Keep OSNews alive by becoming a Patreon, by donating through Ko-Fi, or by buying merch!

Monthly Archive:: April 2010

BlackBerry OS 6.0 Screenshots, Details

  Submitted by poundsmack Wireless 2 Comments
"If you're a BlackBerry fan, there is probably not a single thing you have been looking forward to more than what we have right here - screenshots and full details of RIM's upcoming operating system, OS 6.0. One of our AT&T sources has not only showed us the brand new OS, but has also given us some screenshots that we could share. Since we have seen OS 6.0 in action first hand, we will break it down for you guys, along with all the other screenshots."
Read More

Adobe Ceases Development CS5 iPhone Tools

Rumors 56 Comments
Recently, Apple changed its iPhone OS developer agreement to prohibit the use of programming language other than Objective-C, C, C++, and JavaScript running in WebKit. This has the effect of pretty much pre-emptively killing Adobe's CS5 iPhone developer tools, as well as several other, similar tools. Adobe has now said it will cease development of the iPhone development tools. To make matters really interesting, Apple has actually replied directly to this news.
Read More

ACTA Revealed; Der Untergang Parodies Taken Down

  Submitted by ozonehole Legal 46 Comments
Yes, even more copyright and intellectual property stuff. We have several stories on this one today, so I figured I'd throw them all together. First and foremost, ACTA has finally been dragged out of the shadows and into the light (thanks to the EU parliament), so we can take a look at what's in there. Is it really as bad as everyone thinks it is? Short answer: yes. Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.
Read More

Google’s Challenge: Keeping the Internet Open

Google 24 Comments
"The Internet is one of the world's most important means of free expression. Yet censorship of the Web is growing; more than 40 governments censor information today, up from about four in 2002. And some governments are blocking - or proposing to block - content even before it reaches their citizens. Authoritarian countries are building firewalls and cracking down on dissent, dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules. We at Google believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship online. That's why we are launching a tool that will give people information about the government requests for content removal and user data that Google receives from around the world." Biggest problem I've seen: figures are absolute, not relative (i.e., they are not comparable per country).
Read More

Apple Reports Second Quarter Results

Apple 6 Comments
Apple published the financial results for the latest quarter, and it's been stellar once again, best non-holiday quarter in company history. "Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2010 second quarter ended March 27, 2010. The Company posted revenue of $13.50 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $9.08 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.62 billion, or $1.79 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 41.7 percent, up from 39.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter's revenue."
Read More

Oracle Starts Charging 90 USD Per User for ODF Plugin

  Submitted by Governa Oracle and SUN 94 Comments
When Oracle announced its intentions to buy Sun Microsystems, many were worried about the future of Sun's large open source software portfolio, which includes things like Solaris, Java, MySQL, and more. It seems like Oracle is still struggling with what to do with the large body of products Sun entails; they've started charging 90 USD per user for the Microsoft Office ODF plugin.
Read More

Introducing PCLinuxOS 2010

Linux 26 Comments
The PCLinuxOS distribution is the popular brain child of a man best known as Texstar. PCLinuxOS's website, which carries a pleasant blue theme with ads bordering the pages, claims the distro is "radically simple" and easy to use. If we stopped there, it would probably give the impression PCLinuxOS is aimed at newcomers to the Linux community, but that does not appear to be the case.
Read More

RT-Thread RTOS 0.3.0 Released

  Submitted by midnight OS News 2 Comments
RT-Thread RTOS is an open source real-time operating system for 16-bit and 32-bit microcontrollers, with components which include a hard real-time kernel, a command line shell, a device virtual file system, and a graphic user interface. RT-Thread RTOS 0.4.x series will be licensed under the Apache License v2.
Read More

Patent Absurdity: How Software Patents Broke the System

  Submitted by ciaran Open Source 8 Comments
The Free Software Foundation has released a medium length film which discusses the harms and the origins of software patents in the USA, using the ongoing Bilski case as a backdrop. There are interviews with Dan Bricklin, Timothy B. Lee, Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman, Dan Ravicher, and others. Now this is what the FSF ought to focus on. Great stuff. It explains how software patents came to be: a massive fail by the US justice system.
Read More

Jamie Zawinski on iPhone Development

Apple 6 Comments
"I finally got the iPhone/iPad port working. It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the Mac OS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right? Oh ho ho ho. I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS."
Read More

Zero Install SAT Solver

  Submitted by Tom5 OS News 5 Comments
"In 2007, OSNews ran an article about OPIUM, showing how to cast apt-get installation problems (choosing which of several possible dependencies to install) as a set of pseudo-boolean constraints which could then be solved mathematically to give the optimal solution. We have recently adapted this technique to Zero Install, addressing some problems experienced by the Sugar environment (One Laptop Per Child) and allowing better integration with distribution packages."
Read More