David Adams Archive

If you run a web site or service that runs afoul of US law, and that site is hosted overseas, then the US legal system doesn't have much recourse, right? Wrong. Because the .com, .net, and .org top level domains are managed by a US company, the government can come to Verisign with a court order and seize your domain, effectively shutting you down. And because of a quirk of internet history that made the US-controlled domains the de-facto standard for web sites, this is a situation that's quite possibly permanent.

"When it comes to feeding back information to the player from a game controller, we still rely on a vibration unit inside the controller. It can 'beat' in many different ways, but is quite limited if you want to give a very specific response to what's happening in any given game. A team of engineers at the University of Utah think they can do better, and have developed a new tactile feedback thumbpad of sorts. If used as part of a game controller, it will supplement vibration feedback by stretching the user's skin on their thumb tips in very specific ways."

" latest creation is a tool called Horizon Mobile, and it too is meant for big businesses. The idea is that employees can use a phone's native operating system for personal tasks, but then switch over to a virtual machine that runs a separate OS for business tasks."

"Apple's iOS is starting to get a little long in the tooth. There, I said it. The overall look and feel of the operating system has not changed since its 2007 debut. Sure, Apple has piled in plenty of new features, but the core of the operating system is the same as it was five years ago. It needs a refresh. I'm not saying iOS is ugly or anything, but it's starting to look a little old."

"Mozilla discussed its mobile operating system and app store during last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. At the same time, Telefonica, one of the world's largest telecommunications companies, chipset giant Qualcomm, and Deutsche Telekom announced they were cooperating in the effort. This is all part of Mozilla's 'Boot to Gecko' project, designed to develop an open-source mobile operating system based on Web standards."

Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system is available in beta "Consumer Preview" edition as a free download, but that doesn’t mean you should stop using Windows 7 as your main OS just yet. Here’s a simple way to install the new beta operating while making sure that your computer still boots into Windows 7 by default.

It's definitely a few months away from being released, but Google has plans for the next mobile Android operating system on the table. It will be called "Jelly Bean", which follows the alphabetic naming monikers previous such as Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich. The version will likely be 'Android 5.0', according to a comment made by Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google VP of engineering, who stated "After Android 4 comes 5, and we haven’t announced the timing yet, which we’re still sorting out. There’s a lot of engineering work behind it still, and there’s also just the question of how to time it"

I ran across a business news story about Yahoo's impending layoffs today, and if you're a deep-into-the-internet person like me, it certainly comes as no surprise to read yet again that Yahoo is on the skids. In fact, you're more likely to be surprised to learn that Yahoo has more than 14,000 employees and made something like $6 billion in revenue last year. Yahoo ceased to be relevant a long time ago, and even the Yahoo services that still get some love, like Flickr, seem to be tainted by association. But the question I asked myself when I read the article was, "why didn't Yahoo become a technology leader?"

There were lots of rumors and leaks indicate that Microsoft will use NT kernel as the operating system of Windows Phone 8 'Apollo'. Now we see some real hard evidence inside Windows 8 Consumer Preview bits. There is a string says 'PhoneNT' inside the binary image of NT kernel: ntoskrnl.exe file. Apparently its a new 'ProductType' of NT system. We've seen 'WinNT'/'ServerNT'/'LanmanNT'/'EmbeddedNT' before, and will see 'PhoneNT' in the future.

On the heels of yesterday's launch of Windows 8's preview, new statistics show that Microsoft's decade-old Windows XP again plummeted in usage share and will be surpassed by Windows 7 in June.

When was the last time you reverse-engineered all the PCI devices on your motherboard?. . . Enters the game-changer: IOMMU (known as VT-d on Intel). With proper OS/VMM design, this technology can address the very problem of most of the hardware backdoors. A good example of a practical system that allows for that is Xen 3.3, which supports VT-d and allows you to move drivers into a separate, unprivileged driver domain(s). This way each PCI device can be limited to DMA only to the memory region occupied by its own driver.

By all early reports, Windows 8 is going to be a good operating system. Microsoft's hegemony may be crumbling in a mobile computing onslaught, but its core empire remains undimmed. However, whereas Windows 7 had three versions, Windows 8 will apparently be ballooning to 9 versions.

MINIX 3.2.0 stable is released. Major features include: Asynchronous, multithreaded virtual file system (VFS) server, Better reliability, Better virtualization support, and much more.

The Dutch LinuxMagazine translated an interview (direct PDF link) from their magazine with Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director Open Source Communities at Microsoft into English. Many of your readers are probably wondering, is Microsoft really involved in open source these days, or is there more to it? Fabrice Mous started his conversation with Mr. Rabellino to get to know him better, but also to ask him some pressing questions about Microsoft's policies towards open source and open standards. It turned out to be an interesting, but certainly quite critical conversation, that will probably lead to some discussion.

We would very much like to hear your opinion on the open source policy of Microsoft.