Monthly Archive:: August 2011

The hearing regarding the preliminary injunction in the German Apple v. Samsung case is currently under way. Biggest revelation so far? Samsung is accusing Apple of 27 (!) cases of altering pictures, all done to make Samsung's products appear more similar to Apple's than they really are. Like last time, Andreas Udo de Haes, editor at WebWereld.nl, present in the court room, is covering this. Update: It's on. Update II: Apple claims official picture of Galaxy Tab is rigged. Update III: Lolwut Apple? Update IV: Neelie Kroes is on the edge of her seat. Update V: The judge has upheld the German preliminary injunction. Final ruling on September 9.

Why does news like this always come right before I want to go to bed? Steve Jobs has just announced he is stepping down from the CEO position of Apple. He will be succeeded by Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook. Steve Jobs will remain at Apple as chairman of the board and director. This is... Strange.

Breaking news from my swamp home country The Netherlands: the Dutch court has just banned the sales of all Galaxy S, SII and Ace smartphones in the entire European Union. The judge has ruled that Android 2.x violates Apple's 868 patent which covers scrolling through photos on a touchscreen. Only this one patent is violated - the complaints about two other patents as well as the design patents has been thrown out. In other words, the judge did not agree with Apple that Samsung is copying Apple's design. The injunction only covers the Galaxy smartphones, since they run Android 2.x; Android 3.0 does not violate the patent in question, and hence, sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 can continue. In fact, only the Gallery application violates the patent in question, and Samsung has already stated it is going to replace this application on all new Galaxy smartphones from now on - sales won't even be interrupted. In other words - two patents thrown out, design stuff rejected, and only one patent complaint upheld which will cause no harm to Samsung. Apple just scored a meaningless victory. The Dutch court order is here. The pictures speak thousands of words.

Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk labels) and several other major changes. You can download it now. Remember to read the important information in the release notes and common bugs page.

Rapid7 created a $100,000 investment fund to support up to seven promising open source projects in the security industry. The "Magnificent7" projects will be identified and supported through the remainder of 2011 and into 2012. Any security-related open source project - with a preference for BSD-compatible licensing - is applicable and encouraged to submit a "Magnificent7" application.

Linux, which is a very versatile operating environment, caters for an array of different needs of different users. One such specific usage of Linux is in the area of computer security and penetration testing. Among the digital forensic tools available for Linux, BackTrack is well known as an all-in-one platform that offers security professionals all the tools that they may need to carry out various security related tasks.

Would you believe that ARM processors, those little chips that power so many smartphones and tablets, have a future on servers? Ubuntu does.

A serious-looking (German Language) article examines a rather preposterous claim: that a group of young hackers has produced "the first operating system that allows problems to run programs from Windows, Mac, and Linux with only one system." Their outlandish claims ("every known program runs under UNIOS without driver issues!") drew interest from the local press, then skepticism. I wasn't able to find much information in the English language. So stay tuned here at OSNews, which will no doubt be covering ongoing industry-changing UniOS news as it breaks. Or not.

In five years, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees the traditional desktop becoming obsolete.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit just rejected a patent essentially on the basis that the method used was mathematics. Hooray, they finally almost understood this point, but then they blotted their copybook by seeming to say that it would be OK to patent if the mathematics is hard. Oh dear. Well, baby steps I suppose.

"In its case against Samsung Electronics in the Netherlands, Apple is demanding an extensive ban on all Galaxy series smartphones and tablets, including a complete recall of stock by European distributors and resellers. Apple's complaint against Samsung in The Hague district court is much more comprehensive than previously thought. It's not only broader in its legal scope than a separate, ongoing Apple complaint against Samsung in Germany, but an injunction could have a 'huge impact' on the entire European market for smartphones and tablets, according to Alastair Edwards, principal analyst at Canalys." That's how far Apple is willing to go. They are willing to screw over countless resellers - some big, some small, one-shop affairs - because they don't like competition. I wonder how the Grubers of this world are going to spin this one. Hey Steve, I've got another extremely successful Android phone maker for you to sue.

Major bombshell, and sorry, but this certainly requires a breaking tag as well: HP has announced it is discontinuing operations for webOS devices - effective immediately. Just like that... The TouchPad and Pre 3 are dead. Eh. Raise your hands if this brings back those painful memories of that infamous 'Focus Shift'. In addition, the company also announced its intention to sell its personal computer business.

While the BFS scheduler is getting ready to celebrate its second birthday, in just three weeks AMD's open-source Radeon graphics driver strategy for Linux will be turning four years old . . . which has ended up being a game-changer in the Linux world. AMD continues to support open-source hardware enablement on their latest graphics processors and recently even hired more developers to work on the code and documentation. How far have they come though in four years?

The microkernel developer community uses to be extremely fragmented. There exists a high variety of advanced microkernels each being developed with a different focus. However, since each kernel comes with its own minimalistic user land that is usually geared towards the special needs of its developers, none of those kernels has taken off in the domain of general-purpose computing. Genode has the mission to change that. Thanks to the tooling infrastructure that comes with the new version 11.08, the use of different microkernels has finally become a seamless experience. Those kernels including OKL4, L4/Fiasco, L4ka::Pistachio, NOVA, Codzero, and Fiasco.OC can be combined with the framework's steadily growing functionality such as a its new AHCI driver and Qt4.