I just want to put up a little notice to inform you all about the lack of updates on the main page. The problem is that I’ve been hit by the flu and have been down and out since last Thursday, unable to do the news. The rest of the team has been occupied as well, so that explains that. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and since I’ve pretty much almost recovered, normal posting schedule will resume either tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. Thanks for understanding. Also, read more for the most beautiful piece of art ever created in the history of the universe. And I mean it.
As the title states, I (and I’m sure the rest of the alt. OS community) wish you the speediest of recoveries.
Best wishes,
Sam
You will post articles now or suffer the consequences.
Nevermind, I’m not going to renew my paid subscription.
Well if it makes any difference, nothing important has happened since XFce dropped *BSD support =).
Get well soon Thom.
I <3 Elvis Costello nearly as much as you <3 Unicorns . . .
Costello pales into insignificance compared to Fiona (in my opinion, of course), and the cool thing is that he said the same about this performance. He said Fiona’s rendition of I Want You was better than his own.
Which, as compliments go, is as big as you can possibly get them.
I agree, awesome performance from Fiona! Helps in the long wait of her new album.
Thanks a lot for the video! Music heals the worst pain
Not dead, just sick.
Get well soon!
The title says it all take care of yourself.
Is there any OS News right now? Nothing is happening on Windows, the release of SP1 is soooooo fun, and no real news about Win8.
Still waiting for CUT/PASTE in WinPhone7… But MS seems to like jailbreaker!
Apple seeded a new release of OSX to testers….
Google may or may not have copied Java codes in Android, and the saga keeps on going….
Also, the world is about to end, as animals all over the world are suddenly dying in masses. It’s snowing where it should not and it’s poring rain to make flash flood in a couple of places as well. It’s 2012 coming.
Get well soon.
Edited 2011-01-24 23:08 UTC
I was in the hospital myself because I was really sick.
It looked like I might have had appendicitis, but maybe it was just stomach flu too. Because the real cause was never found. I just got better again.
As I’m in the Netherlands too, maybe it all is the same flu. Many people are sick.
Edited 2011-01-25 00:02 UTC
Moving
The ‘news’ here is nothing new, or revealing. The level of contribution by others than Thom means a limited amount of insight, lack of journalistic review prior to publishing and certainly a theme in his writing makes the site very lopsided. I’m curious, why does OSAlert matter past about year 2002 anyway?
There is some truth in this comment, because if it was not for Thom, there would be close to nothing on OSAlert.
I do think that Thom care, but the contribution of others is lacking severely.
The other thing is, what’s really happening in the alternative OS world? Other than Linux, OSX, Windows, we get some vapor news of something Amiga related and that’s about it… Most of the time….
There is more news now in the world of Smartphone/Tablet OS than anything else. Now the world is all about iOS, WP7, Android, WebOS, RIM, MeeGo, …
Maybe OSAlert should start to abandon their “alternative” OS nature and drive more into the real thing like the OS’s listed above. Just a suggestion.
To sum it up :
-> Yes, Thom is, by far, the main contributor. Especially for originals. At the moment, I mostly cut my brand new editor’s teeth on PG2 stuff.
-> Kroc and I are not nearly as proficient (nor available) for large-scale original article production. As an example, I’ve been working on something about hobby OS development for more than a week (due to getting back to university and things like that slowing me down), Thom would probably have completed and published it in 3 days or less ^^
-> If you have some ideas to put together in an original, we are open to contributions ! Everything you need is at http://www.osnews.com/submit .
Oh, and by the way…
I’d say that this has already happened. We do not abandon alternative OSs, but since there are few news about them we release more news about the rest.
Edited 2011-01-25 12:27 UTC
I can count almost 30 items by Hadrien in the past 7 days. So no, I don’t think there’s any truth in that comment of his.
I’m curious, why do you bother to read OSAlert?
“I’m curious, why do you bother to read OSAlert?”
