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Because OpenBSD is Sadly Lacking

Have you ever tried Freshnews or OSNews? Freshnews is great to find other things to read when /. is full of the "ooohhh shiny!" articles, and OSNews is sadly a lot like what /. used to be, with nearly every story being geeky tech. I have to agree though that /. seems to be hanging a hard left away from geek stuff and more hardcore tech and more into the oooohhh shiny, or worse like TFA stuff designed to get a nice liberal VS conservative flamewar going. If I wanted politics and flamewars over same I'd be hanging at Huffpo.

How about a little known guy named "Steve Jobs"? He can do math too.
link
link

Even better, check the endgadget coverage of the 2006 WWDC. IT'S RIGHT ON THE BIG SCREEN. Article
Direct Link to image

If you think Adobe was the only large company to get screwed by Apple's change, read a Nokia technician's perspective on this: link

You mean something like this:

"Wasn't there report recently about a spate of Android apps tracking users without consent?"

http://www.osnews.com/story/23865/Studies_Show_Android_iOS_Transmit_Private_Data_to_3rd_Parties

Just to start?

How about a kernel that is designed and optimized for multicore systems. Sounds boring, because it is, but it's important. The new kernel changes involved removing several locks that usually hold up XP. They also massively improved the dispatcher, the memory manager and the cache manager, which means you actually use a modern architecture to it's fullest. Overall, that results in a speed boost on very complex applications up to 15x. Think Excel, Access, and SQL Server (YES, SQL IS DESKTOP TOO).

The power management system is also improved significantly, with changes including Idle Resource Utilization, Trigger Start Services, Enhanced Processor Power Management, Timer Coalescing, Adaptive Display Brightness, Low-Power Audio, Bluetooth and Networking Power Improvements. Now when you leave for the day, your workstation can go to low power and still be running, so if you need to access your desktop from home, you can. Your laptop can see a large battery improvement as well.

Security is improved from XP, where the default is now the non-privileged user, and web browsers can run in a locked down protected mode environment. \
ActionCenter shows when changes have been made to the desktop.
AppLocker lets the network admin easily lock down the local workstation.
Remote access is improved using DirectAccess, where the enduser doesn't have to jump through hoops to configure a vpn.
Branch cache offers improved caching from the office to the home office.
Improved remote desktop services with network level authentication.

I'm going to stop here because I have work to do. But if that above doesn't justify spending about 10 cents per user per day over a modest 5 year life-cycle (and you know it will be more like 8 years), then you should seriously re-think network administration.

Sources:
http://www.osnews.com/story/22501/Microsoft_Kernel_Engineers_Talk_About_Windows_7_s_Kernel
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/power-management-improvements-in-windows-7#ixzz11UUVBuSj
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/4/854F66B6-8C09-4F8A-986E-38E9EBAC1677/Windows7_Power_Management_Whitepaper.pdf
Some others that I forgot, use Google.

Trolling, I'm sure, but to people who take "GNU/Linux" seriously: how much of any given distro is really GNU code anymore? While GNOME may still be preferred by Ubuntu, there are also a lot of Kbuntu users, and many other distros seem to prefer KDE. Neither XFree86 nor X.Org were ever GNU. Smaller installations, like smartphones and home gateways (which often do run Linux, even if you can't install a custom version like DD-WRT), use busybox for their basic command line tools, and almost certainly do not use glibc. Debian even went for the eglibc fork, partially because Ulrich Drepper makes Theo DeRaadt look like a nice guy. HURD has gone nowhere for 20 years now, even if it does have some neat ideas.

Non-GNU GUI applications and libraries now make up a huge percentage of a desktop distro, Apache and custom web apps make up a big chunk of server code, and smartphones may or may not have any GNU code at all.

So what's left of GNU code now? Well, gcc is likely to keep being the world's de facto C compiler (though even this was mainly because of the egcs fork way back when). I'm sure there will be legions of emacs users for years to come, and I guess a lot of people still prefer GNOME. GNU's basic command line tools and bash will no doubt still be used on servers and desktops. But is this really sufficient to warrant a "GNU/Linux" nomenclature, not to mention all the pedantry that surrounds it?

To the AnonCow troll above: GNU code has nothing to do with how the kernel handles multicore processors, so your whole point is moot within this context.

