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Monthly Archive:: May 2010

Facebook’s Privacy Woes; Chrome Issue Tempest in a Teapot

If there's one subject that's really hot right now on the web, it's privacy. There's the whole Facebook saga, and especially the company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, seems somewhat averse to the concept of privacy. We also have a much smaller issue with the Chrome web browser, where someone found out zoom settings are stored somewhere, even when in incognito mode. It turned out to be a feature (sort of) but it does highlight how important the concept of privacy on the web has become.

Google to Microsoft on Office vs. Docs: Oh Yeah?

"Google's hackles are raised over Microsoft's claim that Google Docs doesn't work well with Office files, and in fact, has a tendency to butcher Office's page design elements. Alex Payne, Director, Online Product Management, Microsoft, said Office and Google Docs don't play well together because Google Docs converts Office files into a different file format for viewing and editing, which strips out fonts, styles, charts, and other page elements. On Wednesday, Google said it has made a lot of progress in maintaining document fidelity when importing Microsoft Office documents into Google Docs. But Google apparently also sees some irony in Microsoft's reasoning."

Apple Quietly Boosts MacBook Speed, Battery Life

"Apple today quietly refreshed its entry-level MacBook laptop, boosting the processor speed and inserting a longer-life battery. The MacBook remains priced at $999. Apple bumped the MacBook's Intel Core 2 Duo processor speed to 2.4GHz, up from 2.2GHz, and replaced the battery with a 10-hr. battery to match the estimate that it uses in the higher-priced MacBook Pro line. Like the batteries used in those more expensive cousins, the MacBook's is within the case, and cannot be swapped out by the user. The MacBook now sports Nvidia's GeForce 320M integrated graphics, the specially-made-for-Apple successor to the GeForce 9400M, the MacBook's former chipset. The GeForce 320M also powers the two lowest-priced 13-in. MacBook Pro laptops, priced at $1199 and $1499."

revMobile Rejected from App Store, Unity Team Not Worried

While I was too young to experience its heyday, I have heard a lot of people wax lyrically about Apple's HyperCard. Even Steve Jobs himself said, earlier this year, that he'd love for a HyperCard-like environment to come to the iPhone, but that someone would have to build it. Well, someone did indeed build it, called it revMobile, but Apple has rejected 'it' from the App Store (i.e., applications developed using revMobile) because it violates section 3.3.1 of the iPhone SDK agreement. The team behind Unity, however, are luckier: Unity games are still being accepted into the App Store, and as such, they're not worried.

Google Afraid of Cougars, Bans Ads

Ah, American society and sex. For the number one producer of pornography, American society sure doesn't tolerate sex. We already have Steve Jobs going the 'think-of-the-children' route, and now it seems Google has similar problems - Google is banning so-called "cougar" dating sites from advertising via its network, while on the other hand, it does not have a problem with ads where older men can seek younger women. Hypocrisy, thy name is society.

Linux 2.6.34 Released

Linux 2.6.34 has been released. This version includes the distributed filesystem Ceph and LogFS, a filesystem for flash devices. Other features are a driver for almost-native KVM network performance, the VMware ballon driver, the "kprobes jump" optimization for dynamic probes, new perf features (the "perf lock" tool, cross-platform analysis support), support for GPU switching, several Btrfs improvements, RCU lockdep, asynchronous suspend/resume, several new drivers and many other small improvements. You can peruse the full changelog as well.

Wine 1.2 Planned for June 2010 Release

The folks at WineHQ are gearing up for the second release of Wine. "The 64-bit support is now more or less complete, and we have most of the fancy new icons, so it's time to think about the next stable release. Unless some major problems come up, 1.1.44 will be the last of the 1.1.x series. The next release will be 1.2-rc1, which will mark the beginning of the code freeze. This should result in a 1.2 final sometime in June."

