Monthly Archive:: March 2010

Nearly three years after its introduction, the JavaFX multimedia application development platform that Oracle inherited from Sun remains just another entrant in a crowded field, with questions looming about how much momentum the platform can gather. With a debut that saw JavaFX trailing behind RIA technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and AJAX and the emergence of HTML5, some view JavaFX on the ropes, despite Oracle's claims of commitment to the technology. "It's superior , but maybe that doesn't count anymore," says the chair of one Java Special Interest Group. Red Hat CTO of Middleware Mark Little echoed the skepticism building around JavaFX's future, saying that at this stage, JavaFX will survive only if Oracle can build a business around it. "Otherwise, it will die."

BeRTOS 2.4 has been released. "This is a major stable release, compatible with earlier versions. The most outstanding feature is the official release of the preemptive kernel and many other optimizations to context switching routines and the default scheduler. Other additions are dynamic stack allocation for processes (classic static allocation is still available), the ability to configure the heap module using the Wizard, a very low-overhead timer-based scheduler, and a new driver for Texas Instruments TLV5618 DAC."

OpenDNS today announced that its users now represent a full one percent of all 1.67 billion global Internet users online today. The total OpenDNS user count has now surpassed 18 million, according to leading analytics firm Quantcast, doubling in just 12 months. "We see this milestone as incredibly significant, and a true testament to both the unmatched quality of the OpenDNS service and the world's demand for a better DNS service," said OpenDNS Founder and CEO David Ulevitch, "One percent of all of the world's Internet users is a momentous achievement and our growth rate indicates that number will climb at an even more rapid pace going forward."

Think of Opera what you want, but those Norwegian guys and girls know how to get publicity. The company has announced it has submitted Opera Mini to the iPhone's App Store, and it has launched a website with a count-up timer, following how long it will take Apple to approve it - if at all, of course.

Two months ago, Google announced its intention to stop censoring search results in China, while also stating it may even leave the country altogether. The announcement followed the news that Chinese crackers had attempted to crack the accounts of human rights activists. The search giant has stayed true to its word: starting today, search results are no longer censored in China. Google employed a clever trick to get there: they reroute Chinese users to the uncensored Hong Kong version of Google. Instant update: China has already responded: "Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks."

"Mobile software company Myriad Group announced J2Android, which will make it possible for Java-based mobile applications to run on Android-based phones, the company said on Monday. The J2Android tool converts existing Java applications, including games, to run on Dalvik, which is the virtual machine used on all Android devices. Besides converting the application, J2Android will let the application be rescaled to fit the screen of the Android device, according to Simon Wilkinson, CEO at Myriad. It can also add softkeys, if the original application was developed for phones with a numerical keypad, Wilkinson said."

"Microsoft is putting some meat on the bones of its plan to make information that's stuck in databases reachable with the same standards used to retrieve Web pages. At its Mix conference this week, Microsoft touted an interface called the Open Data Protocol, or OData. Specifically, the company announced an OData software developer kit to let programmers more easily use it and said it wants to standardize OData. What fortuitous timing. Microsoft listed the Internet Engineering Task Force and World Wide Web Constortium as groups where it would like to see this standardization, and the latter of these two has new management eager to tackle new projects."

Palm. It's that big clunky part of your hand that doesn't get any of the attention - the fingers, the thumb especially, get all the glory. Just think, however, what your hands would be like if you didn't have palms, and your fingers just grew straight out of your wrist. Doesn't look so hot now, does it? Well, Palm is supposedly about to go under, if you were to believe the reports. Update: Palm has just announced that the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus will become available on AT&T in the coming months.

"Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers. Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme - a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu's visual identity." It might just be me, but I find the new theme ghastly. Compare this to this (my desktop). Oh, and Metacity - I can has anti-aliasing?

Thanks to the efforts of Neil Cafferkey, it has been possible since early March to install and boot AROS from a USB stick (if your BIOS supports this functionality, obviously). There is an ongoing topic about this at Aros-Exec, and the Icaros Desktop Blog talks about it as well.

Haiku's new web browser, WebPositive, has seen a new update. This new release benefits from updates in app_server and enables better text and canvas rendering. The new WebKit-based browser also has new support for bookmarks and additional usability improvements. Find out more at the developer's blog.

Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

"Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, fell the most in more than 15 months in Nasdaq trading after forecasting sales this quarter that were less than half of analysts' estimates. Revenue in the period ending in May will be less than USD 150 million, Chief Financial Officer Doug Jeffries said yesterday on Palm's third-quarter conference call, compared with the USD 300 million average of estimates compiled by Bloomberg. The company also reported its 11th straight quarterly loss."

"There has been much speculation over what OS 6.0 could possibly look like. We were recently hit with these images of what appear to be of a device running OS 6.0 with a similar screen resolution of a storm or storm2. These spy shot images come highly regarded as real from one our best connects. We're hoping to see it soon on a physical device and so until then take from it what you will."