You mean right after they came out with a new phone OS, they'll get rid of it?

That'll play well with developers.

• OSnews: QNX Will Make Its Way to BlackBerry Smartphones, Too
• intomobile: RIM VP Confirms PlayBook QNX OS Will Replace BlackBerry OS

"Apparently, the idea is to first launch BlackBerry OS 7, which will be sort-of a transitional release to prepare developers for the launch of the eventual QNX-based operating system."

So, time to STFU now? Plz k thnx.

(Also why the fuck would they had bought QNX if they didn't intend to use it.)

Btrfs backrefs also make it easier to do an fsck (something that ZFS doesn't have) - there's a comment from the btrfs designer in the penultimate paragraph of http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_

That's because Linux is 100% as vulnerable to ... Linux uses security by "obscurity"...

You really have things backwards. Linux source code is GPL freely available for anyone to inspect. Windows source is proprietary and secret, which Gates testified before Congress was necessary because it was a national resource that should be kept secret for security reasons ... until Gates gave the Chinese copies of the XP source because it was their price for Microsoft to do business in China. So, it is Microsoft that practices "security by obscurity".

Actual security? The 1,000,000 + zombies that are appearing on the giant bot farms discovered every so often are compromised Windows boxes, not Linux or Mac OS X boxes. Ballmer himself put the Linux desktop market share at around 10% and called Linux a greater competitive threat than Apple. With that percentage and, according to you Linux is equally as vulnerable, then why isn't 100,000 of those zombies Linux boxes?

And, if Linux is so easy to compromise then why did professional hackers spend more than 6 months last year just to capture only 700 Linux boxes using brute force password cracking when, according to you, all they had to do was spend a day or two to lure a few hundred thousand Linux users to their porn site honey pot?

Morons are those who drink Microsoft's Kool-aide and become brainless human zombies chanting MS Technical Evangelists astroturf postings as if they are fact.

ZFS is nice but it doesn't have an fsck, partly because of its design philosophy. I think this is an omission and http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ explains why (links to many examples where ZFS won't open a zpool after an abrupt shutdown, possibly due to ZFS bugs or disks that lie about flushing cache to disk).

There is a new zpool recovery feature - discussed in http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6071-No,-ZFS-really-doesnt-need-a-fsck.html - the command is "zpool clear -F data" which is a very specific sort of fsck - it just unwinds the last few transactions, enabling you to have a valid zpool but losing a few recent updates, which is usually better than a complete restore from backups. The feature is mentioned at http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/6067-PSARC-2009479-zpool-recovery-a.html (PSARC 2009/479) and is available since Opensolaris build b128 (ref: http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=127689&tstart=0 )

For those who want a ZFS based NAS, have a look at NexentaStor (which has a proprietary GUI, free for up to 12 TB of disk) or Nexenta Core (just the OS without GUI, and open source) - NexentaStore has some nice features to get you started quickly, or you can use the open source napp.it GUI with the Nexenta Core. Nexenta uses a very recent zpool version (v24) and is based on OpenSolaris build b134 so it includes the above zpool reocvery feature.

Nexenta generally will move to using the Illumos fork of OpenSolaris when that's stable, so it should have a future as long as NetApp don't sue them. If they do get sued you could move to a more community-based distro based on Illumos.

Key question is whether the ZFS on Linux port will be updated to the Solaris b134 code to include this feature. Without it, you are in for some painful recovery using zdb (filesystem debugger) - but in any case you need up to date backups of your entire zpool. FreeBSD does have ZFS but using a much older zpool version without this feature - from my point of view, it's best to use the latest Solaris ZFS code to get the best stability, despite the limitations of Solaris hardware support.

ZFS recovery is an interesting topic given commodity hardware - see http://opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=292794 - there are other failure modes not addressed buy this zpool recovery feature.

While the H.264 licensing summary might lead you to think otherwise, the MPEG-LA has made it clear that licensing is based purely on the number of units, not the amount of money made, and is absolutely required for free software.

ZFS is used in production on FreeBSD by some people and I generally like the ZFS features, but I don't view ZFS as really production ready on any OS.

