Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Feb 2010 23:55 UTC
Windows The past few weeks or so, there's been a lot of interest in a supposed battery status report bug in Windows 7. After installing Windows 7, some users reported seeing "consider replacing your battery"-warnings in systems that appeared to be operating just fine on Windows XP or Vista. After extensive research, Steven Sinofsky has now explained on the Engineering 7 blog that the fault is not with Windows 7 - it really, really is your battery.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Feb 2010 21:38 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes Developed by industrial designer Barton Smith, the Stream Adaptive Computer System is an interesting take on making computing easier and more adaptable to suit the user's current needs. Today, he also unveiled the operating system and user interface that would run on Stream. It's... Amazing.

 

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Written by David Adams on Mon 8th Feb 2010 19:29 UTC
OSNews, Generic OSes We've been working on an "OSNews version 5" upgrade for several months, and with several months to go, we decided to make some incremental changes to OSNews on the existing codebase. The major change, as you probably already noticed, is that we've removed the "Page1/Page2" tabs and instead have OSNews stories with original content and commentary in one column, and news, items on OS-related topics gleaned from other sources in the other. Read on for more details on the changes we've implemented.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 8th Feb 2010 13:23 UTC, submitted by kragil
Graphics, User Interfaces You may remember that back in November last year, I wrote about the lack of a decent Paint.NET-like application for Linux (or, more specifically, for Gtk+ distributions, since Qt has Krita). As it turns out, this compelled Novell employee Jonathan Pobst to code a Paint.NET clone in Gtk+ using Cairo. Version 0.1 is here, and it's remarkably advanced for something so young.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 7th Feb 2010 19:11 UTC
Windows Later this month, Microsoft will most likely unveil Windows Mobile 7 Windows Phone 7 at the Mobile World Congress. Rumours abound, and the latest set of rumours paint a rather dramatic turnaround for Microsoft's mobile platform - no more multitasking, application distribution limited to official channels, and a whole lot more.

 

Linked by Kroc Camen on Fri 5th Feb 2010 23:28 UTC
Web 2.0 A quick round up of various web-related news items. First up, a new open source product entitled the "Highgate media suite" will bring OGG video decoding to Silverlight. Microsoft have just joined the SVG working group (arguably 10 years late, but it's better than nothing). Adobe promise significant improvements in Flash 10.1, including Core Animation rendering on OS X and lowered CPU usage. Finally, CoperLicht--a WebGL JavaScript 3D engine (Quake in JS will be here one day)

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 5th Feb 2010 22:24 UTC
Multimedia, AV In a way, it's kind of sad. The old media squealing and squirming, trying pathetically to hold on to a time that has long been lost to the sands of... Well, time. Jeff Zucker, President and CEO of NBC, made such a pathetic attempt before a US Congress committee yesterday, claiming Boxee stole Hulu's content.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Feb 2010 23:41 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Finally something we can work with. While both the iPad and the Joo Joo are technically still vapourware, people have at least had the opportunity to play with the former, while the latter remained somewhat illusive. Now that the device has been set to ship at the end of this month, Ars Technica finally had some time to play with the Joo Joo and talk to Fusion Garage's CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan. There's good news, and there's (potentially) bad news.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Feb 2010 20:48 UTC
Microsoft Now this is something you don't read every day. Dick Brass, vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004, has written an article for The New York Times' Op-Ed section, detailing the flaws in Microsoft's corporate culture, and how they've severely affected the company in a negative way. Telling, and painful. And, in a way, very sad. Update: Microsoft responds. "For Microsoft, it is not sufficient to simply have a good idea, or a great idea, or even a cool idea. We measure our work by its broad impact."

