Monthly Archive:: June 2009

Back when we were still using the old PalmOS, Palm licensed its operating to other manufacturers, such as Sony with its Clie devices. As it turns out, the company might also license its new webOS to other device makers. They haven't yet made any decision about it, but Palm CFO Douglas Jeffries said that for Palm, "it's not a religious issue". What do y'all think? Good idea? Bad idea? In related news, here's a Sprint ad for the Pre.

ICANN, the non-profit corporation which oversees the backbone of the internet, has a new CEO in the person of Rod Beckstrom, former director of US National Cybersecurity Center. He takes over ICANN in a rather tumultuous time, and during a press conference, he put forth some of his ideas on how ICANN should work. Basic gist: the internet works fine, so there's little need for change.

A native application development kit has been released for Android developers, offering a way to create certain kinds of high-performing applications for handsets running the Google platform. Android applications run through the Dalvik virtual machine, which emulates a Java virtual machine. On Thursday, the Android Native Development Kit (NDK) was released, allowing coders to create parts of their Android 1.5 applications outside Dalvik, using native-code languages such as C and C++.

Today, the second version of i3 has been released. It supports floating windows now, which is convenient for many popups, toolbar windows, etc. i3 aims to be an improved tiling window manager, mainly inspired by wmii. Similarily to other tiling window managers, the goal is to increase productivity by not having overlapping windows. In contrast to wmii, i3 was designed to work well with Xinerama and particular attention has been given to producing clean, readable, and hackable code. See the website for goals, downloads and documentation or go directly to the userguide for a quick introduction.

Not too long ago, Robert Szeleney put the development of SkyOS on a temporary hold. The challenges in keeping up with the ever-changing world of hardware support were simply too big to continue SkyOS then-current development model. As a result, Szeleney recently came up with the idea of using a Linux or NetBSD kernel as the base for SkyOS. Well, we've got a progress report on that one, and in true Szeleney fashion, a lot of work has already been done.

"The magnetic hard disk's tenure as a critical part of the storage technology mosaic is entering its sixth decade, and it shows no sign of ending any time soon. However, certain limitations imposed by rotating media have been coming to the fore lately, and SSDs, which can in theory resolve all these problems, have long been hailed as the eventual successor technology for mass storage. If UK-based startup Dataslide has its way, though, magnetic recording media will get at least one last hurrah, in the form of a new technology called Hard Rectangular Drive."

Back in April after the four involved in the Pirate Bay scuffle were declared guilty of helping to break copyright law, the judge who gave the verdict, Thomas Norstrom, was found to probably be biased due to his involvement in several pro-copyright groups. After a long, cold, hard bout of deliberation, the Swedish Court of Appeals has actually found Norstrom unbiased, something rather surprising. This means that the charges against the guilty still stand.

"With Oracle set to acquire Sun and gain stewardship over Java, there are many in the tech world with an opinion on how the database giant should handle its new relationship with the programming language. One of those opinions is being voiced by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who is calling on Oracle to keep Java open. During a conference call yesterday to discuss Red Hat's first-quarter fiscal 2010 results, Whitehurst also took aim at Oracle's operating system business."

It's that time of the year again: the Top 500 list of supercomputers has been published, as they do every six months. Just for fun, I decided to compare the list released this month to then-current list when OSNews launched; we started in August 1997, so let's compare the list of today to the one from June 1997.

I'm sorry, but I can't get around it any more. Over the weekend, we had a story in the reputable Wall Street Journal that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant two months ago in a hospital in Tennessee. This story got all over the Apple media - obviously - and was later confirmed by the hospital in question. All the usual questions arose about privacy, Warren Buffet had a remark about it, and so on. Let's get all these stories out of the way in one go.

We've been talking an awful lot about the Palm Pre and iPhone lately, but what about Android? Sure, we've mentioned Android a number of times when it comes to netbooks, but what about phones, you know, what Android is designed for? Well, today, HTC annoucned its 3rd Android phone, the HTC Hero. This is the first to include a custom UI, as well as Flash 10 right out of the box.

"After considering Apple's motion to lift the automatic stay that put its lawsuit against Mac cloner Psystar on hold, bankruptcy judge Robert Mark has ordered the stay lifted. This will allow the legal process to move forward towards the trial between Apple and Psystar, which is set to begin this November."

There are a lot of people who believe that program and application management is currently as good as it gets. Because the three major platforms - Windows, Linux, Mac OS X - all have quite differing methods of application management, advocates of these platforms are generally unwilling to admit that their methods might be flawed, leading to this weird situation where over the past, say, 20 years, we've barely seen any progress in this area. And here we are, with yet another article submitted to our backend about how, supposedly, Linux' repository method sucks or rules.

The Engineering 7 weblog has an item about the improvements made in the ClearType font rendering technology which has been included in Windows since Windows XP. While I won't go too deeply into that post, I did figure it was a good opportunity to talk about font antialiasing in general; which type do you prefer?