This is because ZFS on any OS does sometimes lose all access to the zpool (i.e. you lose the entire set of RAID volumes and filesystems on them, all at once) due to ZFS bugs, and there is no fsck. I can't think of another filesystem where you can (a) lose all access to your files and (b) there is no fsck. Same goes for RAID - even if you use RAID-1 with ZFS you can still lose your entire zpool due to a ZFS bug.

Given that the "no data loss by design" (can't find the reference for this, perhaps Sun/Oracle has stopped saying this) hasn't really worked out for ZFS on Solaris or FreeBSD, there is still a need to have a complete backup of any ZFS zpool (as with any other RAID / filesystem). The checksumming, COW, snapshots, and self-healing data (for RAID) are very nice, but losing your whole pool due to a ZFS bug means it isn't really a high availability solution. On the plus side, it does make it very easy to snapshot in order to take a backup, and makes incremental backups easy with zfs send.

Here are a few samples of complete zpool loss:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=132089&tstart=120

http://superuser.com/posts/130822/revisions - FreeBSD

http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg39578.html

My point is not that ZFS is a bad idea, but it really needs an fsck (see http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ ) and anyone using ZFS must have full backups onto another server of the whole zpool, perhaps into a non-ZFS filesystem to avoid software bugs that hit both the main and backup zpool. The need for backups isn't unique to ZFS but I haven't seen other filesystems/RAID implementations promising "no data loss by design"

http://breden.org.uk/2009/05/01/home-fileserver-a-year-in-zfs/ has some good info on using ZFS for a home NAS, with a separate backup server also using ZFS.

btrfs isn't mature yet, but its designer has said he will always make fsck a priority over new features: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.2/1284.html

Yes. They did. I don't know why Slashdot hasn't covered this story yet, it's big news.

Look, I *love* Firefox. I use it pretty much exclusively myself. Nothing can touch add-ons like NoScript, AdBlock, etc. (and most of my add-ons and their associated functionality can't be found on Chrome, Opera, etc.). But if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts. And speed has always been one of Chrome's few positive qualities over Firefox.

Firefox already has the technical lead over Chrome in a number of areas. Here's one such example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIZUdZdFzOo

Safari can also best Chrome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap-UmnHXPFw

Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford to license h264. And that already puts them behind on HTML5. I am hoping that either html5 never catches on, the other browsers all agree to an open format (like WebM)

YouTube is rolling out WebM encodes at a steady pace. Both of the videos I linked to above are available in WebM. I no longer have Flash installed as I've found I already don't need it. Firefox 4, Opera, Chrome 6 all support WebM natively. Safari and IE9 can both use it if the codec is installed. Support for WebM is broad. Now it's up to the mobile devices to catch up. My phone is capable of hardware accelerated WebM playback. It just needs the software to do it.

or there is some kind of flash-player type add-on made for Firefox to support h264. But without one of those, Firefox is (sadly) already in a rough spot for the next gen.

You mean, a player like Adobe Flash? ;-)

it's very important to have almost realtime javascript
this is needed so i can play chess 3d

http://html5games.com/2010/08/html5-chess/
or quake 2 in the browser

http://www.osnews.com/story/23097/Quake_II_Ported_to_HTML5

there is only one thing they shuold scrap from the browser to make it speedier svg and all that is xml related, all the interface should be painted in opengl with data residing in json format, something like QML

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/08/12/a-guide-to-writing-games-with-qml/

Look, I *love* Firefox. I use it pretty much exclusively myself. Nothing can touch add-ons like NoScript, AdBlock, etc. (and most of my add-ons and their associated functionality can't be found on Chrome, Opera, etc.). But if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts. And speed has always been one of Chrome's few positive qualities over Firefox.

Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford to license h264. And that already puts them behind on HTML5. I am hoping that either html5 never catches on, the other browsers all agree to an open format (like WebM), or there is some kind of flash-player type add-on made for Firefox to support h264. But without one of those, Firefox is (sadly) already in a rough spot for the next gen.

And I say all that as someone who hates the idea of giving up my Firefox and having to get my browser from an increasingly-evil Google, an already evil Microsoft, or a closed-off Opera. If I wanted evil and closed, I would have bought an iPad, not a netbook.

