Monthly Archive:: March 2011

"Itsy-OS v0.1 is a small 8086 operating system kernel providing two basic services: a simple preemptive task switcher and memory management. If necessary, simple IPC and task management can be added to provide the features of a traditional microkernel. Weighing in at about 380 bytes, Itsy should port well to tiny architectures."

Ubuntu has released the first beta for Ubuntu 11.04. This si the first release where Unity is the default desktop environment. All the official Ubuntu derivatives have also bee beta'd.

a Windows Phone developer takes a look back at the past year, and looks at some of the numbers, to try to measure how the new mobile platform is coming along. Example: "1,200 - While the 36,000 registered developers are nice to talk about, the 1,200 newly registered developers we are adding every week is incredibly encouraging. Developers are pragmatists and they are going where there is ample opportunity."

Playtime is over in Android Land. Over the last couple of months Google has reached out to the major carriers and device makers backing its mobile operating system with a message: There will be no more willy-nilly tweaks to the software. No more partnerships formed outside of Google's purview. From now on, companies hoping to receive early access to Google's most up-to-date software will need approval of their plans. And they will seek that approval from Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android group.

Oh irony, thy silver thorn strikes like the moonlight through my delicate skin. While this complaint could actually hold merit, the fact it's coming from Microsoft lessens its validity somewhat. Redmond has just filed an antitrust complaint about Google in Europe.

Google will be subjected to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years over charges that it "violated its own privacy promises". The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that the search giant wrongly used information from Google Mail users last year to create its social network Buzz. The FTC ruled that "the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective". "Google Buzz fell short of our usual standards," Google said in a blog post. "While we worked quickly to make improvements, regulators unsurprisingly wanted more detail about what went wrong and how we could prevent it from happening again. "Today, we've reached an agreement with the FTC to address their concerns." That agreement will require Google to undergo a privacy review once every two years for the next 20 years.

Hearkening back to the Sony Rootkit brouhaha from a few years ago, a security researcher is claiming in a Network World article that he detected factory-installed keyloggers in two brand new Samsung Laptops. Samsung has made no official response, but a tech support supervisor contacted by the author said that the keystroke logging software was installed by Samsung to "monitor the performance of the machine and to find out how it is being used."

Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the "GM1" release . . . That would still mean an early Summer release - and potentially one before Summer technically even begins. After all, early June would line up nicely with the June 5 to 9 timeframe that Apple's WWDC event is likely to take place this year.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now run their cloud applications on hardware dedicated to them. Amazon's EC2 uses virtualization, based on a customized version of the Xen hypervisor, to run multiple OSes and customers on a single physical machine. However, that way of running an IT infrastructure isn't a good fit for all users as some have regulatory or other restrictions that require physical isolation, according to an Amazon." Also: "Oh snap! Look who just ate Apple and Google's lunch here? Minutes ago, Amazon rolled out its very own music streaming service which is conveniently dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player."

"Version 4.6 of GCC was released over the weekend with a multitude of improvements and version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is due out in early April with its share of improvements. How though do these two leading open-source compilers compare? In this article we are providing benchmarks of GCC 4.5.2, GCC 4.6.0, DragonEgg with LLVM 2.9, and Clang with LLVM 2.9 across five distinct AMD/Intel systems to see how the compiler performance compares."

The C++ programming language is about to be updated, as the ISO steering committee for the language has approved the final draft specifying its next version. The ISO/IEC Information Technology Task Force will review the steering committee's Final Draft International Standard will review and, barring any complications, publish the draft later this year. It will be known as C++ 2011.

I'm still reeling from the unrivalled epicness and awesomeness that is Sucker Punch in IMAX (just got home - do not miss this film), but now I'm back to boring old reality where we apparently care about pieces of plastic that go beep. So, anywho. The deal between Nokia and Microsoft has many Symbian and Qt developers worry about the future of their platforms. To address these concerns, Purnima Kochikar, vice president of Forum Nokia, has published an open letter describing Nokia's plans for Symbian, Qt, and Java for Series 40 devices. While the letter doesn't deliver any hard dates, the transition phase to Windows Phone 7 is set to 2011/2012.

The ReactOS team has released ReactOS 0.3.13. "This version continues building on the work first previewed in 0.3.12, ranging from memory management improvements to better sound and display control. A Coverity scan also occurred between 0.3.12 and 0.3.13, helping the team clean up potential security holes and also help improve general stability by enforcing more care in memory operations." The detailed 0.3.13 changelog is also available.

HelenOS is a modern microkernel-based multiserver operating system running on a large variety of processor architectures. Version 0.4.3 thereof has been just released. The new release fixes many bugs and brings a lot of improvements in areas so diverse such as new hardware platform support, userspace device driver framework, device drivers, observability and robustness, programming languages, file systems and networking. For the complete list of user-visible changes, see the release notes. The released files can be downloaded from the project's download page.