Monthly Archive:: December 2009

Psystar Closes up Shop Does Not Close up Shop

In a very unsurprising move, Psystar is closing up shop. It will fire its eight employees, and be done with it. There isn't more to say, really, except this: one down, at least four to go, of which three in Europe. Good luck bullying those three, Apple. Update: Psystar's lawyers have stated that the original story wasn't true. Psystar will continue to litigate the legality of Rebel EFI through the motion process described by Judge Alsup. They will also continue the Florida case.

Mozilla Rolls Out Latest Firefox Beta

"The Mozilla development community has rolled out the latest beta of its Firefox 3.6 browser. In addition to the usual round of bug fixes, Firefox 3.6 beta version 5, comes with a number of new features and performance enhancements. The browser offers the ability for users to easily reskin the browsers with a new visual theme. The new version can also run scripts asynchronously, which should speed load times of pages that have multiple scripts. The new release also aims to appease cutting-edge developers, with support for various new standards."

Palm Unveils Browser-Based IDE, Quarterly Results

We have lots of Palm new for you today, since the company released its quarterly results yesterday. The company also opened up public beta access to Ares, its browser-based integrated development environment for the webOS. Which to me, as a non-developer, looks totally awesome. webOS 1.3.5 is also on its way, which will bring battery life and performance improvements, among other things.

VLC for Mac Death “Greatly Exaggerated”

Late last night (CET), we reported on the story that the VLC project needed more developers for the Mac version of this popular video player, or else the Mac variant may disappear. Just about every website out there reported on this issue, but it turns out it all got a bit exaggerated (on the internet? Surely you jest...). We spoke to VLC developer Pierre d'Herbemont to clarify the issue, and they've also put up a wiki page about the so-called demise of the Mac version of VLC. He also detailed what, exactly, they meant by "Apple is blocking us".

VLC for Mac’s Future in Danger, More Developers Needed

MacNN has just published an important news item regarding the future of the Mac OS X version of the VLC mdia player. According to VLC's developers, the Mac version is at risk of being discontinued due to a lack of developers. Update: The VLC developers claim that Apple is working against them: "Apple doesn't want us on the Mac platform and is blocking us a lot, and refuses to explain why."

VMware Workstation vs. VirtualBox vs. Parallels

InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy takes an in-depth look at VMware Workstation 7, VirtualBox 3.1, and Parallels Desktop 4, three technologies at the heart of 'the biggest shake-up for desktop virtualization in years.' The shake-up, which sees Microsoft's once promising Virtual PC off in the Windows 7 XP Mode weeds, has put VirtualBox -- among the best free open source software available for Windows -- out front as a general-purpose VM, filling the void left by VMware's move to make Workstation more appealing to developers and admins. Meanwhile, Parallels finally offers a Desktop for Windows on par with its Mac product, as well as Workstation 4 Extreme, which delivers near native performance for graphics, disk, and network I/O.

Publishers Caught in Smartbook Dispute

Last week, OSNews received an interesting email from a German attorney. It informed us that a company called Smartbook AG has a trademark in several countries to the term "Smartbook" and admonished us (semi-threateningly) not to use the term for anything but his client's company's products. Our first reaction was, "huh?" But a quick search reminded us that several companies, most notably Qualcomm, have started referring to low-power mini-notebooks as smartbooks. It turns out that OSNews, and many other news sources, have been caught in a trademark dispute between Smartbook AG and Qualcomm. This prompted me to do a little research on trademark law.

Clarifications: GNOME, GNU, Planet GNOME

In the item we ran yesterday about GNOME and the GNU Project, one aspect got snowed under a little bit. It turns out a claim made in the iTWire article about the role a blog post by Miguel De Icaza was false, and even though the claim wasn't ours, I did repeat it, and therefore, should correct it too. I also need to offer apologies for not framing the opening of the article clear enough - had I framed it better, a lot of pointless discussion and name-calling could've been avoided.