The problem ofcourse is, while it wasn't intentional, it does contain the code. :-)

http://www.osnews.com/story/23670/Chromium_Sends_Data_to_Google_Turns_Out_It_s_a_Regression

companies that are suffering from Microsoft lock-in

The City of Munich is going thru this. The first big hurdle (which they have cleared) was replacing M$Office macros and templates. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/09/5284.ars
(The next big hurdle is getting SAP's stuff to behave with a non-M$ OS or getting a replacement for the closed, proprietary stuff.)
The city's goal is to gain control of the source code for EVERYTHING they use.
They have their own spin of Debian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
(Progress report there on the city's conversion to all-FOSS; they are taking a very cautious, conservative approach WRT the timetable.)

The region of Extremadura in Spain was far more bold. They first converted over to FOSS apps under the payware OS--then in a single weekend switched the whole public sector over to a FOSS OS.
http://www.osnews.com/story/12611
Their spin of Debian is called LinEx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuLinEx

...and, of course, there's the classic example from the previous century of a corp getting its tit caught in the wringer with payware licenses and a BSA raid and deciding to get off that junk post haste.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6488047_ITM
http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

gewg_ (CAPTCHA: ragweed; How'd they know?)

Hmm..Maybe Apple shouldn't have open sourced it then?

Troll harder...

http://www.osnews.com/story/22152/Apple_Releases_Grand_Central_Dispatch_as_Open_Source

CD was obviously designed as a poor compromise of technology versus Apple's long-standing -- usually unsuccessful -- desire to get developers tied into their platform.

You seem to be lagging behind in your predictions somewhat. There have already been several stories this year about OSX trojans being discovered in the wild. This was the first hit on Google just now, there are many others.

OS-X has much bigger market-share than any of the linux distros so it makes sense it would be the first target. Once more of these are established I would expect more linux distros to be targeted, and then finally the emergence of unix-wide trojans.

And your signal loss can be 20 to 24 db when using one hand with the iPhone 4?

There is even a school of thought that the command line is easier for new computer users. It's very hard to judge what life is like for a new computer user when you (and most other people around you) are already experienced with Windows.

Enjoy it for as long as you can (which will be for a while).

However, the "Analog Sunset" will eventually disallow you from using analog connections to watch a Blu-Ray disc one way or the other - via a flag embedded in a disc by a studio, or if you have to buy a new player after 2013 (after your current one breaks according to the manufacturer's carefully-timed plan to avoid giving you warranty service) it won't have analog outputs. Blah blah HDFury - as soon as they're popular enough for studios to notice, their HDCP keys will be blacklisted so you're one involuntary firmware update away from being broken again. If you think the studios won't do that because it could disable a bunch of legitimate players, think again.

Also, your cable and satellite providers have the go-ahead from the FCC to shut off analog outputs at will, which is purportedly for PPV and certain on-demand content.

+1 for promotion of piracy yet again.

There's a serious analysis here, with some extra commentary by OS News here.

Not to mention "ready for commercial use", unlike the competition.

You wouldn't want free software to be able to compete, would you?

It can compete. It's called Android, and it's competing rather well

Just from a simple Google search:

http://www.osnews.com/story/23272/Android_Outsells_iPhone_in_the_US

Ah yes, the increasing the digital divide routine...I work in a school as a computer science teacher. Some students have access to the best computers, with the 100 M internet connection. And in the SAME school, other students are given old junk computers with no internet connection... Who do you think is getting more access to more information, to more opinions, to better info, etc.? Yes, people will spend some time on their private matters...so what? Are you in favour of denying people the opportunity to communicate, to expand their horizons, etc.?

Well, all I can say is, schools of the U.S. of A., Canada, etc., you are being bypassed by the rest of the world...have a look at:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS9016897370.html
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/22/2038209
http://www.osnews.com/story/12611

So, yeah, you keep up with that DRM, filtering/blocking, etc. crap. See how far that gets you.

