Monthly Archive:: December 2010

Paul Allen’s Patent Infringement Case Dismissed

Legal No Comments
Paul Allen's patent infringement complaint against the world and its dog has been dismissed. The court agreed with Google et al that it "lacks adequate factual detail to satisfy the dictates of Twombly and Iqbal" and also "fails to provide sufficient factual detail as suggested by Form 18". The court doesn't agree with Allen's Interval Licensing that the two cases do not apply to patent complaints, but it doesn't even need to go there: "The Court does not find it necessary to determine whether Form 18 is no longer adequate under Twombly and Iqbal because Plaintiff's complaint fails to satisfy either the Supreme Court's interpretation of Rule 8 or Form 18."
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Introduction to OpenCL

General Development 16 Comments
"Using a GPU for computational workloads is not a new concept. The first work in this area dates back to academic research in 2003, but it took the advent of unified shaders in the DX10 generation for GPU computing to be a plausible future. Around that time, Nvidia and ATI began releasing proprietary compute APIs for their graphics processors, and a number of companies were working on tools to leverage GPUs and other alternative architectures. The landscape back then was incredibly fragmented and almost every option required a proprietary solution - either software, hardware or both. Some of the engineers at Apple looked at the situation and decided that GPU computing had potential - but they wanted a standard API that would let them write code and run on many different hardware platforms. It was clear that Microsoft would eventually create one for Windows (ultimately DirectCompute), but what about Linux, and OS X? Thus an internal project was born, that would eventually become OpenCL."
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Ubuntu May Replace GDM with LightDM

  Submitted by Debjit Ubuntu 31 Comments
Yet another possible change in Ubuntu's core components: they're mulling over replacing GDM with LightDM. Why? Well: "Faster - the greeter doesn't require an entire GNOME session to run. More flexible - multiple greeters are supported through a well defined interface. This allows Ubuntu derivatives to use the same display manager (e.g. Kubuntu, Lubuntu etc.). Simpler codebase - similar feature set in ~5000 lines of code compared to 50000 in GDM. Supports more usecases - first class support for XDMCP and multihead."
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Anand’s Thoughts on Google’s Chrome OS

  Submitted by B. Janssen Google 9 Comments
"At a high level, Chrome OS sounds like the most interesting thing to happen to the low end netbook/notebook market since we saw the first Atom platforms. The problem has never been hardware, but rather the software. At $299 - $399, for someone who is truly just going to rely on web based applications, I can see Chrome OS being a very good alternative to a netbook. The integration of Qualcomm’s Gobi modem is particularly brilliant, giving every Chrome notebook a GPS as well as cellular data connectivity. The 100MB of free transfers per month for two years is just perfect for light users. Chrome OS or not, I’d like to see this sort of a setup on all notebooks."
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Syllable CMS Ported to Syllable Desktop

Syllable, AtheOS 8 Comments
The CMS that builds the Syllable websites was used on Syllable Server so far, but has now been ported to Syllable Desktop. This was done by porting it to REBOL 3. This screenshot shows Desktop building its own website in static batch mode and synchronising it with Amazon S3. This screenshot shows the Webster browser previewing the built site as local files. Building the websites on Syllable Server is around 35% faster with REBOL 3 than with REBOL 2. A few longstanding problems in the Russian website and Syllable documentation were fixed because REBOL 3 now understands Unicode.
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Politics Affect Operating Systems Too

OS News 65 Comments
I know that there's a number of readers who don't like it when OSnews covers political topics, I'm one of them. These political upheavals however spell danger for operating system hobbyists and so I dedicate this article to framing the political news within the context of what we are here to read about: operating systems.
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Haiku R1 Features Poll

  Submitted by drcouzelis Haiku 25 Comments
The Haiku developers are preparing to finalise which features should be present in the first official release of Haiku. "This general interest poll, is to allow you - yes you! - the opportunity to effectively express your thoughts on which features should be present in Haiku R1 (Final). For R1, a balance must be attained between delaying the release and making Haiku R1 a well polished, impressive and feature rich release."
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Windows 8 3D UI Rumours: Probably Unicorntastic Nonsense

  Submitted by Debjit Windows 48 Comments
Amidst all the WikiLeaks hoopla, there's also actual regular news going on. Windows 7 is barely out the door, and we're already dealing with Windows 8, which is indeed being worked on but will not arrive for at least two years. There's some rumours from an Italian website which state that the 64bit version of Windows 8 will have a completely new interface called Wind. Right.
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Dutch Police Arrest MasterCard Attacker

