believe that in many ways the future of computing is mobile. It's also a pretty exciting field, since it's been so dynamic over the past ten years, with platforms rising and falling, and no one vendor ever rising to dominate. But this "wild west" market can be a real source of anxiety for mobile-oriented software developers, who have to gamble on which platform to support, or go to the extra effort of placing multiple bets. Maybe it's not a huge problem for hobbyists or developers of simplistic apps, but as the devices get more powerful, it's enabling the development of more powerful apps. If only these developers could develop a sophisticated mobile app that could be deployed on all the major mobile platforms. Now they can. There's an open mobile framework called Rhodes that allows developers to write an app that will deploy on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android.

Google will add scripting capabilities to Google Docs, allowing organizations to customize its online applications and automate tasks. Google plans to sign up about 1,000 customers over the next few weeks to test the feature, called Google Apps Script. It will be tested initially in Google Spreadsheets and extended to other Google Docs applications over time.

While most people focus on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org as being each other's competitors, there's a third player in this market: KOffice. While KOffice is obviously geared towards use on KDE, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME-based distributions as well, making it much more platform-independent than Microsoft's Office suite. Version 2.0.0 was released today, and comes with a whole boatload of improvements.

Mozilla Jetpack makes it so easy to filter, modify, and mash up pages that it might end up pitting developers and users against content producers in a battle for the Web, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. By allowing users to modify the behavior, presentation, and output of Web apps and pages to their liking, Jetpack brings us one step closer to a more democratic Web. Yet, as Jetpack produces fruit, expect more SaaS providers and media companies to call for 'guardrails for the Internet.'

"EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager that automatically changes your sound depending on the current application using it. For instance if you listen to music and a Skype call comes in, the music will fade out (based on your settings) until it's turned off, and the skype sound will be the only one running. Or if you listen to music and then play a YouTube video, the music will be again turned off and you will only hear the sound of the YouTube video. The application doesn't have a fancy interface, it only does what it's supposed to, and does it well."

There's been a new release of DOSBox, version 0.73. It's got support for more graphics modes and cards, improved Vista support, new OPL emulation cores, sound fixes and improvements for Mac OS X, lots of compatibility fixes, lots of CD-ROM detection improvements, lots of memory (EMS/XMS) improvements, various fixes and enhancements for the recompiling core, and much more.