The promises are largely meaningless and empty.

http://www.osnews.com/story/21858/FSF_Microsoft_s_Community_Promise_Empty_

the mono framework is inferior crap, F-Spot regularly crashes and often brings down x display manager with it.

you MS shill boys are amusing. Microsoft has done so much evil over the last 20 years, stifling innovation and competition, and you want to pretend it's professional and balanced to treat them as a normal company.

heya,

Hmm, I really hope you know what you're talking about, and aren't just talking out of your rear-end...lol. Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've been a KDE fan since the 3.5 days, and a Ubuntu fan from around those days as well. So it was a natural progression to use Kubuntu. I've basically tried every Kubuntu release since 7.04, until around 9.10, when I basically gave up on it. The 8.x branch, from memory, was particularly patchy for me. I've also tried openSUSE for some time, and spent a bit of time with Fedora. Of these, Arch Linux, either with it's stock KDE packages or KDEmod has been the best, and Kubuntu by far has been the worst.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "in the same place", but they most certainly aren't the vanilla KDE packages - part of the whole point of Ubuntu is they add their own patches to the vanilla packages.

Look, if you don't believe me, take a look at these two articles, and in particular the comments on them:

Kubuntu Gets Some Love
http://www.osnews.com/comments/22113

http://www.osnews.com/comments/22348

Comments like this one:

"Kubuntu has always been a little unstable in my experience - even with KDE3, but since the switch to KDE4 it's been nearly unusable. openSUSE and Mandriva, for example, have the resources to work through a lot of the issues that have come up with KDE4, and I think on a whole both have done a great job. Kubuntu seems at a disadvantage, and I can't imagine recommending it to anyone as a good distro to showcase KDE or even linux. It's just too buggy and frustrating. I have a lot of respect for the Kubuntu developers and their efforts, but they have a steep hill to climb."

Or this one:

"That's an appropriate comparison. I have to use Ubuntu at work and it's as if they go out of their way to damage KDE, so that people will get so disgusted with it that they'll switch to Gnome.

The problem with Kubuntu is not that it's being intentionally broken - it's just their shortage of resources. Blaming Kubuntu is stupid, because it's only so much a few guys can do.

It's a shame, really. It would be in KDE upstreams best interest to see that Kubuntu works well, because that's the distro they are going to get the majority of the users from. If you have a company policy specifying "Ubuntu", that's what you are going to use - and install kubuntu-desktop metapackage to get the kde environment."

or this one:

"Your attitude towards Kubuntu might be unfriendly, but it is kind-of deserved imho. Esp if you're a translator I can understand the frustration. I know and respect the two KDE-canonical employees (Aurelien and Riddell) but agree that Ubuntu puts less work in Kubuntu as it's user base would justify."

And there are more. As you can see, my views on Kubuntu's lack of polish is a fairly common one. Perhaps it's improved as of Lucid, I'm not sure. But the one time I did try the Lucid (Beta, mind you) Kubuntu live Cd, it refused to boot (IBM Lenovo X200 Tablet), and when I tried a later RC, it was horrible and broken (particularly plasma).

Cheers,
Victor

heya,

Hmm, I really hope you know what you're talking about, and aren't just talking out of your rear-end...lol. Have you actually tried to use Kubuntu, then tried a different KDE 4.x distro and compared them?

I've been a KDE fan since the 3.5 days, and a Ubuntu fan from around those days as well. So it was a natural progression to use Kubuntu. I've basically tried every Kubuntu release since 7.04, until around 9.10, when I basically gave up on it. The 8.x branch, from memory, was particularly patchy for me. I've also tried openSUSE for some time, and spent a bit of time with Fedora. Of these, Arch Linux, either with it's stock KDE packages or KDEmod has been the best, and Kubuntu by far has been the worst.

And I'm not sure what you mean by "in the same place", but they most certainly aren't the vanilla KDE packages - part of the whole point of Ubuntu is they add their own patches to the vanilla packages.

Look, if you don't believe me, take a look at these two articles, and in particular the comments on them:

Kubuntu Gets Some Love
http://www.osnews.com/comments/22113

http://www.osnews.com/comments/22348

Comments like this one:

"Kubuntu has always been a little unstable in my experience - even with KDE3, but since the switch to KDE4 it's been nearly unusable. openSUSE and Mandriva, for example, have the resources to work through a lot of the issues that have come up with KDE4, and I think on a whole both have done a great job. Kubuntu seems at a disadvantage, and I can't imagine recommending it to anyone as a good distro to showcase KDE or even linux. It's just too buggy and frustrating. I have a lot of respect for the Kubuntu developers and their efforts, but they have a steep hill to climb."

