Monthly Archive:: August 2010

Not too long ago Adobe started a "We love Apple" campaign, as a response to Apple's continuous negative remarks about the company. With Flash 10.1 slowly but surely appearing on more and more mobile devices, it seems like the company just doesn't care about it any more. Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen has said they've "moved on".

With the release of Internet Explorer's first beta upon is, it's a good time to look back upon the history of Microsoft's web browser. As it turns out, Internet Explorer turns 15 today, with the first version released August 16, 1995. Pretty turbulent history, there.

Lots of talk on net neutrality this week, mostly due to the joint policy proposal from Google and Verzion. While many Americans are calling for government-imposed net neutrality rules, The New York Times' Eric Pfanner proposes a different solution - one that has been working wonders in Europe. And hey, what a coincidence - I'm European!

While I was away from OSNews, FreeBSD 8.1 was released. Nobody posted it on OSNews, so here I am, a little late (my apologies). It's got all sorts of improvements, like support for UltraSPARC IV/IV+ and SPARC64 V processors, SMP support for PowerPC G5 processors, GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5, and much more.

"We always knew that WebKit is going to make Konqueror fast; but how much faster? Today we test that by putting Konqueror with KHTML through the SunSpider JavaScript Test and the then do the same with WebKit. To get an idea of how fast they are compared to other browsers, we also decided to put Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 through the tests."

We're far from done with the Oracle v. Google lawsuit. The search giant has responded to the lawsuit, and Miguel De Icaza has provided a very interesting insight into the case. His report has been confirmed by James Gosling, known as the father of Java who left Sun right after the merger. Icaza speculates that the potential to monetise on Java by suing Google was pitched by Jonathan Schwartz during Sun's sales talks with Oracle. Oh boy.

The entire complaint Oracle lobbed at Google has been available online for a while now, and after reading it through with my total lack of any knowledge of the inner workings of the American legal system, a few things did stand out to me as peculiar. We'll have to wait for a more detailed analysis by someone qualified to do so. Also, a few other notes about this case I've picked up online.

I'm supposed to be asleep right now, but this news kind of hit me like a ton of bricks: Oracle is suing Google over its Android mobile operating system, claiming it infringes on its patented Java technology. Not a good week to be Google, is it?

Microsoft has announced the release date of the beta of Internet Explorer 9 - September 15. "Starting today, a select group of VIP web developers, designers, bloggers and press begin receiving their invitations to an event we're holding in San Francisco on September 15th to celebrate the Beauty of the Web and to mark the launch of the IE9 Beta."

"Windows Phone 7 is entering a tough market. Apple's iOS and Google's Android have become well-entrenched, widely used platforms, and both have application stores boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of applications. At launch, Windows Phone 7 will certainly have its virtues - a slick user interface, a first-rate e-mail client, and extensive integration with online services -- but it will also lack a great many features that its competitors include. But the modern, consumer-friendly, touch-friendly smartphone market is still a new one, expected to undergo substantial growth over the next few years. Microsoft may be late to the game, but probably isn't too late - there's certainly no winner yet. And the company has one major strength its competitors lack."

Kaspersky has announced in this article the first trojan specific for Android. "The new malicious program penetrates smartphones running Android in the guise of a harmless media player application. Users are prompted to install a file of just over 13 KB with the standard Android extension .APK. Once installed on the phone, the Trojan uses the system to begin sending SMSs to premium rate numbers without the owner’s knowledge or consent, resulting in money passing from a user’s account to that of the cybercriminals."

"Apple has released security updates for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to address flaws in both PDF handling and I/O - these flaws had been exploited recently to create a Web-based jailbreak for the company's portable devices. iOS 4.0.2 is available via iTunes for the iPhone and iPod touch, and iOS 3.2.2 patches the flaw for iPad owners."

Not too long ago, Apple added the Video Decode Acceleration framework to Mac OS X, allowing developers to get low-level access to hardware H264 acceleration. Adobe was quite thrilled about this, because they claimed this was needed for Flash video to become hardware accelerated on the Mac. This feature's been in beta for a while now, but yesterday they finally released it as part of a regular Flash Player update. Caveat: Apple's support for this framework can be a bit sketchy.

Today, the Genode OS Framework has seen another feature-rich release, introducing support for hardware-accelerated graphics by the means of Gallium3D, wireless networking via the MadWifi communication stack, a new block-device infrastructure, and Qt4 version 4.6.3. Genode is a modular framework for building special-purpose operating systems, currently supporting 6 different kernels. With the new release, its device-driver coverage reaches a new level and brings the project one step closer towards the goal of shaping Genode to a general-purpose OS.