Monthly Archive:: May 2010

"Lately, the Perl language has had less buzz surrounding it than many other languages and development environments, but Perl is still a key component on the Internet. For this guest post, we asked Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState, to weigh in on the topic."

A group of Opera Software developers decided to port Opera to their favorite mobile platform. In a Q&A the team explains their motivation and the challenges they met when developing for Maemo. It is the first of Opera's mobile browsers to feature the new Carakan JavaScript engine, which made Opera the quickest browser on the desktop.

If there's one Linux company that has seen lots of ups and downs it's the Paris-based Mandriva S.A. They have a great distribution, but as a company, they've always been on shaky grounds. First a rumour, now confirmed: the company has put itself up for sale - which, as the community points out, isn't necessarily a bad thing.

While most of us here on the OSNews team are proponents of HTML5, we're all fully aware that Flash serves an important role on the web today, and will most likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Flash has a rather spotty record when it comes to performance, and so far, hasn't been able to run well on mobile devices. It seems this is about to change, as an Adobe evangelist has showed off Flash 10.1 on Android 2.2 (Froyo) running on the Nexus One. And eerlijk is eerlijk, it looks pretty darn impressive, especially considering how far they've come.

It has long been rumoured that Apple and AT&T signed an exclusivity deal for the iPhone covering five years since the launch of the original iPhone (2007). Apple has confirmed in a court case that this is indeed true; in other words, there is not going to be a Verizon iPhone before 2012. However, it is important to note that the original agreement may no longer be valid (for instance due to AT&T problematic service). This same court case also touched upon another important issue. "The plaintiffs argued that Apple exerts illegal monopoly power over the iPhone applications market by barring third-party apps from iPhone OS 1.0, and the court ruled the argument was valid enough to go forward." Should be of interest to Adobe and the FTC.

When Apple sued HTC, and targeted Android specifically (news which came out of the blue), many people, including myself, were convinced this was Apple letting the world know they were afraid of Android's rising popularity. This notion was laughed away by many an Apple fan, but it turns out that this is most likely far closer to reality than many dare to admit: in the first quarter of 2010, Android conquered the number two market share spot from the iPhone in the US - and by a wide margin too. Update: Added a graph which better shows the trend.

Ah, the AmigaOne x1000 - now that the summer is approaching, the powerful next-generation Amiga machine is getting ever closer to being officially unveiled and launched. The hardware is being developed by A-EON Technology, who formed a strategic partnership with Hyperion Entertainment, the company behind AmigaOS 4.x, with the "express purpose of developing new hardware for AmigaOS 4 and beyond". Obligement has a long and detailed interview up with Trevor Dickinson, long-time Amiga enthusiast and collector, and one of the prime forces behind A-EON.

"If you're looking for notebook power on the cheap and you're not too keen on either using Intel's integrated graphics or paying for a higher-performing, NVIDIA-made workaround (i.e., Optimus), then there's an obvious alternative mobile platform for you: AMD/ATI. AMD is gaining steam in the mobile space due to a combination of low cost and its ATI Radeon graphics solution, with Reuters reporting that the company will better than double the number of design wins this back-to-school season compared to a year ago."

"Dear Ubuntu, for the last couple years life has been good. Every time I've shown you to a friend or family member, they've compared you to what they're familiar with--Windows XP or Vista, mostly--and by comparison you've looked brilliant. Yeah, your ugly brown color scheme was a bit off-putting at first, but once people saw how secure, simple, and reliable you were, the response was almost universally positive. But recently, things have changed ..."

According to The Register, "Researchers say they've devised a way to bypass protections built in to dozens of the most popular desktop anti-virus products, including those offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG, and BitDefender. The method, developed by software security researchers at matousec.com, works by exploiting the driver hooks the anti-virus programs bury deep inside the Windows operating system. In essence, it works by sending them a sample of benign code that passes their security checks and then, before it's executed, swaps it out with a malicious payload."

Wolfire blog writes: "It's 'common knowledge' that Mac and Linux gaming are so unimportant that they might as well not exist. Everyone 'knows' that Mac games sell a tiny fraction of the amount that Windows games sell, and that Linux games simply don't exist. But are these ideas based on reality? Where did these figures come from? Anyone who has ever worked with statistics knows that it's unwise to trust 'common knowledge' without data to back it up. I decided to ask some developers about their sales distribution, and get some real data about Mac and Linux game sales."

And so the suing continues. Apple and Nokia aren't particularly friendly towards one another as of late, with both companies accusing each other of infringing upon one another's patents. Several shots have been fired back and forth already, with the latest one coming straight from Espoo.

Canonical has explained why it has licensed H264. As it turns out, the license does not cover the distribution as a whole - since Ubuntu is entirely Free software, the license cannot be included. Canonical has licensed H264 so that it can offer it as an option to OEMs, just as it does with Flash, Fluendo, and some others. Since this is just an option for OEMs, it does not mean that every pre-installed Ubuntu system comes with the H264 license - it depends on whether or not your OEM decided to include it (good luck finding that out). And people actually promote this complicated spaghetti licensing situation.

The recently released 10.04 version of Ubuntu is the third Long Term Support (LTS) version Canonical has released. I installed this new version on four of my laptops (2 netbooks, 1 normal laptop, 1 portable desktop replacement), and here's my impression of it.