Or this one:

"That's an appropriate comparison. I have to use Ubuntu at work and it's as if they go out of their way to damage KDE, so that people will get so disgusted with it that they'll switch to Gnome.

The problem with Kubuntu is not that it's being intentionally broken - it's just their shortage of resources. Blaming Kubuntu is stupid, because it's only so much a few guys can do.

It's a shame, really. It would be in KDE upstreams best interest to see that Kubuntu works well, because that's the distro they are going to get the majority of the users from. If you have a company policy specifying "Ubuntu", that's what you are going to use - and install kubuntu-desktop metapackage to get the kde environment."

or this one:

"Your attitude towards Kubuntu might be unfriendly, but it is kind-of deserved imho. Esp if you're a translator I can understand the frustration. I know and respect the two KDE-canonical employees (Aurelien and Riddell) but agree that Ubuntu puts less work in Kubuntu as it's user base would justify."

And there are more. As you can see, my views on Kubuntu's lack of polish is a fairly common one. Perhaps it's improved as of Lucid, I'm not sure. But the one time I did try the Lucid (Beta, mind you) Kubuntu live Cd, it refused to boot (IBM Lenovo X200 Tablet), and when I tried a later RC, it was horrible and broken (particularly plasma).

Cheers,
Victor

Bonus: for several years I have proudly demonstrated my nose hairs to a chosen few with Video VOIP using Microsoft Portrait on Windows Mobile (...)I hear that Apple's newest phone may finally have Video VOIP thus summer...

Windows Mobile, eh? The platform that Microsoft has discontinued due to failure and generally being awkward, and Skype dropped. You can't download Skype for Windows mobile anymore.

As for voice chat on cell phones, it was awkward (and thus completely unused, other than once for trying) on my Nokia N95 - and I doubt even Apple can get around the "holding your phone at arms length in front of you is awkward and stupid" issue. Apple certainly needs multitasking (which Microsoft won't have on their phones replacing the now discontinued and obsolete Windows Mobile), and things like FM radio would be really nice. Front facing camera, OTOH, is a waste.

Apple did almost go bankrupt in 1996, due to previous lousy years.

Many people including me thought Apple would go-out just like Atari and Commodore went out of business. The Microsoft deal was announced in 1997 a partnership with Microsoft. Since that happened when Apple was near-bankruptcy many viewed it as MS saving Apple.

Apple did not become profitable again until 1998.
http://www.osnews.com/story/16056

Good for OpenBSD for supporting a computer architecture that is fully open and documented. Oh, the irony that it hails from communist China! And, eee-gads! It looks like Theo and Richard both like it! http://www.osnews.com/story/22674/China_s_Loongson_Processor_Effort

The insecurity of OpenBSD

A criticism of the OpenBSD security philosophy is performed, along with an examination of the claims made regarding the project. In particular their rejection of any advanced access control framework is examined. A well researched and well written article, followed by over 200 comments that are also worth reading.

Yes this kernel feature probably needs to be done first, but for decades people have had to manually save data before restarting X, without the X developers ever fixing that. Some apps have worked around this problem, but if the X bunch use that as an excuse to not fix things it's going to stay crap and this kernel feature will be mostly useless.

It doesn't affect me anymore, I use Linux mainly for servers. So I don't really care who is responsible, I'm just putting on a virtual "Steve Jobs" turtleneck and saying overall it still sucks, the problem is far from fixed yet, and it sure isn't "insanely great".

In comparison here's the state of things for:
OSX: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3709/gfxcardstatus-brings-2010-macbook-pro-gpu-switching

Windows: http://www.osnews.com/story/22850/NVIDIA_Unveils_Optimus_Seamless_GPU_Switching

No, Netbooks sales have continued to grow. They're just growing at a slower rate than they did before. There's a large difference.

See here for a more thorough explanation.

Thom Holwerda over at OSnews disects the story thus>:

Also in the report, Huberty has a chart which shows the decline in netbook sales growth per month, year-over-year. The chart shows that year-over-year, the sales growth of netbooks is on a steady decline. In July 2009, netbook sales increased by a staggering 641% compared to the same month a year earlier. This is the kind of idiotic growth that's simply unsustainable.

