In the News Archive

In a recent speech Bill Gates gave to a group of government officials and tech specialists in New Delhi, he criticized US privacy and immigration laws, spoke of his outlook on future technologies, and explained why he got rid of his Facebook page. His criticisms of the US laws took the pretense that health care providers and doctors not being able to share medical information of an individual to other institutions was a stumbling block and that exceptions in strict immigration ought to be made for "smart people" to live and work in high-paying jobs in the US. Gates also mentioned his views of a future with cell phones recognizing people around them or testing for diseases and an Internet being utilized for a broader use than simply web pages and the like. He mentioned that he once had a Facebook page and that it became too much of a time-waster having to sort through ten thousand friend requests periodically.

In a world where applications are everything, it's nice to see new ways of obtaining said applications. When they're free, open source, and quality, that just tops the ice cream with your favorite chocolate or caramel sauce. Allmyapps.com, a fairly new alternative online catalog launched earlier this month providing simple installation of a growing variety of apps on Ubuntu. It was designed with new and unknowledgable users in mind so as to provide an easier way to find and install applications. Allmyapps has been collaborating with Intel to create a new app store for the forthcoming Moblin platform as Moblin had none beforehand, and what they've got brewing looks pretty promising. The Moblin app store will be debuted in September.

The pro-internet file sharing Pirate Party yesterday scored a big win by securing a seat in the European parliament. It pulled in 7.1 per cent of votes in Sweden, which handed the party one of the country's 18 seats in the European parliament. "Privacy issues and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that clearly when they voted today," Pirate Party candidate Anna Troberg told Swedish TV on Sunday.

Five Four years ago today, OSNews published some interesting articles. Apple announced it was dropping PPC for x86 (that one was a bombshell). That news was met with fear, excitement, and a fair bit of skepticism. Five Four years later, that decision has gone down as one of the smartest, gutsiest moves in computing business history. Congratulations to Apple's engineers for making it go so smoothly. We also examined whether "soon" personal computers will have the ability to respond to stimuli from the outside world, by seeing and interpreting video or other signals. We're still waiting on that one. (And the project we linked to is now a dead link). Note: due to a back-end Snafu, this one didn't post until the fifth, but it's still an interesting date in OSNews history, so enjoy.

The news has been out for a few hours already, but we were waiting for some official documentation and sources until we would publish it: Psystar, the Macintosh "clone" maker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Apparently, the small company has a debt of USD 259000. The filing was made on a voluntary basis, and according to Psystar the financial troubles arise from the economic downturn.

"On May 14, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute to express our shared concerns with the group’s draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. The ALI Principles are meant to provide guidance to judges and others as they interpret software licensing agreements. While the Principles reflect a lot of hard work and thought by the ALI, Microsoft and the Linux Foundation believe that certain provisions do not reflect existing law and could disrupt the well-functioning software market for businesses and consumers, as well as create uncertainty for software developers."

After being admitted to the hospital earlier today, the health situation of Professor Stephen Hawking has improved, and he is now "comfortable" according to a spokesperson of the University of Cambridge in the UK. He was admitted into the hospital today after "chest problems", and university spokespeople stated he was "very ill".

"A Customer Experience Index report from Forrester Research came to the conclusion after studying almost 4600 computer users' experiences from 2008 and asking them to score the ease of use of their computers, how enjoyable the experience is and whether or not the systems fulfill their owners' needs. Apple's overall score reached 80 and was not only enough to give it the lead but also leave it as the only company to earn a 'good' ranking in Forrester's view. Every other manufacturer in the list scored significantly lower, with Acer's American label Gateway being closest with a score of just 66; the standing is only 'okay' in the research group's chart."

The live migration work in the L4-based "NomadBIOS" hypervisor, which inspired Xen's live migration and the influential "Live Migration of Virtual Machines" USENIX NSDI 2005 paper, also resulted in a Ph.D. thesis called "Virtual Machine Mobility with Self-Migration". The author of the thesis, Jacob Gorm Hansen from the University of Copenhagen, was recently awarded the EuroSys Roger Needham Ph.D. Award for best European operating systems thesis in 2008. Last year's award winner was Adam Dunkels, author of the uIP/LWIP embedded TCP/IP stacks. See this link for more information.

We've been following the recent news about IBM potentially buying Sun, and the internet had more or less accepted that big blue was going to be the new owners of Sun Microsystems. However, the omnipresent "people close to the matter" have told the New York Times that IBM has withdrawn its offer, and that the deal is now off.

A week ago, we reported that IBM was in acquisition talks with Sun. Sun has been in trouble for a while now, and has been shopping around the Valley for a potential buyers for the company. This report came from "people familiar with the matter", but it seems that we now have a confirmation from none other than Intel's CEO, Paul Otellini.

In a move that would certainly shake up the computer industry quite a bit, IBM is reportedly in talks with Sun Microsystems about the possibility of IBM acquiring Sun. Sun is going through hard times at the moment, and has been actively looking for someone to be acquired by.

Now's the time for a congregational sigh of relief. After the DTV transition was postponed from February 17th to June 12th, several millions of Americans waited impatiently for government funding to get their $40 converter-box coupons. Now our reliable Congress has approved another $650 million for the program, and the 4.1 million-deep waiting list can begin to flow again. NITA, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, plans to eliminate that pending list in a mere three weeks. If you're not already on the waiting list, you had better skedaddle and get on it because who knows if the money poured into this project will dry up again?

The recent text-to-speech craze dealing with the Kindle 2 eventually got to the top as we all knew it would. Amazon has now released official word that their TTS feature is completely legal, but not to challenge those who were causing a fuss over its legalities earlier. They're stating that they're reprogramming the Kindle's system and are going to let the rightsholders decide whether to allow their book to be read by the Kindle's TTS on a title-by-title basis, and also that Amazon has much commercial interest in the audiobook business and believes that TTS will help the business, not detract from it. In Amazon's own words: "With this new level of control, publishers and authors will be able to decide for themselves whether it is in their commercial interests to leave text-to-speech enabled. We believe many will decide that it is." Phew. Glad that legal squabble has been dealt with. Lawyerless, courtless, suitless resolution; if only all disputes could be solved this way.