JIT Brings Speed to Android 2.2

Google is set to announce Android 2.2 at the Google I/O event this week and one of the highly anticipated features will provide a big boost for performance and battery life. Originally the Dalvik virtual machine was implemented as an interpreter, but now a JIT compiler will be used. Already benchmarks show a roughly 6x improvement in numeric performance with the new JIT. While this will make Snapdragon-powered phones like the Nexus One seem even more responsive it will have the biggest impact on lower end phones using ARM11-based chipsets. It remains to be seen how many existing models will receive upgrades to 2.2.

Apache support for Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)

FreeBSD developer Robert Watson has announced an Apache GCD MPM that uses Apple's Grand Central Dispatch concurrent programming framework, and cites 1/4 the number of lines of code for threaded MPMs to accomplish the same goals. Currently, the MPM is being distributed on Mac OS X Forge, and runs on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Apache developer Paul Querna has proposed merging it to the Apache trunk. There are also ongoing efforts to port libdispatch to Solaris and Linux, so hopefully it will work there soon as well!

LLVM Gets Its Own C++ Standard Library

The LLVM developers seem to be driven to replace all parts of the GCC toolchain and libraries with home-grown alternatives under BSD-style licenses. The latest addition to the project is libc++, an implementation of the C++ standard library which is faster and uses less memory than the GCC libstdc++. The developers also intend to support standard library debugging which is ABI compatible to the release version, which should help developers cut down on lengthy recompile-and-debug cycles. The project is still in an early state but it already implements 85% of the C++0x standard library. As with the rest of the LLVM project, the development of libc++ is being supported by Apple.

DOSBox 0.74 Released

This article falls under the category of emulation. The venerable DOSBox emulator has been incremented to version 0.74. DOSBox emulates an IBM compatible PC computer running MS-DOS and is great for all you retro gamers or those wishing to run legacy applications. Personally I would love to relive the past with all the great games of yore. There is an extensive change log listing all the improvements, so head on over to the official website to peruse them.

Bear and Monkey Smack Apple with Patent Suit

"Apple has been slapped with another patent infringement lawsuit - but the suit says more about the festering sore that is the US patent system than it does about the individual patents involved. The lawsuit was filed by Austin, Texas inventor Eric Gould Bear, President and CEO of interface design firm MonkeyMedia. The core of his infringement claim is that his patents cover a user-interface concept that he calls 'Seamless Contraction' - essentially a set of techniques to narrow the display of information to that which is most 'salient', to use his term, to the user's needs."

Wild Fox: Firefox Fork with H.264 Support

Mozilla, sticking to its ideals of the open web, decided long ago that support for the patent-encumbered H264 codec would not be included in any of its products. Not only is H264 wholly incompatible with the open web and Free software, it is also incredibly expensive. Mozilla could use one of the open source implementations, but those are not licensed, and the MPEG-LA has been quite clear in that it will sue those who encode or decode H264 content without a license. Software patents, however, are only valid in some parts of the world, so an enterprising developer has started a project that was sure to come eventually: Firefox builds with H264 support.

Commodore PET 65816 CPU Card

Andre Fachat has created a CPU add-in card for Commodore PET machines. "It speeds up your PET to up to 12.5MHz (at least that's the plan for the final stage, but it currently looks good!). The board uses a 65816 CPU that runs at up to 12.5MHz, plus a Xilinx CPLD as logic glue. It includes up to 1MByte fast RAM (run at CPU speed) plus 512k parallel Flash ROM, that can be used as boot ROM". Source code and schematics are provided. Via Commodore News Page.

Why OSNews Is No Longer OSNews

There's one complaint we here at OSNews get thrown in our faces quite often: what's up with the lack of, you know, operating system news on OSNews? Why so much mobile phone news? Why so much talk of H264, HTML5, and Flash? Where's the juicy news on tomorrow's operating systems? Since it's weekend, I might as well explain why things are the way they are. Hint: it has nothing to do with a lack of willingness.