From July 2009 onwards, the sales growth of netbooks has been declining - note, however, that sales are still growing, only at a more comfortable, less hype-like pace.

Basically, this is a non-story and yet more baseless hype for Apple's gadget.

Not that Microsoft cares, but Free Culture just took a big hit. Money quote:

there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don't know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes (go on, read your manuals). I was first made aware of such a restriction when someone mentioned that in a forum, about the Canon 7D dSLR. I thought it didn't apply to me, since I had bought the double-the-price, professional (or at least prosumer), Canon 5D Mark II. But looking at its license agreement last night (page 241), I found out that even my $3000 camera comes with such a basic license. So, I downloaded the manual for the Canon 1D Mark IV, which costs $5000, and where Canon consistently used the word "professional" and "video" on the same sentence on their press release for that camera. Nope! Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon's press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with a similar restriction. You can only use your professional camera for non-commercial purposes. For any other purpose, you must get a license from MPEG-LA and pay them royalties for each copy sold. I personally find this utterly unacceptable.

And no, this is not just a Canon problem (which to me sounds like false advertising). Sony and Panasonic, and heck, even the Flip HD, have the exact same licensing restriction.

Welcome to Digital Sharecropping.

there is something very important, that the vast majority of both consumers and video professionals don't know: ALL modern video cameras and camcorders that shoot in h.264 or mpeg2, come with a license agreement that says that you can only use that camera to shoot video for "personal use and non-commercial" purposes (go on, read your manuals). I was first made aware of such a restriction when someone mentioned that in a forum, about the Canon 7D dSLR. I thought it didn't apply to me, since I had bought the double-the-price, professional (or at least prosumer), Canon 5D Mark II. But looking at its license agreement last night (page 241), I found out that even my $3000 camera comes with such a basic license. So, I downloaded the manual for the Canon 1D Mark IV, which costs $5000, and where Canon consistently used the word "professional" and "video" on the same sentence on their press release for that camera. Nope! Same restriction: you can only use your professional video dSLR camera (professional, according to Canon's press release), for non-professional reasons. And going even further, I found that even their truly professional video camcorder, the $8000 Canon XL-H1A that uses mpeg2, also comes with a similar restriction. You can only use your professional camera for non-commercial purposes. For any other purpose, you must get a license from MPEG-LA and pay them royalties for each copy sold. I personally find this utterly unacceptable.

And no, this is not just a Canon problem (which to me sounds like false advertising). Sony and Panasonic, and heck, even the Flip HD, have the exact same licensing restriction.

3) I am pretty sure it is non valid, in europe, to impose a contract/EULA in an item which is only viewable AFTER the sale.

That's true in the Netherlands. However, the EULA does not need to be actually presented prior to the sale. As long as the buyer is notified of the fact that there is an EULA beforehand, has some possibility to view it, and agrees to the EULA (even by clicking "I Agree" during installation) after the sale, the EULA constitutes a contract.

For example, my Windows 7 box mentions (translated) "You must agree to the enclosed license terms before you can use this software. If you wish to read the license terms, visit www.microsoft.com/useterms. For use on a single computer or device." This sounds like it satisfies the criteria.

According to the same article, though, if I manage to install Windows 7 without breaking any laws and without clicking "I Agree", then the EULA does not apply to me, and Dutch copyright law allows me to use Windows anyway.

He doesnt care that you should care, or not.

Flash apps circumvent the app store, you can make a website app through flash for free (such as a game) and Jobs doesn't get to enforce his Apple Tax.

HTML5 doesn't? http://www.osnews.com/story/23097/Quake_II_Ported_to_HTML5

What walled garden am I in exactly? Citation please? Oh right no citation, because there isn't any. MP3 plays just fine on Linux as well as Windows. How's that iTunes Linux client working for ya? Oh right, there isn't one. BSD? Nope. Windows? BWA HA HA HA HA...Biggest pile of shit since the old Real Jukebox is iTunes for Windows, and a GREAT example of the hypocrisy of Jobs since it uses NONE of the underlying OS tech, which is of course one of the things he screams at Adobe about with regards to Mac.