Like many others in the world of ‘news’, we often like to document the train wrecks and carnage as they happen. Not all things in life are peachy and keen, factually news is really just olds that is marketed over and over again. OSAlert is no exception, the wreckage as it happens is entertaining.
“I ATEN’T DED”
– Esmerelda Weatherwax
…. and may you have a swift recovery.
Edited 2011-01-25 09:43 UTC
wow. “the most beautiful piece of art ever created in the history of the universe” the flu has really hit you. hard. take some time to rest. “sterkte!”
The fever is probably making him delusional.
It doesn’t.
No, but it gives you a really bad taste in things…
“flu makes him delusional”…
Not very likely the cause, more like genetics or heavy substance abuse.
Yes, heavy substance abuse was fun back in the day. I later on exchanged it for using Windows 3.11 to 9x which kept me awake just as long with constant troubleshooting and reinstalls. Now I^A'm clean, finally, and it^A's boring.
Thanks for embeding an html5 tag instead of flash! It’s the first time I see this…
Take your time and sleep well, the best you can do against the flu.
Could anyone tell me why my article silently disappeared from the list of pending submissions? I didn’t get a complaint or anything, it just disappeared from the list.
There are lots of submissions, so I can’t tell what happened to yours in particular. If you still have the original content at hand, consider e-mailing it to me (hadrien AT osnews.com), and maybe I’ll be able to tell you more.
I didn’t really expect this to happen, so I didn’t make a backup of it unfortunately. In case the article might be stored on your servers somewhere or something, the title should be “Port Gallium3D to Haiku, make $2000!”. If it’s not there, I’ll rewrite it and email the new article to you. Thanks.
Edited 2011-01-25 14:27 UTC
Found nothing about Gallium3D in the database, don’t remember seeing it, and find it highly unlikely that someone else in the team would have deleted something like this. Maybe a bug…
Edited 2011-01-25 14:31 UTC
I just sent the new article to you. Please submit it to OSAlert if it’s OK. Thanks.
Satisfied with this result ?
Edited 2011-01-25 15:51 UTC
Yeah, it’s fine. Thanks.
We dont live in 2002 anymore, times have changed.
http://www.osnews.com/story/23301/Why_OSAlert_Is_No_Longer_OSAlert
Submitters like me have been looking for operating system news. But it’s scarce and frankly not that interesting. Many projects are dormant and if there’s news it’s like this “Version 1.45 bugfixes and improvements”
then after six months “Verson 1.46 bugfixed and improvements”
I frequent a lot of IT technology and OSAlert is one the most interesting.
All the editors here have daytime jobs and still it’s a great site.
Osnews to me is what it should be. A chronicle. Not an occassional whitepaper type site with very long articles but very low news turnover.
Anyway cant you see Osnews has increase it’s news output?
…and have big threads like the previous one.
Or you can actually do some research about operating systems in the mobile space, for example, what makes them tick, what is wrong with them, how Nitdroid performs on N900, how Flash 10.2 is hidden by Adobe so as that it is not installed in many machines Adobe doesn’t like…etc.
Or, you could post some articles regarding interesting operating system technologies, including security models, system-wide garbage collection, automatic persistence, efficient message passing, you know, operating system news.
…and you think I’m rich enough to buy phones as if they’re cakes, why, exactly?
You are rich enough to afford this site, but not rich enough to buy a few handsets?
I wasn’t talking about buying handsets though. I was talking about researching their software, starting from their operating systems. You don’t need to buy the handsets for that.
You can’t write about the details of operating systems and software without using them.
…news second. It’s not like we aren’t inundated with news from a variety of sources everyday anyway.
“…news second. It’s not like we aren’t inundated with news from a variety of sources everyday anyway.”
Couldn’t agree more, and one of the many facts that backs the burning question of why OSAlert and Thom don’t matter.
Maybe nobody at OS/News is good at it, I’m not. How about seeing if you can work together to come up a list of questions (or even asking us) about what you/we would want to ask person X about the OS they either work on or are the visionary on.
