Monthly Archive:: March 2011

About one month ago, I've posted an OSnews Asks item asking for details on how interrupts work on various architectures. Since then, I've been reading the manuals and comments, and have extracted what I found to be a summary of the specifics of each architecture. I've then written my first attempt at a portable interrupt handling model based on this data for my pet OS. Now I contribute this back to OSnews, so that these resources get more exposure for those who are interested.

When you run smbd -V on your Snow Leopard installation, you'll see it's running SAMBA version 3.0.28a-apple. While I'm not sure how much difference the "-apple" makes, version 3.0.28a is old. Very old. In other words, it's riddled with bugs. Apple hasn't updated SAMBA in 3 years, and for Lion, they're dumping it altogether for something homegrown. The reason? SAMBA is now GPLv3.

Samsung has developed a completely transparent solar-powered monitor that's designed to be used with ambient light. Though they're marketing it as a television, it's almost certainly going to be used initially as displays in commercial areas, and it apparently is also a touch-screen, opening it up for the coolest kind of kiosk you've ever used. See a video after the jump.

The Linux Foundation has announced MeeGo TV working group ,the goal of which is to "help drive the evolution of MeeGo within the television ecosystem and provide an open framework for industry creativity and innovation".

Research In Motion has just dropped a pretty major bombshell about its PlayBook tablet. Rumours were heard before, but now it's official: the PlayBook, which runs QNX, will be able to run Android applications. On top of that, and less surprisingly, support for BlackBerry Java applications has also been added, as well as a native C/C++ SDK alongside the already supported HTML5/AIR/Flash environments.

Yesterday, we linked to a story about the most recent allegations Sony made against George 'GeoHot' Hotz in their ongoing court case. Supposedly, Hotz has sabotaged the hardware he had to hand over, and he had fled the country to further stifle the court case, among other things. Hotz' lawyer, as well as Hotz himself, have responded to these allegations. The gist? They're all nonsense.

A new set of x264 and vpxenc encoder benchmarks have been published. The new benchmarks address many of the concerns raised in the comments about the methodology used in the previous article, such as using SSIM for quality measurement. Theora is also included in these tests.

"Sony has filed a new document arguing that the legal action against the noted hacker George Hotz should proceed in California. One of the arguments Hotz's legal team made against California's jurisdiction was the lack of a PlayStation Network account, which means he didn't agree to the Terms of Service, but now the company claims to have 'proof' that Hotz did in fact have a PSN account. An interview with a company based in California, and the number of downloads from California, are being used as evidence."

"Does $75 trillion even exist? The thirteen record companies that are suing file-sharing company Lime Wire for copyright infringement certainly thought so. When they won a summary judgment ruling last May they demanded damages that could reach this mind-boggling amount, which is more than five times the national debt. Manhattan federal district court judge Kimba Wood, however, saw things differently. She labeled the record companies' damages request 'absurd' and contrary to copyright laws in a 14-page opinion." Wait, this is only five time the US national debt? Fascinating.

"A federal judge rejected Google's $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company's ambitious plan to build the world's largest digital library and bookstore. Judge Denny Chin of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the settlement went too far in granting Google rights to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners, and that it was 'not fair, adequate and reasonable'." Here is a desk. Please to bang head against it repeatedly until world starts making sense.

After a very long development phase, Mozilla has finally officially relased Firefox 4.0. The binaries were already up on the FTP sites yesterday, but today the release became official. Firefox 4.0 packs a heck of a lot of new features, including an entirely new user interface.

And so the story regarding Android supposedly violating the GPL continues. Linus Torvalds has responded to the story in his usual straightforward manner - he thinks it's "totally bogus". In the meantime, Groklaw - not exactly my favourite place but alas, good points are good points - found out that the IP lawyer who started this story, Edward Naughton, used to be a lawyer for Microsoft in dozens of cases, a fact he tried to erase from his online resume.

There's a scene in American Beauty where Kevin Spacey masturbates in the shower, while his voice-over states: "This will be the highlight of my day. It's all downhill from here." That's how I feel right now. We just had Microsoft suing Barnes & Noble, which was already pretty low to begin with, but Apple just upped the ante by suing Amazon... Over the 'app store' trademark. For the love of god.

Since competing on merit is looked down upon in the computer and software world, companies in this business usually go for the blindfolded chick with the scale and sword. Up until recently, Microsoft didn't go for the whole patent litigation thing, but now that they've tasted some, they want more. They just sued Barnes & Noble, Foxconn, and Inventec for patent infringement because they use Android.