Monthly Archive:: January 2010

Atomthreads Open Source RTOS Released

Submitted by Kelvin Lawson 2010-01-25 OS News No Comments

"Atomthreads is a free, lightweight, portable, real-time scheduler for embedded systems. It is released under the flexible, open source BSD license and is free to use for commercial or educational purposes without restriction. It is targeted at systems that need only a scheduler and the usual RTOS primitives. No file system, IP stack or device drivers are included, but developers can bolt on their own as required. Atomthreads will always be a small number of C files which are easy to port to any platforms that require threading by adding a simple architecture-specific file."

Holiday Cheer Gives Apple Some Eye-Popping Earnings

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-25 Apple 1 Comment

"Today, Apple announced that the holiday season brought booming sales to most of its product lines, the lone exception being the iPod. Although the music players declined slightly to 21 million units from the year before, Mac sales shot up by 33 percent to 3.36 million, while iPhone sales doubled, hitting 8.7 million. Those sales, plus changes to accounting rules, helped the company book $3.38 billion dollars in profits."

AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-25 Amiga & AROS 46 Comments

It seems like only yesterday, but in fact it's already six months ago. July last year, we published our review of AmigaOS 4.1 running on ACube's sam440ep motherboard, and here we are, six months later, and Hyperion has released AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1. This free update brings with it quite a number of new features, and since I still have the sam440ep on my desk, I could test the new features first-hand.

Syllable Desktop Gets OpenSSH Server

Guest post by Kaj de Vos 2010-01-25 Syllable, AtheOS 2 Comments

After many years of trying by several people, Kaj de Vos collected their hints and got the server part of OpenSSH to work. The integration into Syllable Desktop is based on earlier integration into Syllable Server of the system configuration needed for the OpenSSH server. Kristian Van Der Vliet implemented the socketpair function in Syllable 0.6.6 to support OpenSSH, although this currently still needs to be disabled. Michael Pavone and Adam Kirchhoff supplied and tested several more options that need to be disabled to get the server running and stable.

Microsoft Cites Psystar Case in Xbox Antitrust Defence

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-24 Games 49 Comments

Remember that little legal spat going on between Apple and Psystar? That one's been more or less wrapped up, with Apple being the sole victor there. The dust from that case has barely had time to settle, and already we see another company quoting it to support its own restrictive, anti-consumer practices. The company in question? Ha, it's Microsoft.

Mozilla Explains Why it Doesn’t License h264

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-24 Mozilla, Gecko 158 Comments

This week, both YouTube and Vimeo opened up beta offerings using HTML5 video instead of Flash to bring video content to users. Both of them chose to use the h264 codec, which meant that only Safari and Chrome can play these videos, since firefox doesn't license the h264 codec. Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, explained on his blog why Mozilla doesn't license the h264 codec.

75% of Linux Code Written by Paid Developers

Submitted by Dale Smoker 2010-01-24 Linux 52 Comments

LWN.net founder and kernel contributor Jonathan Corbet offered an analysis of the code contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24 2008 and January 10 2010. 18% of contributions were made without a specific corporate affiliation, 7% weren't classified, and 75% were from people working for specific companies in roles where developing that code was a major requirement. "75% of the code comes from people paid to do it," Corbet said.

Submitted by elsewhere 2010-01-24 Legal 17 Comments

The sand has hit the elephant. The buttons have dried the desert. The empty CD-Rs are dancing to Radiohead. The unicorns have left the building. The US International Trade Commission is going to be working overtime this year: after Nokia and Apple, Motorola, too, has now filed a complaint with the ITC, seeking a ban on imports of RIM devices.

AMD Reaches Profitability for the First Time in Years

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-24 AMD 13 Comments

AMD has reached profitability for the first time in three years during the fourth quarter of 2009, benefiting from a legal settlement with Intel and a change in its business model. The company reported net income of USD 1.18 billion during the quarter that ended on Dec. 26, an improvement over the loss of USD 1.44 billion it reported in the fourth quarter of 2008. The company reported diluted earnings per share of USD 1.52.

Re-Live 1992 With Windows 3.1

David Adams 2010-01-24 Windows 26 Comments

An intrepid web developer has re-created the entire Windows 3.1 experience within a browser window, including games, notepad, and a web browser. Truth be told, the included web browser is a major anachronism, since it's apparently standards-compliant in 2010.