Don’t do interviews where you email them questions and have them email back. Those rarely work for well.
Be prepared to let them set the direction of the interview unless it gets really off topic (such as the interviewee saying, “I’m particularly interested in the color of bluejays”. I don’t think I’m interested in that.)
If they get off topic, pull them back in with another question and again let them run with it and then ask another question.
Also be prepared with other questions about where the topics might go AND be prepared with the person being interviewed not being interested in that line of discussions and shelve those questions.
I’ve seen too many interviews where someone has a set list of questions and doesn’t listen to the person being interviewed and they miss a great line of thinking or they bore the poor person half to death asking variation of a theme of questioning the person is definitely not interested in talking about.
I REALLY wish I was good at this as I would try to take the time and see if I could do the interviews. However, I’m not good at doing this. My talents definitely lay elsewhere.
So … If you have someone on staff that you feel could do this, PLEASE have them spend the quality time it takes to do it right and I promise that a good group of us will be fascinated.
Alternate OSs are not dead. The “problem” is that the people running this site are not interested in alternate OSs.
For instance, there is rarely any news on THIS website about OS/2 – eComStation. However, there is definitely news about it on http://www.os2bbs.com/os2news/ and other websites on a daily basis. So there IS news about this OS. OS/News is just not interested in reporting about this OS.
There is rarely any talk about any UNIX other than BSD. Actually there isn’t that much talk about BSD at all.
How about a series of articles talking about the different Linux distributions. HOW and WHY are they different? What is the philosophy, the vision behind each one. Why were they created and where are they going that is different than the other distributions. Are they light or “heavy”. Under which kind of circumstances would I pick X over Y?
How about posting FAKE news. News that is said right up front is fake in order to get people who ordinarily stay hidden would pop up and say, “HEY, THAT ISN’T RIGHT! and will respond with something that IS right AND is interesting.
Poke the bears and lions and make them wake up. Make them angry if you have to in order to get them to respond.
News isn’t always reactionary.
Your submission tab is empty. Why?
I work 60 to 70 hours a week. I jump on here and other sites while I’m waiting for a server to reboot or when compiling programs.
Sorry but no OS stuff. Just proprietary stuff for the org that I work for.
When I’m not working my wife either wants part of my time or a divorce. So far the time I’m not working goes to her, sleep, and sometimes fun.
Yet you are regularly commenting on this website, and you somehow learned about this os2bbs website (btw, if you look in older news, there was something about eCS today)…
Look. I appreciate careful, polished PG2 submissions a lot. But if you don’t have the time and only send a link that’s okay, I’ll write the article myself as I do in those cases. It helps me improve my English
And no, you can’t say that you have the time to comment here but not to copy-paste a link in OSAlert’ submission form. In most modern browsers, opening an OSAlert tab, going to the submission page, and copy-pasting a link to something you’re reading takes a few keystrokes and maybe three clicks. Less than a minute or two of your time.
Edited 2011-01-25 20:14 UTC
If a link is good enough for someone to follow up on, then sure, I can do that. I thought you were referring to articles.
I would think it would be easy to create a list of OSs though and to find out what companies/orgs are working on that, and then to find interesting people in there to interview or possibly to have them write an article. Yes it is harder to find interesting people but if you don’t know, ask us who we would think would be interesting to read an interview or even a profile about.
Look at new orgs like newspapers and tv news. They don’t just have office staff that sit there waiting for them to call me or by looking at the internet to see what they can find. They have reporters and investigators that literally “go out in the field” to find news. I think OS/News needs to do a lot more of that.
Edited 2011-01-26 17:58 UTC
I’ve said this so many times I lost count, but here it goes AGAIN. Sorry for the caps, but it seems this basic stuff simply won’t penetrate some people’s skulls.