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Feb 2010 10:10 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless As promised, Fusion Garage has sent out a press release regarding its Joo Joo tablet device. The news is all good: full production has started, and the device will ship this month, readily beating the iPad to market. It has also been confirmed it will come with Flash, and once Flash 10.1 goes final, the Joo Joo will be able to playback HD through Flash, so that things like Hulu will work.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 4th Feb 2010 00:12 UTC
Multimedia, AV We've got news from the MPEG-LA, regarding any possible H264 license changes they might institute at the end of this year. More specifically, they've put out a press release stating that they will not change one specific aspect of the license that governs the AVC Patent Portfolio (to which h264 belongs): MPEG-LA will not collect royalties for internet video that is free to end users. The press release is highly confusing, so let's de-construct what's going on here.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Feb 2010 20:13 UTC
Hardware, Embedded Systems Ah, the ARM chip. ARM is a hugely successful architecture, and can be found in just about every cell phone or other small device out there. ARM, however, wants more, and for a long time now we've been hearing predictions about an upcoming massive rise in ARM netbooks - so far, this hasn't materialised. Warren East, ARM's CEO, said in an interview with PC Pro that netbooks could one day make up 90% of the laptop market - preferably powered by ARM processors of course.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Feb 2010 23:25 UTC, submitted by Chicken Blood
Apple The beauty of the internet is such that every opinion has become worthless; this goes doubly so for those with publish buttons on (relatively, we're humble) major websites. For every opinion, there's a matching counter-opinion, and that's great. Yesterday, we linked to an article by Mark Pilgrim about tinkerers and the iPad, and of course, someone was bound to disagree with that one.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Feb 2010 22:52 UTC
Windows Heck, Microsoft really weren't kidding when they said Windows 7 was the fastest-selling operating system in the world. NetApplications released its figures for January 2010, and it seems that after only three months of availability, Microsoft's latest baby has already hit the 10% market share mark.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Feb 2010 22:26 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless Today, we have two major mobile operating systems releasing updates to their platforms. First, Apple bumped the iPhone OS up to version 3.1.3, and second, Google released an update for the Nexus One which implements activates multitouch support for the phone.

 

Written by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Feb 2010 14:25 UTC
Games And here I am, a week later. The Xbox home screen is patiently waiting for input, and as I put the controller down, my eyes drift towards the left, towards the closet where I keep my Xbox games, ordered according to which I find the best. Out of excitement, I had put the Mass Effect 2 box in the prime position when I bought it, but now that I've finished the game, I can't help but take it down a few pegs - behind Mass Effect 1, behind Dragon Age, but just above Fallout 3. I find it hard to admit, but Mass Effect 2 failed to meet my (admittedly) insanely high expectations.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 1st Feb 2010 21:42 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless While we're all busy weeting ourselves or getting our knickers in twists over Apple's iPad, we'd almost forget that this other company had already announced a similar product two months ago. Fusion Garage's CEO has given a number of updates on the Joo Joo, while also filing its motion to dismiss the court case started by TechCrunch.

 

Written by Adam S on Mon 1st Feb 2010 18:19 UTC
Podcasts Back in August of 2009, the OSnews team spent 3 full hours discussing Apple. In the course of discussion, we spent some time talking about the then-mythical "Apple Tablet." So, 5 months later, how did we do? Were we accurate in our predictions? How did you envision the Tablet, long before the nonsensically named "iPad" became a reality? This clip, which I've called "Episode 20.x" and inserted into cannon retroactively, is pulled, unaltered, from the original podcast.

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 1st Feb 2010 16:25 UTC
General Development While the iPad can certainly be debated as a product, people on the internet are discussing not the product, but the shift devices like the iPhone and iPad represent: a shift away from a computer being accessible to it being something closed and impenetrable. Is this a future we want for ourselves?

 

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 31st Jan 2010 14:20 UTC, submitted by lemur2
Internet & Networking Despite the recent interest in adopting HTML5's video tag, there is still one major problem: there is no mandated standard video codec for the video tag. The two main contestants are the proprietary and patended h264, and the open and free Theora. In a comment on an LWN.net article about this problematic situation, LWN reader Trelane posted an email exchange he had with MPEG-LA, which should further cement Theora as the obvious choice.

 

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