Written by Alexandru Lazar on Mon 5th Jan 2009 19:13 UTC
General Development 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.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Jan 2009 19:01 UTC, submitted by Joel Dahl
FreeBSD The FreeBSD 7-STABLE branch saw its first point release today. Don't let the point release moniker fool you, though, as FreeBSD 7.1 comes packed with a number of pretty significant changes, such as support for OpenSolaris' DTrace, as well as a new, more efficient scheduler.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Jan 2009 18:51 UTC, submitted by drcoldfoot
Apple 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.
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Written by Thom Holwerda on Sun 4th Jan 2009 21:47 UTC
Windows Reviewing the first beta of an important release like Windows 7 is never an easy job to do. A confouding factor is that many people have already made up their mind about Windows 7; not because they have tried it, but because it's a Microsoft product, and therefore it sucks. At OSNews we try to judge products by their own merits, not by the parent company that created it. Read on for a set of impressions regarding the Windows 7 beta.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 3rd Jan 2009 12:58 UTC
Windows 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.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd Jan 2009 22:06 UTC
Google Netbooks run either Windows or Linux, and both are readily available in shops all over the world. The Linux variants chosen by several netbook manufacturers are usually derived from desktop distributions, and obviously, Windows is a desktop operating system as well. However, netbooks have small displays, and both Windows and GNOME/KDE and some of their applications aren't always suited well for such an environment. Enter Android, Google's Linux-based phone operating system. It is suggested that Android-based netbooks will appear on the market in 2010, maybe even sooner.
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Written by Thom Holwerda on Wed 31st Dec 2008 18:26 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes 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!
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Linked by Kroc Camen on Wed 31st Dec 2008 11:11 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems At this year's 25th Chaos Communication Congress, an annual four day conference with the slogan "Nothing to hide" reveals everything about the Commodore 64, in 64 minutes. Across 256 slides. The video is now available to download via BitTorrent or FTP. The Commodore 64 is the greatest selling computer of all time; learn how it got there with its quirky hardware, loved by hackers worldwide.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 30th Dec 2008 23:49 UTC
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y 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.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 30th Dec 2008 21:29 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems While solid state drives are very well suited for netbooks from a power efficiency viewpoint, they pose problems when it comes to capacity (and performance, but that's another matter). In order to combat this issue, MSI has launched a new netbook with a hybrid approach to storage: it has a solid state drive for the operating system and applications, and a conventional hard drive for storage.
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Linked by David Adams on Tue 30th Dec 2008 19:04 UTC, submitted by jeanmarc
Microsoft 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.
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Linked by Kroc Camen on Tue 30th Dec 2008 15:09 UTC
Web 2.0 IBM takes a two part march through the attack vectors of spam on "web 2.0" sites. 'Real Web 2.0 means harnessing the power of social groups to improve information systems. This will invariably attract nasty people who look for the cracks to take advantage of you and me. Spam on the Web is one of the biggest threats to a modern Web developer.' Part 1 of this series shows you how to assess visitor behaviour and control work-flow to reduce Web 2.0 spam. Part 2 shows you how to use the power of community against spam.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 29th Dec 2008 17:10 UTC, submitted by jeanmarc
BeOS & Derivatives 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.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 28th Dec 2008 10:43 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces High bit depth support, non-destructive editing (so called "effect layers") and colour management. Three hot topics in photography editing - that users have been waiting for for a long time now to appear in GIMP. Today Linux & Photography blog features an exclusive interview with Martin Nordholts, one of the core contributors to GIMP. Nordholts speaks about the current state of affairs, explains what is going on deep inside the GIMP (and GEGL) and also lifts a corner of the veil about what is to come.
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Linked by Kroc Camen on Sat 27th Dec 2008 20:52 UTC
General Development 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.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 26th Dec 2008 20:00 UTC
Law and Order Large multinational software companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, rarely - if ever - initiate patent infringement lawsuits against other software companies, probably because they themselves infringe on lots of patents too. However, they do get sued themselves by smaller companies. Even though the Christian part of the world is all about forgiveness and love and pink ponies during the holidays (or, at least, they ought to be), Apple, Google, and Microsoft have been struck by a patent infringement lawsuit started by Cygnus Systems.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 26th Dec 2008 11:58 UTC, submitted by probono
BSD and Darwin derivatives 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.
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Written by Thom Holwerda on Thu 25th Dec 2008 16:07 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes Consider the following a little Christmas gift. Some of you may have already noticed, but for a few months already OSNews has seen a shift in content. Not necessarily in the subjects we cover, but more in the way we present our news. We've experimented for long enough now - we have settled on a definitive change in our content type. Read on for the details.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 24th Dec 2008 20:49 UTC, submitted by judgen
Law and Order 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.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 23rd Dec 2008 20:18 UTC
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu As part of its initiative to improve the usability of the Linux desktop, Canonical has made a proposal for a desktop notification system for both GNOME and KDE. Mark Shuttleworth announced the proposal on his blog earlier this week. The mockup video shows notification more or less like the 3d party Growl system for Mac OS X. Since we are talking Linux here, the meat is in the implementation details and cross-desktop compatibility.
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