WE ARE NOT RICH. WE DO NOT HAVE THE MEANS TO GO OUT ALL DAY, TALK TO PEOPLE, AND ‘FIND’ THE NEWS. THE OSAlert EDITORIAL TEAMIS BASICALLY JUST ME, AND I ACTUALLY HAVE A JOB, A UNIVERSITY CAREER AND A SOCIAL LIFE TO ATTEND.
WE ALSO DO NOT HAVE A RICH PARENT ORGANISATION LIKE ARS, ENGADGET, GIZMODO, ETC. DO.
Get it now? Jesus.
I was going to say a variant of the same thing (albeit without the OSAlert is just me part).
We are not rich, we are not paid, and OSAlert is not a full-time job for us. We have no reporters whose sole task is to keep up with what’s happening in the world outside. That’s why we rely more on the community for this than other newspapers.
But anyway, our community is something which we can rely on
Sorry Thom. I must have missed all of those. It must have been in threads that lost my interest before you posted this. I definitely see it now.
Maybe it would be a good idea to update the FAQ with this information. I for one read FAQs on websites like this. I would put it at the top with a title such as, “Who we are and what we do”. This might stop some of us misunderstanding your resources.
If any website or publication is only waiting for news to come to them instead of going out there and looking for it, you get a lot less news.
We’re not waiting for news to come to us – you are waiting for your news to come to us.
Just to comment my personal experience submitting news.
Once I submitted a news about a new release of Spashtop OS (http://www.splashtop.com/)and never got posted on the site. I really thought that it was a interesting non common OS related news, but it was dismissed.
I will like to know the criteria for a news to get posted or not on the site. What is considered interesting to be on the site and whats not?
Martin
There are no criteria other than practicality:
1. Is it of publishable quality? (very rarely, if ever a problem)
2. Does an editor know enough about the subject to editorialise it? (short items)
3. Is there too much on Pg.2 already?
The biggest limitation right now is that there is not pg.1 items being submitted, just links. This forces the staff to either leave out or demote stories to pg.2 if it’s in an area they personally are not interested in or knowledgable about.
To get on pg.1, please consider expanding the story to 200+ words. It will be much more likely to be published if it falls into an area that we don’t personally know about. E.g. I stick mainly to web-based stories. I can’t write anything meaningful about eComStation unless you do.
Uh oh… Splashtop you say ? Was it this month ? In that case I might be the culprit there.
When I began my work as an editor, I had to discover at some point that if you do something in a wrong way, the backend will swallow the article without any hope of recovery. I trashed a few articles before understanding this. And if I remember well, there was something about Splashtop in the heap.
“When I began my work as an editor, I had to discover at some point that if you do something in a wrong way, the backend will swallow the article without any hope of recovery. I trashed a few articles before understanding this. And if I remember well, there was something about Splashtop in the heap.”
I learned a long time ago not to trust web pages when entering text that is going to take more than a minute or two. I use a text editor, create it in that, then copy and paste into the website.
Well, for ages you could recover something you were typing in Opera simply by using the Back button, and recently Firefox got this feature too, but I had forgotten at the time.
Anyway, what happens is that in the backend, we have a list of pending submissions. We can pick one, read it, then start editing a new article based on it by clicking a button.
What I had not understood at the time is that from the moment you click this button, the submission does not exist in the submission list anymore. And it is not saved elsewhere in the backend. As long as you have not saved it in the backend again by explicitely asking for it, the sole remaining copy of the submission is in your browser.
I discovered it because at some point, screwing up when editing a submission. I wanted to go back to the original version. So I went back to the submission list, and there the harm was done. The submission had vanished. I trashed a few more submissions before I understood what exactly was happening.
There is news!
Apple is changing the screws on the iPad, finally screwing their users in a very physical way!
In dutch, for Thom
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/72175/apple-verzegelt-iphones-na-reparat…
Get well soon!
I’m a long time reader, but just registered.
I like reading OSAlert, and I’m willing to help as I’ve just almost finished my bachelor thesis right now. I’ll submit news when I have something OSAlert hasn’t cover yet.
Keep up the good work, OSAlert team