Monthly Archive:: February 2010

"Normally, the story would end there; you'd RMA the material, get an exchange for the lot, and move on. Except there were a couple of problems. So I kicked into forensic mode. Very low serial numbers are a hallmark of the "ghost shift", i.e. the shift that happens very late at night when a rouge worker enters the factory and runs the production machine off the books." A fascinating in-depth peek into the grey-market of China.

This is news that makes me very, very happy. Stephan "stippi" Assmus has written a lengthy blog post detailing the progress made on Haiku's WebKit port, and they're quite far along. Thanks to the help of several community members, the test browser, enticingly named (euh...) HaikuLauncher, is already relatively stable, supports tabbed browsing, and a whole lot more.

With the new version 10.02, the Genode OS Framework significantly extends its supported base platforms by the addition of two modern microkernels, namely Codezero and NOVA. In contrast to most operating systems that are tied to one respective kernel, Genode enables the development of specialized component-based operating systems that are portable across 6 different kernels including the whole family of open-source L4 kernels. Each kernel has different strengths, which increasingly become available at the framework's API level. For example, the new version 10.02 enables applications to benefit from the real-time scheduling as provided by the OKL4 and L4ka::Pistachio kernels.

Now that Apple has unveiled the iPad, people are wondering what the future holds for the iPhone OS platform and the concepts behind it. The iPad comes scarily close to being an actual computer in the more classical sense of the word, and a recent Apple job posting seems to indicated the Cupertino giant is interested in further moving the iPhone OS up the ladder. We ask you: would you be put off or excited about the iPhone OS' restrictive model moving up the stack?

GNOME Shell is the new core user interface for GNOME 3. GNOME Shell 2.29.0 brings a lot of new features and improvements, the most noticeable being a new message tray showing notifications sliding into the bottom of the screen, a status area for past notifications, the ability to set your presence to the user status menu, switching the overview between a grid and linear view of workspaces.

"Global sales of mobile phones dipped slightly in 2009 overall but did stage a fourth-quarter recovery, according to new figures from Gartner. Last year, consumers worldwide bought 1.21 billion cell phones, a 0.9 percent decline from the prior year. However, a surge in smartphones from the likes of Apple and Research In Motion and in low-end devices boosted fourth-quarter sales to 340 million units, an 8.3 percent gain over the fourth quarter of 2008, the market researcher said Tuesday."

The desktop-oriented FreeBSD variant, PC-BSD, has put out a major release: PC-BSD 8.0. "The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.5. PC-BSD 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements over the 7.x series."

Fantastic expose about Flash and HTML5 video by lead x264 developer Jason Garrett-Glaser. "The internet has been filled for quite some time with an enormous number of blog posts complaining about how Flash sucks - so much that it's sounding as if the entire internet is crying wolf. But, of course, despite the incessant complaining, they're right: Flash has terrible performance on anything other than Windows x86 and Adobe doesn't seem to care at all. But rather than repeat this ad nauseum, let’s be a bit more intellectual and try to figure out what happened."

What's that you say? You made a New Year's resolution but haven't kept it? You vowed to sharpen your programming skills, write a cool application, AND use cutting edge operating system technology? Look no further, you have come to the right place. This article will get you started writing applications for Haiku, the open source version of the advanced BeOS operating system.

"With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec - VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash)."

I figured the whole "Windows-7-ate-my-RAM!"-thing would be one-item only, but apparently, it won't be. Over the weekend, the situation got a lot murkier. As it turns out, Craig Barth, the supposed CTO of Devil Mountain Software, was actually an InfoWorld blogger/editor - who has been fired from InfoWorld over all this. Someone on the web who isn't who he claims to be? Surely you jest! Update: Ars' Peter Bright has published an article about this as well.

Discovered by Czech researchers, the Chuck Norris botnet has been spreading by taking advantage of poorly configured routers and DSL modems. The malware got the Chuck Norris moniker from a programmer's Italian comment in its source code: 'in nome di Chuck Norris', which means 'in the name of Chuck Norris'. Chuck Norris is unusual in that it infects DSL modems and routers rather than PCs. It installs itself on routers and modems by guessing default administrative passwords and taking advantage of the fact that many devices are configured to allow remote access. They're behind the times, though. It should've been the Epic Beard Man Botnet. Move over, Chuck.

"People confused and frustrated by computers can now turn to a laptop called Alex built just for them. Based on Linux, the laptop comes with simplified e-mail, web browsing, image editing and office software. Those who sign up for Alex pay GBP 39.95 a month for telephone support, software updates and broadband access. Its creators hope the laptop and its simple suite of software proves to be a popular alternative to the Windows and Mac operating systems."

While it's been a low-level grumbling for years, the issue of Flash on mobile devices (and particularly the iPhone/Touch/iPad ecosystem) has reached fever pitch over the past few weeks, with Steve Jobs as self-appointed Flash basher-in-Chief. The OSNews crowd, that is, dyed-in-the-wool technologists have, by and large, not been big fans of Flash, with its spotty availability and performance on alternative platforms, resource hogging, and instability. And though it's quite useful for web video and other specialized interfaces, it drives the tech savvy crazy when it's used for utterly superfluous multimedia bling. So we've had a lively discussion of the pros and cons of Flash, and whether device users should be free to make their own decision about whether it's worthy to install on their iPads. But we're leaving out an important detail. As Daniel Eran Dilger, a Flash developer, points out, almost all the important existing Flash infrastructure won't work anyway. Update: A worthwhile rebuttal to this point of view.