There's an article making the rounds right now about how applications on iOS crash more often than applications on Android. I'm not going to detail the entire methodology - the article itself does so - but it does raise an interesting talking point about how both mobile operating systems handle application crashes and updates. osnews.com | 2/4/12 1:43 AM

There are different reasons people use Unix-like operating systems, including configurable, availability free of charge, powerful command line interface an many more. Some people are motivated by the moral issue: they reject non-free software. Specifically for such users Free Software Foundation developed Guidelines for Free System Distributions and created the list of absolutely free ("as in freedom") distributions. In this article we are going to look at the most recent entry on the list - Parabola GNU/Linux. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 2/3/12 1:22 AM

"Google has added an automated scanning process that is designed to keep malicious apps out of the Android Market , the company announced today. The new service, code-named 'Bouncer', scans apps for known malware, spyware, and Trojans, and looks for suspicious behaviors and compares them against previously analyzed apps. Every app is then run on Google's cloud infrastructure to simulate how the software would operate on an Android device, he said. Existing apps are continuously analyzed, too." osnews.com | 2/3/12 1:11 AM

This is the kind of news just tailor-made for OSNews. After 16 years of trusty service, the venerable Windows CE will be history as far as Microsoft's mobile operating system offering goes - the next major version of Windows Phone will use the NT kernel from Windows 8. As a heavy former Windows PocketPC Mobile CE Ultimate SP2 Edition user, this makes me sad. As a fan of the NT kernel, this makes me happy. osnews.com | 2/3/12 1:07 AM

Apple has released Mac OS X Lion 10.7.3 (by far Apple's most inelegant product name). It's a whole bunch of under-the-hood stuff, mostly bug fixes. It adds support for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian. It's all in Software Update. osnews.com | 2/2/12 1:26 PM

So, this is apparently a big thing, but because of my perpetual state of total boredom with regards to social networking, I really don't have the will to turn this into a proper item. So, here you go: Facebook is doing its IPO thing. Eh. In any case, lots of new rich people. Maybe the wealth will trickle down this time. osnews.com | 2/2/12 12:29 AM

How many N9's did Nokia sell, and how many Lumia's did Nokia sell? It's an interesting thing to ponder, because estimates by Tomi T. Ahonen seem to indicate that, despite decidedly undermarketing the thing, the N9 faired considerably better in the marketplace than the Lumia did. osnews.com | 2/2/12 12:24 AM

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation, supported by Carpathia Hosting, today announced its plans to assess the scope of the issue facing Megaupload users who are at risk of losing their data. Carpathia has created this website to assist users in contacting EFF. EFF will review the factual situations shared by users and, if possible, try to resolve their issues." I osnews.com | 2/1/12 11:46 PM

"The European Commission has opened a formal investigation to assess whether Samsung Electronics has abusively, and in contravention of a commitment it gave to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), used certain of its standard essential patent rights to distort competition in European mobile device markets, in breach of EU antitrust rules. The opening of proceedings means that the Commission will examine the case as a matter of priority. It does not prejudge the outcome of the investigation." Maybe Samsung should've added '...with rounded corners' to their patent applications. osnews.com | 2/1/12 11:39 PM

InfoWorld's Rick Grehan takes an in-depth look at Opa, MLstate's attempt to provide a single language for Web app development, and one of 10 cutting-edge programming languages that could shake up the future of IT. "With Opa, you write your Web application as though it were a single-tier program, and the compiler handles the knotty details of partitioning your program and deploying the resulting components to their proper domains. The compiler also builds the communication infrastructure among application components, and that infrastructure is invisibly managed by the runtime. The security weaknesses inherent in today's Web applications are virtually eliminated." osnews.com | 2/1/12 11:36 PM

Firefox 10 Arrives Today with Extended Support for Businesses. Though the software does bring an array of tweaks and enhancements for both users and developers, it's perhaps most notable for the fact that it marks the debut of the business-oriented Extended Support Release (ESR) program. One can check out what’s new and known issues for this version of Firefox by reading Mozilla's release notes. Perhaps the most important change from a user's perspective is that add-ons and themes are assumed to function, rather than not function as assumed by previous Firefox versions, meaning that the update process won't leave a user with familiar extensions disabled and needing updates. osnews.com | 2/1/12 11:36 PM

