OSNews

In the age of dynamic languages and closures, most of you have probably heard of a mighty dragon called Lisp (which stands for LISt Processing), whose fans look almost with despise at other languages rediscovering it. Invented half a century ago, Lisp went on to become a de facto standard in the world of AI research, and has stood behind a handful of very neat inventions in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the long AI winter and the drift of technology towards other paradigms have almost lead to forgetting Lisp alltogether; IT has only recently started to rediscover parts of what made Lisp so cool back then.

Last week, Gizmodo rumoured that that Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health was in a very bad condition, so bad in fact that the "inevitable news" would arrive coming Spring. Then, Apple characteristically declined to comment on the rumour, meaning Gizmodo's story couldn't be verified. As it turns out, Gizmodo's story does have a hint of truth, but luckily, Jobs' health isn't even remotely in as bad a condition as they made it out to be.

Even though the EULA accompanying the beta build of Windows 7 prohibits the publication of benchmark results (good luck enforcing that one, Redmond), everybody and their dog will still compare the Windows 7 beta to Vista and Windows XP. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is one of those benchmarking the beta, and according to his results, the Windows 7 beta beats both Vista and XP in just about every scenario.

The internet, and much of the real world as well, is currently in list mode. Just about any possible list that can be made up regarding 2008 will be made up somewhere, so we decided not to reinvent the wheel and look forward instead of backward. Since we like to leave the guessing predicting to the analysts, we just limited ourselves to what tech-related matters we would like to see in 2009. Read on for our lists, and of course, post your own in the comments. And lest we forget: a very happy 2009 from the OSNews crew!

Steve Jobs' health has been an important topic of rumours ever since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in mid-2004. He was treated successfully, and recovered from his ordeal. Ever since then, rumours of possible health problems popped up regularly, which were only ignited further by Apple's recent announcement to drop out of MacWorld San Fransisco, with Steve Jobs not delivering the famous keynote speech coming January. Gizomodo threw a whole lot of oil on the fire today by publishing information which they claim comes from a source which has always been 100% accurate.

A recently-filed patent from Microsoft gives us a glimpse into a possible future strategy from the software giant, wherein people buy a computer, but only pay for that portion of the computer's performance and capabilities they actually use. There's a pretty detailed summary of the plan in a Cnet article that's worth a read. It actually sounds a lot like a "cloud computing" strategy for the consumer, and it all seems to make sense, until you start to really think about it.

A long time ago, when Windows was busy crashing into walls, when the Mac OS was running around naked in the woods looking for someone to protect its memory, and when Linux was frantically jumping up and down with a lollipop in its mouth, we were blessed with the BeOS. It was new, free of legacy nonsense, fast, and designed from the ground-up to make sense (which it didn't, but at least they tried). It could do all sorts of fancy stuff that the other operating systems could only dream of, but at the same time, trivial things like actually getting networking and the internet to work brought it to its knees. Sadly, it didn't make it because Windows and the Mac OS were bullying BeOS, and of course it didn't help that BeOS' parents didn't really know anything about the real world either. The community around BeOS, however, never really died out, and the central hub, BeBits, weathered all storms. It found a new owner today.

Dave Thomas, programming book author and Ruby evangelist presented the keynote at RailsConf2008; "There's a sound that no presenter wants to hear, and that's dead silence. And that's what greeted me when I made a suggestion in my RubyConf keynote [...]. I think by the end of the talk, though, most people were convinced." This is one of the best programming topic presentations I have ever seen. Even if you've never written a line of Ruby, you'll find it perfectly clear-and enjoyable. Watch, and then "read more" for Kroc's personal commentary on the issues raised.

Most of you will know that the underlying core set of components of Mac OS X and the iPhone operating system are released under the Apple Public Source License, an FSF-approved open source license. Few of you, however, will have actually used Darwin in any other form than Mac OS X or the iPhone OS. Despite numerous projects attempting so, Darwin has never gained any significant traction apart from Apple's own interest. The PureDarwin project tries to rise from the ashes of the OpenDarwin project, and has just released a Christmas developer preview.

The legal back-and-forth between PsyStar and Apple is slowly but surely moving into the twilight zone. Not too long ago we had Apple going all black helicopter on PsyStar claiming people and/or companies other than PsyStar are involved in the clone maker's unlawful practices, even though Apple could so far not name any of them because, well, they don't know who they are yet. If that wasn't enough, PsyStar now claims that Apple's copyright on Mac OS X is invalid.