Keep OSNews alive by becoming a Patreon, by donating through Ko-Fi, or by buying merch!

Monthly Archive:: June 2011

DuckDuckGo: The Privacy-centric Alternative to Google

Remember when Altavista was the search engine? Or Yahoo? They stuffed their search pages with useless, distracting crap, and using them became unpleasant. And then, bam, along came Google, with a simple, clear search page and uncluttered search results. However, now that Google has become this massive behemoth, tracking our every move, and tailoring our search results, leading to only being fed those pages you agree with - isn't it time for something new? Something simple? It might be, and you've undoubtedly heard of them: DuckDuckGo. I'm switching. Update: Just got an email from Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind DuckDuckGo. The OSNews !bang (!osnews) is now live!

Retro RISC OS Games Into the 21st Century

Since the opening up of the RISC OS source code, developers have been experimenting with the OS on modern ARM hardware. Recently, work has progressed on porting some vintage Acorn games to other platforms, including iOS and Windows. Paradise Games has released an iOS port of Inferno, and TBA Software has rendered BHP in OpenGL on Windows. TBA has also ported its TBAFS filing system to ARMv7 hardware and is investigating its TAG games engine and the modernisation of BBC BASIC. The Icon Bar has further details.

Haiku Alpha 3 Released

Haiku Alpha 3 has been in development for more than 14 months. In that time more than 800 bugs have been identified and fixed, major sections have been updated, applications have been added and updated, and great progress has been made in supporting additional hardware. Here is a summary of updates, more details can be found here. Also inside, interviews with some core Haiku developers.

BitTorrent, uTorrent Sued for Patent Infringement

Right, well, this is new. We know of countless copyright lawsuits being thrown about regarding BitTorrent - but what about a patent lawsuit? A company which, for now, has all the airs of a classic patent troll, has sued BitTorrent, Inc. and uTorrent, claiming the BitTorrent protocol violates some vague software patent. No connection to the mafia RIAA/MPAA/etc. has been found yet, but I won't be surprised.

Microsoft To Officially Support Homebrew on Windows Phone 7

Way back in old and boring January of this year, Microsoft announced they would be working together with the Windows Phone 7 homebrew community, with the goal of creating a stable, supported way for homebrew developers and people interested in homebrew applications to enable side-loading on their WP7 devices. Well, they took their sweet time, but the ChevronWP7 team (Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, and Long Zheng) and Microsoft have just announced the results.

Adobe Drop Linux Support for Adobe AIR

In a blog post today, Adobe's Director of Open Source and Standards said: "we will be focusing on supporting partner implementations and will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux". McAllister says that "way back in 1999" he'd predicted "a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. Obviously I was wrong. So we, Adobe, also need to shift with the market." Source code for AIR will be made available to partners so they can make their own Linux implementations if they so desire. Is there anyone in the audience who cares about no more AIR on Linux from Adobe? Anyone...?

IBM Turns 100 Today

"Today International Business Machines celebrated a relative rarity in the tech business - its one hundredth anniversary. By contrast Google is a mere 12 years old, Apple is 35, Microsoft is 36, and Hewlett-Packard is 72 years old." One of the most important companies in the computer industry. Congratulations, IBM, on to the next century! And we get to use our IBM logo for once. Yay!

Apple Sued Over iCloud Name

Just as Apple wraps up one lawsuit with Nokia, they have been hit with another one by a Phoenix based company named iCloud Communications. iCloud Communications, a VoIP vendor, claims that Apple's new iCloud causes confusion with competing products, and has harmed their image because anytime someone hears the name 'iCloud', they will now think of Apple instead of iCloud Communications. Super-Instant Pre-publication 5000W Turbo Update from Thom: ...and we have another one.

Kinect for Windows SDK

Microsoft has released a beta SDK for Windows, allowing Windows developers to officially make use of the XBox Kinect hardware. From their own press release: "The Kinect for Windows SDK, which works with Windows 7, includes drivers, rich APIs for Raw Sensor Streams, natural user interfaces, installer documents and resource materials. The SDK provides Kinect capabilities to developers building applications with C++, C# or Visual Basic using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010."

EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite Going Open Source

"PathScale announced today that the EKOPath 4 Compiler Suite is now available as an open source project and free download for Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. This release includes documentation and the complete development stack, including compiler, debugger, assembler, runtimes and standard libraries. EKOPath is the product of years of ongoing development, representing one of the industries highest performance Intel 64 and AMD C, C++ and Fortran compilers." More here.

KQ ZFS Linux No Longer Actively Being Worked on

"Remember KQ Infotech? KQ Infotech was the Indian company that ported the ZFS file-system to Linux as an out-of-tree kernel module (after deriving the code from the LLNL ZFS Linux work) and KQ's interesting methods of engagement in our forums. The company was successful in delivering an open-source ZFS module for Linux that performed semi-well and didn't depend upon FUSE (the file-systems for user-space module) like other implementations. However, this ZFS Linux code appears to no longer be worked on by KQ Infotech."

New Syllable Desktop Live CD Released

The Syllable project has released a live CD for Syllable Desktop 0.6.6. It has been a long time since the last live CD, so Syllable 0.6.5 was skipped. The creator of the original live CD left the project, without releasing the build scripts. Further it turned out that a needed patch to Syllable wasn't available, either, so the project had to create a whole new live CD, including a modified kernel. Also, some eighty SDL programs were recently ported to Syllable (video of the Power Manga game).

Windows 8 HTML5/JS Comment Causes Panic Among Developers

There's a full-blown panic going on in Microsoft's core third party developer community. After the big Windows 8 demonstration earlier this month where HTML5 and JavaScript were touted as a new way to create applications for Windows 8, speculation has gone through the roof - with developers panicking in the streets about the end of Silverlight and .NET and a HTML5/JS-only Windows 8 release. Looking more closely at the whole situation, though, it would seem that what we're dealing with here is a miscommunication - one that Microsoft desperately needs to address since the web is blowing it way out of proportion. The tl;dr: no, HTML5 and JS are not going to be the only ways to write applications for Windows 8.

The OS-periment’s Service Model, RC3

Lots of feedback from Alfman in the previous article's comments meant that it was time for another version of my article on my RPC-based daemon model, and as such another iteration towards a final design of my OS' core IPC mechanism. Not a full rewrite this time, but rather incremental improvements on specific points, which include a choice of naming (nonblocking RPC it is), an improved coverage of pointers, shared memory, and the currently envisioned design limits of those, and explicit support for dynamic setup of RPC calls and graceful server death handling.