"Barnes & Noble's claim that Microsoft is misusing patents to undermine competition from Google's Android operating system was thrown out by a U.S. trade judge. U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Theodore Essex rejected today Barnes & Noble's arguments the patents should be held unenforceable, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard said in a statement. Essex's decision is subject to review by the six-member commission, which has the power to block imports of products that violate U.S. patent rights." osnews.com | 2/1/12 11:19 PM

This weekend at FOSDEM 2012 what Kristian Hogsberg is expected to say in Brussels will surprise many of you: Wayland 1.0 is gearing up for release as their first stable release. Wayland [a new X server for Linux] is supposed to be ready to take on the Linux desktop world. osnews.com | 2/1/12 1:50 AM

When the Raspberry Pi ships later this year, it will be delivered to your door as a finished unit. The more adventurous tinkerers among you, as well as adept system builders, have asked the Raspberry Pi Foundation why they can’t get them in kit form instead. The reason why that wasn’t considered is demonstrated in an image released by Broadcom . . . they are tiny. And unlike a typical system build using an x86 chip that just slots into place, installing these chips requires a very steady hand and just the right amount of solder. osnews.com | 2/1/12 1:46 AM

ike your RHEL on your servers just the way it is? That’s fine by Red Hat, which has extended its flagship Linux operating system's lifecycle to ten years. osnews.com | 2/1/12 1:41 AM

The first tablet computer that comes with Plasma Active pre-installed is to be named "Spark". It sports an open Linux stack on unlocked hardware and comes with an open content and services market. The user experience is, of course, Plasma Active and it will be available to the general public. The hardware is modest but compelling: 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor, Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal storage plus SD card slot, a 7" capacitive multi-touch screen and wifi connectivity. The retail price will be €200. osnews.com | 2/1/12 1:36 AM

An article at The Next Web points out that the latest marketshare numbers put Apple at the top of "PC" makers, and that some PC makers that don't have any tablet momentum are calling foul. It's "controversial" to count tablets as PCs, they say. The article points out various justifications for not categorizing tablets as personal computers, and then shoots them down. I must say, I find the argument compelling. osnews.com | 2/1/12 1:08 AM

In its analysis of last year's smartphone market in the U.S., NPD found that market share for Apple's iOS went up following the release of the iPhone 4S, to 43 percent of all smartphone sales in October and November from 26 percent in the third quarter. Android, meanwhile, retained its lead, but lost market share towards the end of the year, dropping in October and November to 47 percent from 60 percent in the previous quarter. These are some dramatic shifts in market share but what do they really mean to you and me? Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 2/1/12 12:24 AM

With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.' osnews.com | 2/1/12 12:14 AM

According to MSNBC, up to 50 million Megaupload users could lose their data by Thursday. They haven't been able to access their data since surprise US government raids early this month. None of these users has been charged with any crime. This continues the US trend towards expanded use of forfeiture laws to arbitrarily seize and/or destroy private property without due process. The US Constitution's 5th Amendment states "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty or property without due process or law; nor shall private property be taken... without just compensation." The situation raises questions both about the reliability of cloud services for data storage and the end of due process in the United States. osnews.com | 1/31/12 5:49 AM

Finally something really interesting to talk about. If you've used UNIX or any of its derivatives, you've probably wondered why there's /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin in the file system. You may even have a rationalisation for the existence of each and every one of these directories. The thing is, though - all these rationalisations were thought up after these directories were created. As it turns out, the real reasoning is pretty damn straightforward. osnews.com | 1/30/12 10:39 PM

Les Bell has released (Jan 2012) his course material "Introduction to OS/2 Warp Programming" under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The course had been released with its original files, OOXML, ODF, PDF version and lab exercises. osnews.com | 1/30/12 8:07 PM

Jon Rubinstein, once a prominent voice in the mobile community as he sought to reinvent Palm, has left HP. The move isn't a surprise considering how many management shuffles HP has gone through as of late, and Rubinstein has all but disappeared from the webOS landscape in its recent transition to an open source platform. osnews.com | 1/30/12 8:07 PM

