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Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.
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Opera Software announced the availability of Opera Mini 4.1 for cellphones, which introduces the following new features: Opera Mini 4.1 is up to 50% faster than Opera Mini 4.0. The new Opera Mini will automatically suggest URL completions, making address input easy and intuitive. Web pages can be saved for later off-line viewing (newer Java implementation required). Opera Mini 4.1 gives you quick access to the word or phrase you want in Web pages. Images, ringtones and other content can be downloaded without leaving Opera Mini. You can test Opera Mini 4.1 from within your browser too (if you scroll all the way down on the mobile page of OSNews you can select between our desktop and mobile version).
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Microsoft has released the first service pack to Microsoft Office:Mac 2008. The company also said that sales of Office:Mac 2008 have "soared", and that it is "selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years". Microsoft also had a surprise announcement about Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support.
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Rethinking the desktop metaphor, or even improving it in any significant way, is a daunting task, and few dare to take the risk. The end result is that the desktop metaphor that we use today barely changed over the years - which is quite unique for the computing industry, as normally, things change very rapidly.
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The Fedora Project has pushed out its 9th release. The release announcement is one of those fancy story ones, without much actual information, but an earlier email by Fedora project leader Paul Frields had some more interesting things to say.
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Windows XP SP3, the final service pack for Windows XP, was released to manufacturing a few weeks ago, and popped up on Windows Update about a week later. Even though the service pack is rather light on actual new features, it still caused a few problems for some users. Despite these problems, some benchmarks show that while SP3 delivers better performance compared to XP SP2, Microsoft seems to have solved many performance issues with Vista, turning the company's latest OS offering into the better choice for gaming - according to ExtremeTech.
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Ars Technica's Jeremy Reimer has published the 7th instalment in their series on the history of the Amiga platform. Part 7 deals solely with gaming on the Amiga, detailing various classic Amiga games that in one way or the other pushed the envelope. "The Amiga started out its life as a dedicated games machine, and even though it grew into a full computer very quickly, it never lost its gaming side. The machine's 4096-color palette, stereo sampled sound, and graphics acceleration chips made it a perfect gaming platform, and it didn't take long for game companies to start taking advantage of this power."
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The X Windowing System is the graphical backbone of most UNIX-like operating systems (and OpenVMS) - despite lots and lots of criticism, the system has withstood the test of time. Despite its age, development on X has not slowed down - in fact, it only seems to have picked up. A few weeks ago, we had kernel-based mode setting, and today we have the X server running as user instead of root.
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Last week, we reported on a peculiar price difference in Australia between the Linux and Windows versions of the Asus Eee PC 900, the new model in the Eee line. The Windows model was 50 USD cheaper than the Linux model - the Linux model did have a bigger hard drive, but interestingly, the version with the smaller hard drive was not available as a Linux machine. This gave rise to speculation that Microsoft had been putting pressure on Asus to favour Windows XP over Linux. It appears Microsoft's assault in this segment of the market goes deeper than just Asus and the Eee alone.
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Linux has been described as one of the most secure operating systems available, but the National Security Agency (NSA) has taken Linux to the next level with the introduction of Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). SELinux takes the existing GNU/Linux operating system and extends it with kernel and user-space modifications to make it bullet-proof. If you're running a 2.6 kernel today, you might be surprised to know that you're using SELinux right now! This article explores the ideas behind SELinux and how it's implemented.
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As you may remember from our series on common usability terms, I have a lot of interest in graphical user interface concepts. In addition, I applaud anyone trying to improve existing concepts, people that try to think beyond set conventions to come up with an improved version of that concept, or a new concept altogether. Thorsten Wilms took on the well-established concept of the scrollbar, and came up with a few interesting tweaks.
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1983. The year of the IBM PC XT, the Apple Lisa, Pioneer 10 leaving the solar system, and Hooters opening up shop in Florida. It's also the birthyear of a 25 year old BSD bug, squashed only a few days ago.
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Multitouch has more or less turned into a buzzword these days - sometimes, its implementation makes sense and comes out as pretty useful (see the iPhone and Microsoft's Surface), however, other implementations turn out be debatable. There is another implementation out there, one that received a lot less attention from the press than the aforementioned cases: Jeff Han's Perceptive Pixel.
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Today's NPR Talk of the Nation Science Friday radio program discussed the recent Memristor advances for the non-Electrical Engineer: "The possibility of such a circuit element, known as the "memristor," was first described in 1971, but no one was able to find a device with the properties of that missing element. Now, a group of scientists at HP Labs has found that in nanoscale materials, the "memristance" property becomes easier to see. The finding could lead to lower power, instant-on computers, as well as novel types of circuitry. HP Senior Fellow Stanley Williams, one of the discoverers of the modern memristor, talks about the find and its potential applications." The 13 minute program is available online
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In February 2008, the European Commission fined Microsoft for the record-breaking amount of 899 million Euros, for not complying to the 2004 ruling from Brussels. Today, Microsoft announced it has decided to appeal the fine. "We are filing this appeal in a constructive effort to seek clarity from the court. We will not be saying anything further," the company stated.
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