Judge Reduces USD 1.92m P2P Fine by 97% to USD 54000

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-23 Legal 51 Comments

Like many of you, I kind of lost my faith in the US justice system (when it comes to piracy cases) when a judge awarded USD 1.92 million in damages for downloading 24 songs in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. At the same time, also like many of you, I was very pleased with the outcome of the OiNK case in the United Kingdom last week. As it turns out, some of my faith in the US system has been restored: the USD 1.92 fine has been reduced by 97%, to a mere USD 54000.

“Ten Outdated Elements of Desktop Operating Systems”

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-22 OS News 84 Comments

Taking a break from reporting on the latest netbook or phone rumours, Engadget posted an article yesterday about several elements in desktop operating systems writer Paul Miller finds outdated. While there's some interesting stuff in there, there's also a lot to discuss.

Guest post by Cymro 2010-01-21 Apple 59 Comments

It's the most hyped device of the moment, a device that nobody has laid eyes on without an NDA death-grip. While rumour and speculation escalate (sometimes giving way to apathy), little has leaked out of Cupertino. But nobody seems to be asking whether this tablet thing will be successful or not.

Google Sees Fourth-Quarter Revenue, Earnings Rise

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-21 Google No Comments

"With the economy beginning to show signs of a recovery, Google's growth continued in the fourth quarter as the company beat analyst estimates and saw revenue rise 17 percent from a year ago on strong ad sales. Revenue for the quarter ended December 31, excluding traffic acquisition costs, was $4.95 billion, slightly higher than the $4.92 billion analysts were expecting. Including those costs, Google posted total revenue of $6.67 billion. Earnings were $2.19 billion, or $6.79 a share, excluding stock-based compensation and other costs. That was higher than the analyst expectations of earnings per share of $6.50, and up from year-ago earnings of $1.62 billion, or $5.10 per share. Including all costs, earnings were $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, compared with $381 million, or $1.21 a share. Traffic acquisition costs, the portion of revenue shared with Google's partners, totaled $1.72 billion and represented 27 percent of ad revenue."

MIT Creates Picture-Driven Programming for the Masses

Thom Holwerda 2010-01-21 General Development 17 Comments

"Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a basic understanding of Python, people can write programs that incorporate screen shots of graphical user interface elements to automate computer work."

Submitted by aaron 2010-01-21 Mozilla, Gecko 21 Comments

After a number of delays, Mozilla today released version 3.6 of the successful Firefox web browser. It brings with it numerous improvements and new features, and of course speed improvements are welcomed, too.

Submitted by HAL2001 2010-01-21 Internet Explorer 1 Comment

As promised, Microsoft released the patch that fixes the Google attack vulnerability. Seven other holes are closed off as well. "Microsoft on Thursday issued a cumulative critical patch for Internet Explorer that fixes eight vulnerabilities, including a hole targeted in the China-based attacks on Google and other U.S. companies. The security update is rated critical for all supported releases of IE 5, 6, 7, and 8, according to the advisory. The more severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a malicious Web page using IE, it said."

“The Insecurity of OpenBSD”

Submitted by Anonymous 2010-01-21 OpenBSD 43 Comments

"OpenBSD is widely touted as being 'secure by default', something often mentioned by OpenBSD advocates as an example of the security focused approach the OpenBSD project takes. Secure by default refers to the fact that the base system has been audited and considered to be free of vulnerabilities, and that only the minimal services are running by default. This approach has worked well; indeed, leading to 'Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!'. This is a common sense approach, and a secure default configuration should be expected of all operating systems upon an initial install. An argument often made by proponents of OpenBSD is the extensive code auditing performed on the base system to make sure no vulnerabilities are present. The goal is to produce quality code as most vulnerabilities are caused by errors in the source code. This a noble approach, and it has worked well for the OpenBSD project, with the base system having considerably less vulnerabilities than many other operating systems. Used as an indicator to gauge the security of OpenBSD however, it is worthless."

Submitted by poundsmack 2010-01-21 Oracle and SUN No Comments

"It's official: the European Commission has granted regulatory approval for Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems for approximately USD 7.4 billion, without further conditions. In a statement released moments ago, Oracle says it expects unconditional approval from China and Russia as well and intends to close the transaction shortly."

Submitted by igalmarino 2010-01-21 Google 79 Comments

Only a few days ago, we discussed the most popular YouTube feature request: HTML5 video support. Apparently, a lot of people want a version of YouTube that doesn't depend on Flash (me being one of them), and now Google has honoured their request with the HTML5 YouTube beta. Sadly, video quality needs a lot of work, and in spite of the original feature request, it's using h264 instead of Theora.