"One of the fun examples among all the copyright fuss is the extreme example of copyright claims made by AT&T some time in the 1980s. It's the /bin/true program. This is a dummy' library program whose main function is to make it easy to write infinite loops (while true do ...) in shells scripts. The 'true' program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status. This can be done with an empty file that's marked executable, and that's what it was in the earliest unix system libraries. Such an empty file will be interpreted as a shell script that does nothing, and since it does this successfully, the shell exits with a zero exit status. But AT&T's lawyers decided that this was worthy of copyright protection." Three blank lines. Copyrighted. You can't make this stuff up. osnews.com | 1/30/12 4:10 PM

We should no longer be confused about the notion of the 'post-PC era': Apple's shocking iOS device sales numbers for its first fiscal quarter are just further proof that tablets and smartphones are the personal-computing products taking over our hearts and wallets. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 1/27/12 12:50 AM

I promise we'll have more on ACTA next week, but for now, I'm too busy to properly cover the subject. In any case, the European Commission signed it today, but that means little - each individual member state's parliament still has to ratify it, and if one votes against it, it's over. The European Parliament has to accept it too - not a done deal either. My opinion on the matter is clear. osnews.com | 1/27/12 12:50 AM

KDE has announced its latest set of releases, providing major updates to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Platform. Version 4.8 provides many new features, and improved stability, performance and dynamic power management. osnews.com | 1/27/12 12:42 AM

"It's no longer possible to write a single app that takes advantage of the full range of Mac OS X features. Some APIs only work inside the Mac App Store. Others only work outside it. Presumably, this gap will widen as more new features are App Store-exclusive, while sandboxing places greater restrictions on what App Store apps are allowed to do." Anybody surprised by this, here's the clue stick. Please proceed to hit yourself with it. osnews.com | 1/26/12 5:13 PM

"Android accounted for 39% of the market in the final three months of last year, up from 29% a year earlier, Strategy Analytics said. Apple's share fell to 58% from 68%. Microsoft's share stood at 1.5%." Really now. osnews.com | 1/26/12 11:09 AM

Microsoft is giving an unusually long advanced look at their next edition of Windows 8, both for client and server, and Tom Henderson (who has been writing about networking and security for decades) takes a look at the implications of the features in the "pre-beta" tuned for businesses and network admins. The client version of the operating systems is known to have support concerns, for instance, as long-time APIs are retired and new ones introduced, as he writes in Windows 8 Client Pre-Beta: Five Important Implications. And the Windows 8 Server Editions promise more radical changes than the operating system has seen in a decade: It’s a re-thinking of how server roles are accomplished for Microsoft. He discusses the impact on your Windows Server deployment in Windows 8 Server Pre-Beta: 5 Important Implications. osnews.com | 1/26/12 2:06 AM

"HP today began executing its plan to deliver an open webOS by committing to a schedule for making the platform’s source code available under an open source license. The company aims to complete this milestone in its entirety by September. HP also announced it is releasing version 2.0 of webOS's innovative developer tool, Enyo. Enyo 2.0 enables developers to write a single application that works across mobile devices and desktop web browsers, from the webOS, iOS and Android platforms to the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers â€" and more. The source code for Enyo is available today, giving the open source community immediate access to the acclaimed application framework for webOS." osnews.com | 1/26/12 12:49 AM

Google has updated its privacy policy - in fact, it has consolidated a mess of over 70 different privacy policies each covering an individual service into one, simpler policy. You'll now be treated as a single account, and data will be shared between Google services to make search results and ads more personalised (I assumed they already did that - makes sense). osnews.com | 1/26/12 12:45 AM

"Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced 'speedy') protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that's already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted." osnews.com | 1/26/12 12:05 AM

InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp takes an in-depth look at six Chromium-based spinoffs that bring privacy, security, social networking, and other interesting twists to Google's Chrome browser. 'When is it worth ditching Chrome for a Chromium-based remix? Some of the spinoffs are little better than novelties. Some have good ideas implemented in an iffy way. But a few point toward some genuinely new directions for both Chrome and other browsers.' osnews.com | 1/25/12 8:59 PM

