Monthly Archive:: January 2011

All the recent hackery news regarding the Playstation 3 has culminated in the inevitable: the first custom firmware for the Playstation 3. KaKaRoTo, its creator, did not release his custom firmware; in fact, he released the tools so you can modify your own Playstation 3's firmware update package. The feature set is extremely limited - but that's kind of the point. He left most of it untouched, and refuses to implement anything related to piracy.

I'm not interested in summing up all the boatloads of tablet news coming out of CES this year, so I'll just point you towards Engadget, Gizmodo, or whatever's your favourite gadget website. The gist? Everybody is unveiling tablets at CES.

Linux 2.6.37 has been released. This release includes several SMP scalability improvements for Ext4 and XFS, complete removal of the Big Kernel Lock, support for per-cgroup IO throttling, a network device based in the Ceph clustered filesystem, several Btrfs improvements, more efficient static probes, perf support to probe modules and listing of accesible local and global variables, image hibernation using LZO compression, PPP over IPv4 support, several networking microoptimizations and many other small changes, improvements and new drivers. You can read the full changelog as well.

"HP has just issued an invitation to the press for a webOS event in San Francisco on February 9th. The minimal email asks attendees to 'Think Big. Think Small. Think Beyond.' -- and that definitely sounds like a multi-product launch to us. If we were betting types, we'd put money on a phone (perhaps rumors we've been hearing about the 'world's smallest' smartphone will turn out to be true), a tablet, and lots of talk about the future of webOS. One thing missing? The name Palm. Looks like that brand could be on the way out."

Top computer science conferences typically give an award to the best paper published that year. This page compiles the best paper awards for 16 conferences since 1996, in artificial intelligence, operating systems, databases, HCI, information retrieval, and theory. The institutions that currently hold the most best paper awards? Stanford, followed by the University of Washington, Microsoft Research, and CMU."

It's been a long time coming, but a brand new release of VirtualBSD is out: "VirtualBSD 8.1 is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE based on the Xfce 4.6 Desktop Environment and, being distributed as VMware appliance, it makes dead easy to take FreeBSD for a test drive." The best part? Not only are the most common aplications available out of the box, this is a genuine FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, which means that if you go past the desktop you'll be dealing with The Real Thing. You can take a look at the screenshots, go to the download page or, if you're impatient, just grab the torrent file.

Ah, OnLive. This company is trying to bring streaming gaming to the mainstream, and has has just announced a pretty significant partnership with Vizio, the US' largest LCD TV seller. Vizo TVs, smartphones, tablets, and Blu-Ray players will all come equipped, out of the box, with OnLive's streaming service.

To understand what the BeOS and Haiku operating systems are, we first must remember that BeOS was developed with the multimedia user in mind. BeOS wanted to be what OS X has become today: an easy to use, attractive operating system. However, BeOS was a niche OS, destined for the media-hungry user. The percentage of audio and video applications available for Haiku is greater than the one in Linux, OS X or Windows, and the inner workings of the operating system were created in such a way, that the same multimedia passionate would find it easy to work with the user interface and files. Each application can interfere with other applications of its kind. A WAVE file selection can be dragged from a sound editor and onto the desktop, to create an audio file. Audio applications can interfere with each other via the Haiku Media Kit -- the corespondent of a Linux sound server. Applications like Cortex are a perfect example of how BeOS and Haiku deal with multimedia files: you can have more than one soundcard and use each one of those soundcards independently or separately. You can link one soundcard to the Audio Mixer, start a drum machine application and link that software to the Audio Mixer. If you want to output whatever you create with the audio application, all you have to do is drag the microphone and link it to the application's icon in Cortex.

You may not have noticed it, but in the past six months, we've been experiencing a true massacre. Not one written in blood, but one written in microchips and touchscreen displays. The scene of the crime? The United States. The perpetrator? Google's Android. The victims? Everybody else.

It's the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, so it's time for new stuff to spend your hard-earned cash on. This time around, Intel is making headlines by officially launching its Sandy Bridge line of processors, which, up until now, were totally next-generation.

"In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a web site we need the cooperation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly requires this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment's notice." Recommended reading. I'm no fan of Stallman, but despite a bit too much dramatisation towards the end, this article aptly illustrates in layman's terms why the 'net needs to be free, open, and unregulated.

"This article is about the OS/2 and eComStation community on 2010 and I will try to resume the high points of the past year. Of course that this is my point of view and I'm listing the projects that I liked more."

"I'm a Mac and iOS developer and just spent the past week using a Windows Phone 7 powered Samsung Focus as my primary phone rather than an iPhone 4 as I have for the past three years Anytime a new phone hits the market, I want to pick it up. I was also intrigued by the screenshots and previews I've been reading on Engadget for the past few months. Windows Phone 7 looked like nothing else I've seen on the market."

A few weeks ago, we took a look at TotalFinder, a collection of add-ons to the Mac OS X Finder that fixes some of its shortcomings, adds some welcome features, and in all, makes it a little more pleasant to use. We've got three free copies of TotalFinder to hand out, so read on to find out how you can win one!