Monthly Archive:: February 2011

InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard takes a look at the past 20 years of innovative Windows malware -- an evolution that provides insights into the kinds of attacks to come. From macro viruses, to interstitial infections, to spray attacks, to industrial espionage, "there's been a clear succession, with the means, methods, and goals changing definitively over time," Leonhard writes, outlining the rise of Windows malware as a succession of ingenious breakthroughs to nefarious ends.

"Now that the dust has settled after Stephen Elop's big announcement on the 11th February 2011, many have come to realise that actually Nokia's move towards a a new Ecosystem is not as bad as what they thought. But what does all this mean for the Nokia Developers? When the proposed partnership with Microsoft was announced, many felt betrayed and worried about their future, but after having heard and assisted a number of workshops at the Nokia Developer Day at this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, earlier this month, their outlook towards the new ecosystem has taken a 180 degree turn and are now looking at the proposed partnership with a lot more enthusiasm, recognising the potential it will bring them in the coming months."

Earlier this week, Apple released the first developer preview of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. At the same time, Apple listed a number of new features we hadn't yet heard about, which are quite interesting. There are two themes: bringing iOS to Mac OS X, and adding features other operating systems have had for ages - except in such a way that you can actually use them. Update: Fixed that scrolling thing. It's the other way around of course.

This is a situation where I need the help of you OSnews readers who are experienced with low-level development on ARM, SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, and other hardware architectures we have on computers nowadays. The issue is that I'm currently designing the part of my hobby kernel which takes care of interrupts. Although I mostly work on x86 at the moment, I'd like to keep this code portable to other hardware architectures in the future. To do that, I have to know how interrupt handling works on as much HW architectures as possible.

"Intel is pleased to announce the BIOS Implementation Test Suite, a bootable pre-OS environment for testing BIOSes and in particular their initialization of Intel processors, hardware, and technologies. BITS can verify your BIOS against many Intel recommendations. In addition, BITS includes Intel's official reference code as provided to BIOS, which you can use to override your BIOS's hardware initialization with a known-good configuration, and then boot an OS."

Google has released a new set of tools for the WebP Image format. The release includes a completely rewritten encoder with improved image quality. Also available is a Windows Imaging Component providing WebP import to any application that supports WIC such as Microsoft Office 2010. There is a side-by-side comparison between the new encoder, the old encoder and JPEG here.

Oh. My. God. When I read this, and browsed the website, my face went like this. Do you remember the Amiga? That fun little computer that was miles ahead of its competition, but in recent years has been dragged through the mud by one shady figure after the next? Here's a new one: Amiga, Inc., the one 'run' by Bill McEwen, has partnered with a company called IContain to slap the Amiga logo on a bunch of low-end, incredibly sad products. Whether this is another shady deal I don't know, but worthy of the Amiga? I don't think so. I'm not putting this in the Amiga category, by the way. I refuse to. Forget it. It's going into our generic category. Fitting. Update: As was pointed out over at AmigaWorld.net, not only are these nothing more than brandless OEM products with Photoshopped logos, the website itself is just a standard, unmodified WordPress theme. Oi. Doesn't instil a lot of confidence, now, does it?

Apple today released a developer preview of Mac OS X Lion, available to Mac Developer Program members through the Mac App Store today, and the final version of Lion will ship to customers this summer. Mac OS X Lion which features Mission Control, an new view of everything running on your Mac; Launchpad, a new home for all your Mac apps; full screen apps that use the entire Mac display; and new Multi-Touch gestures. Lion also includes the Mac App Store, a place to discover, install and automatically update Mac apps.

"Gnome Shell 2.91.90 was released yesterday getting some fine adjustments according to the release announcement: 'This release just about concludes user interface changes anticipated before GNOME 3.0. The only significant change we expect after this release is to add a native network indicator based on NetworkManager 0.9.' Gnome Shell 2.91.90 brings new automatic workspaces, removed minimize and maximize buttons from window titlebars, a PolicyKit authentication agent and more."

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. For more information, see the 8.2-RELEASE announcement, and the 7.4-RELEASE announcement, ehch has also been released.

Apple has just updated its line of MacBook Pros. Usually, this isn't anything to get particularly excited about, but this time around, they've got a genuine treat: Thunderbolt. Apple is the first to use this new connection technology, developed at Intel and believed to be the copper version of Lightpeak. It's pretty impressive.

"Oracle has claimed that Google derived its Android code from the specifications for 'hundreds' of Oracle's copyrighted Java files, and that at least eight Android files are actually decompiled Oracle object code. Last week, Google asked a federal court to consider dismissing the copyright portion of the patent and copyright infringement suit that Oracle brought against Google and Android last August. But Judge William Alsup rejected Google's request, following a letter from Oracle strongly defending the copyright claims." Also - wait, are we already back to A? Didn't Alsup do the Apple vs. Psystar case?

Ah, something Microsoft really couldn't use right now: problems with the very first update to its Windows Phone 7 operating system. In this very competitive marketplace, in which WP7 is a late newcomer, it can't use major problems like this. The thing is though - how big of a problem is this, really? And, is it even Microsoft's fault at all?

Ever since the successful development and launch of Windows 7, Microsoft has become ever tighter-lipped about Windows development. Sure, it dropped the bomb about releasing Windows 8 for ARM, but that's it. Nothing on features or timetables (other than 'three years after Windows 7'). Well, the usually well-connected (inside Microsoft, that is) Mary-Jo Foley now claims to have a legit development roadmap - and it seems everything is on track for a Windows 8 beta in September 2011.