Why do people troll? Can we prevent trolling or limit the damage trolls do? Here are some thoughts on trollology derived from academic studies and web research. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 1/25/12 8:58 AM

As much as I dislike Unity, I commend the Ubuntu team and Shuttleworth for having the guts to try to innovate and bring the desktop forward (pretty much the exact same can be said of KDE4 and GNOME3). Shuttleworth has just announced yet another significant change for Ubuntu, and it's all about replacing the menu with a search interface dubbed the HUD. osnews.com | 1/25/12 12:53 AM

Apple reported its quarterly results, and thanks to the iPhone 4S and the iPad, Apple is putting out bizarre figures - 37 million iPhones, 15.5 million iPads. "The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter." Is this the end of Android's dominance, or just a single uberquarter due to the new iPhone? osnews.com | 1/25/12 12:08 AM

Summer last year, the Dutch courts ruled that Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 did not infringe on Apple's community designs, and as such, would not be banned from The Netherlands. This was a "quick case", and as such, Apple had the right to appeal and turn this into a "full case". Apple did, but I now think they really wish they hadn't - the Court of Appeal in The Hague has pretty much ripped Apple a new one [Dutch], and upheld the District Court's ruling. osnews.com | 1/24/12 9:09 PM

"Today Mozilla and the Rust community are releasing version 0.1 of the Rust compiler and associated tools. Rust is a strongly-typed systems programming language with a focus on memory safety and concurrency. This is the initial release of the compiler after a multi-year development cycle focusing on self-hosting, implementation of major features, and solidifying the syntax. Version 0.1 should be considered an alpha release, suitable for early adopters and language enthusiasts. It's nifty, but it will still eat your laundry." osnews.com | 1/24/12 12:10 AM

VirtualBSD 9.0 is a desktop-ready FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE built around the XFCE Desktop Environment for good aesthetics and usability, and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes. The most common applications, plugins and multimedia codecs are ready since the first boot. osnews.com | 1/24/12 12:08 AM

This is a call out for help on creating a consistent and native feeling on Mac OS X and Linux. As I have never owned a Mac and haven't used Linux as my main OS for over 3 years I need the community of OSNews to help me do this. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article... osnews.com | 1/23/12 3:18 PM

"The CPU design firm Venray Technology announced a new product design this week that it claims can deliver enormous performance benefits by combining CPU and DRAM on to a single piece of silicon. We spent some time earlier this fall discussing the new TOMI (Thread Optimized Multiprocessor) with company CTO Russell Fish, but while the idea is interesting; its presentation is marred by crazy conceptualizing and deeply suspect analytics." osnews.com | 1/23/12 1:29 PM

That's what you get for not delivering. As had been anticipated for a while now, the two co-CEOs of Research In Motion, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, will step down from their posts. Chief operating officer Thorsten Heins will take over the role of CEO, while the two former co-CEOs will move to other functions within the company. osnews.com | 1/23/12 1:00 PM

Supposedly we've won today. Both the PROTECT-IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House of Representatives have been shelved by their respective sponsors. However, these acts have been shelved before, and the bags of money sent to DC didn't suddenly devalue, so I'm sure the next SOPA is being written as we speak. What did make me happy, though, was Neelie Kroes: the EU commissioner for the digital agenda has unambiguously distanced herself from SOPA, which she calls "bad legislation". Obama, the next time you want to make a statement with teeth, just wait for Kroes to do it for you. osnews.com | 1/21/12 1:40 AM

"This week, tons of websites are reporting that Apple is catching up with Android when it comes to U.S. smartphone market share. The reports are based on some new data from Nielsen, a metrics company that measures smartphone use. The only problem: people are completely misinterpreting the data." Numbers are fickle beings. osnews.com | 1/20/12 3:41 PM

"Windows and Office: they've been Microsoft's two biggest cash cows since... Forever. But in Microsoft's second fiscal 2012 quarter ending December 31, 2011, Windows/Windows Live dropped to No. 3, behind the Microsoft Business Division (home of Office) and Server and Tools." osnews.com | 1/20/12 1:04 AM