So accusing somebody of being in a walled garden because they use MP3s (Which BTW FYI, thanks to Lame sounds great, uses less resources and gets better pretty much all the time. Can you say the same?) is like standing 5 feet deep in shit and laughing at someone outside the pit "Oh look, you got a little poo on your shoe!" so give me a break. With MP3 I'm not locked in to any platform, no walled gardens here, can go anywhere, use anything, not a bit of problem here.

How's that Fairplay DRM working out on that non iCrap? Oh right, it don't. Ooops, sorry, having a bit of a sarcasm moment. I find it funny as hell though that only Apple buyers would brag about buying a device with nearly 100% markup. I just think that is hilarious! Oh and feel free to waste modpoint on me, fanboy rage just makes me laugh harder! meanwhile I am relaxing with my sandisk that is built like a tank, sounds great, and when the battery gets low while I'm out and about can be picked up at any shop and changed easily, all for less than $5 for a pack of AAAs. How's changing the battery on that new (and soon to be obsolete) iCrap working for ya? Oh right, can't do that either. BWA HA HA HA HA HA! You Apple guys, you so silly!

The patent issue here is not how to store a long filename in a FAT directory. The patent covers the technique for making a file system where each file has two names, and 8.3 "short" name and a "long" name.

This was crucial back in the day. Your Windows 3.1 system could read the floppy disk written by your Windows 95 computer; that file you saved as "ode to a summer day.txt" would wind up as ODETOA~1.TXT in Windows 3.1, and you could access the file.

But these days, nobody really cares about the 8.3 "short" filenames. Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac OS, etc. all just look at the long filenames.

So, Andrew Tridgell made a change to the Linux VFAT driver, and now Linux writes a valid long filename, and puts horrible junk in the space for the 8.3 filename. The horrible junk includes illegal characters for a filename. Thus, Linux is not writing both a long and a short filename, and thus isn't infringing.

And Linux still has the FAT driver, in addition to the VFAT driver. The FAT driver reads and writes 8.3 filenames only. In the event that you have a volume with nothing but 8.3 filenames, you can still use it with Linux.

http://www.osnews.com/story/21766/Linux_Kernel_Patch_Works_Around_Microsoft_s_FAT_Patents

The FAT long filenames patent should expire sometime around 2015, at which time Linux will return to full compatibility. (I presume that in countries that don't enforce software patents, people are still using Linux with full compatibility.)

steveha

Right, and the "custom 1GHz Apple A4 chip" uses an ARM core....

http://www.osnews.com/story/22805/Apple_s_A4_ARM_CPU_GPU

"Golden Boy" Obama has surrounded himself with ex-lawyers from the RIAA / MPAA. Good luck on getting a good appointee.
http://www.osnews.com/story/23002/Obama_Sides_with_RIAA_MPAA_Backs_ACTA

In one case, only ecma mono is covered.
In the other case, all of mono is covered.

The former is the Microsoft promise.
The latter is the Novell contract.

http://www.osnews.com/story/21784/C_CLI_Under_Community_Promise_Mono_Split_in_Half

There you go.

--
BMO

The MCP only covers the ecma parts.

Anything mono that is not ecma is not covered.

The Novell situation is a whole different kettle of fish.

Since Mono comprises a lot more than just the parts covered by the ECMA standards, De Icaza also announced that Mono will be split in half. "In the next few months we will be working towards splitting the jumbo Mono source code that includes ECMA + A lot more into two separate source code distributions," he explains, "One will be ECMA, the other will contain our implementation of ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Winforms and others."

http://www.osnews.com/story/21784/C_CLI_Under_Community_Promise_Mono_Split_in_Half

Would you want to touch that with a 10 foot pole?

Why will Firefox use Direct2D instead of SDL?

I don't believe they have dropped the hypervisor - that's one of the major security strongpoints and partly what has kept the PS3 from being totally pwned by now...
From the osnews article you linked, they say (with emphasis mine)

I’m sorry that you are frustrated by the lack of comment specifically regarding the withdrawal of support for OtherOS on the new PS3 slim. The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers for any significant hardware changes – this costs SCE. One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.

What I read into this is that they don't want to keep updating the hypervisor drivers for OtherOS support with the major hardware changes they made for the Slim, not that they're dropping the hypervisor altogether...