Legal 20 Comments
An arrest has been made in the case of the DDoS attacks against MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and others. The Dutch police has arrested a Dutch guy who has already confessed to taking part in the attacks. Most likely, he is not in any way the brains behind the operation, and I'm going out on a limb here stating that these attacks will continue nonetheless. Also, I'm not the guy. Also also, I'm wondering if there's police anywhere looking for the people who are continuously DDoS'ing WikiLeaks.
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The ASF Resigns From the JCP Executive Committee

Java 19 Comments
"The Apache Software Foundation concludes that that JCP is not an open specification process - that Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses; that the commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem; that it is impossible to distribute independent implementations of JSRs under open source licenses such that users are protected from IP litigation by expert group members or the spec lead; and finally, the EC is unwilling or unable to assert the basic power of their role in the JCP governance process."
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Verve: A Type Safe Operating System

  Submitted by poundsmack Microsoft 17 Comments
"The Singularity project (an OS written in managed code used for research purposes) has provided several very useful research results and opened new avenues for exploration in operating system design. Recently, MSR released a paper covering an operating system research project that takes a new approach to building an OS stack with verifiable and type safe managed code. This project employs a novel use of Typed Assembly Language, which is what you think it is: Assembly with types (implemented as annotations and verified statically using the verification technology Boogie and the theorem prover Z3 (Boogie generates verification conditions that are then statically proven by Z3. Boogie is also a language used to build program verifiers for other languages)). As with Singularity, the C# Bartok compiler is used, but this time it generates TAL. The entire OS stack is verifiably type safe (the Nucleus is essentially the Verve HAL) and all objects are garbage collected. It does not employ the SIP model of process isolation (like Singularity). In this case, again, the entire operating system is type safe and statically proven as such using world-class theorem provers." Channel9 has an interview on video with one of the developers behind this MSR project. Source code to Verve is available.
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Lazaridis: QNX Coming to BB Phones Once They Go Dual-core

  Submitted by poundsmack Wireless 3 Comments
"At D:Dive Into Mobile this evening, Waterloo's outspoken co-CEO went on record that they'll be taking the PlayBook's QNX platform to smartphones just 'as soon as dual core baseband CPUs', though power consumption remains a limiting factor. At any rate, RIM seems to be fully acknowledging now both that QNX is a little too beefy for today's smartphones and that BlackBerry OS isn't quite beefy enough, which leaves these guys in a bit of a pinch until the dual-core revolution takes hold." It's clear QNX isn't Engadget's forte (I don't blame them - I know jack-all about gadgets compared to them), but of course, we know better. QNX itself will happily run on current-gen mobile phones; heck, even a simple PII will do the job. The problem here is most likely BlackBerry's own userland.
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HTML5 in Browsers: Canvas, Video, Audio, Graphics

Internet 1 Comment
InfoWorld's Peter Wayner launches the first in a series of articles on browser implementations of HTML5 capabilities. Focusing this round on the presentation layer, Wayner provides an overview of how Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari stand on HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, SVG, and WebGL, providing developers with tips, samples, and resources for making the most of today's HTML5 presentation layer technologies on today's browsers.
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Wake Your Linux Up From Sleep for a Cron Job

Linux 12 Comments
Here's the latest in our new series on OS tips from power users: a seemingly trivial task. You have a computer, most likely a laptop, that you wish to keep suspended while you're not working. For example, let's say overnight. At the same time, you wish to run a handful of maintenance tasks, like backups and cleanup, which you don't normally do during the day. So you need a mechanism that will send your machine to sleep, wake it up when necessary, run cron jobs, then send it back to sleep again.
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4chan Hits PayPal, MasterCard, Others for WikiLeaks Snubs

Internet 303 Comments
It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet - and they're learning it the hard way. Several major companies have been hit by the collective powers of Anonymous after 4chan launched several distributed denial-of-service attacks. What many have been predicting for a long time now has finally happened: an actual war between the powers that be on one side, and the internet on the other. Update: PayPal has admitted their WikiLeaks snub came after pressure from the US government, and Datacell, which takes care of payments to Wikileaks, is threatening to sue MasterCard over Wikileaks' account suspension. Update II: Visa.com is down due to the attack. Update III: PayPal has caved under the pressure, and will release the funds in the WikiLeaks account.
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