Kroc Archive

"The failure of Minitel was not one of technology, It was the whole model that was doomed. Basically to set up a service on Minitel, you had to ask permission from France Telecom. You had to go to the old guys who ran the system, and who knew absolutely nothing about innovation. It meant that nothing new could ever happen. Basically, Minitel innovated from 1978 to 1982, and then it stopped." This is what the World Wide Web could one-day look like. Dearth of innovation for the want of permission.

"Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice."

Two weeks ago we covered the news that the Mono development team were let go kicked out by the new owners of Novel, Attachmate, apparently to move operations to Germany. Miguel de Icazza, founder of Mono, has taken this opportunity to break off on his own and has started a new company, Xamarin, to bring commercial .NET development products to iOS and Android.

It's not the return of the OSAlert comic, but it was too good to let pass. Our coverage of the Apple event was minimal this week, so I decided to round the key points up in an illustration...

"The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project."

A mini-tempest has been raging across the web with anger at Mozilla for removing the RSS icon from the Firefox 4 toolbar by default (and moving it to the bookmarks menu). This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, and I had avoided writing about it on OSAlert since the recent furore is often cited to have begun around a personal blog post I wrote, but now things have come to an impasse: "No matter how loudly you shout, what you see in the beta with regard to the feed auto-discovery button is what will ship in Firefox 4". When Mozilla can say they are open to input, but refuse to change in the face of near universal disagreement, we all lose, not just me.

I know that there's a number of readers who don't like it when OSAlert covers political topics, I'm one of them. These political upheavals however spell danger for operating system hobbyists and so I dedicate this article to framing the political news within the context of what we are here to read about: operating systems.

"The Apache Software Foundation concludes that that JCP is not an open specification process - that Java specifications are proprietary technology that must be licensed directly from the spec lead under whatever terms the spec lead chooses; that the commercial concerns of a single entity, Oracle, will continue to seriously interfere with and bias the transparent governance of the ecosystem; that it is impossible to distribute independent implementations of JSRs under open source licenses such that users are protected from IP litigation by expert group members or the spec lead; and finally, the EC is unwilling or unable to assert the basic power of their role in the JCP governance process."

"I had reduced the size of my ongoing Z80 project down to something more wieldy by using CPLD chips, but it was still a bit too bulky to fit into an acceptably sized case. The next step was to look into FPGAs and see where they could take it. One thing led to another and I ended up building a self contained post modern home computer laptop.. thing." Kroc: Can I haz port of BBC BASIC plz?

In response to Jean-Louis Glassee's article "The OS Doesn't Matter..." I wrote quite simply: the future of the browser wars is he who integrates with the OS best. This phrase came from my article lambasting Microsoft's use of HTML for their IE9 jump lists, which caused quite a stir. In the wave of ever increasing web browser capability, the operating system is going to matter to web users more than it ever has before.

"I am truly shocked that so many people are being duped by BlackBerry's recent announcement of their tablet, the PlayBook. I have read endless comments from people who are saying they can't wait to get this tablet computer. Well, I think I have some bad news for you folks. There is no evidence that the PlayBook exist as advertised. Why do I say this? I will make it brief..."

Technologists fear (and loathe) that which has no purpose. Why must some insist in deriding an operating system like Haiku that doesn't fit their particular needs or precepts of what has a purpose, when, it's advanced enough to have a decent web-browser and productivity software? Today I shall be further offending these people's tastes with a look into LoseThos--a pure 64-bit, preemptive-multitasking, multicored PC operating system that is intended to be used as a secondary operating system for user's recreational programming on their best PC while dual booting a primary system such as Linux or Windows where they do networking and other modern activities such as multimedia. Yes, LoseThos has no networking, no security of any kind, and VGA graphics; but it certainly has a purpose: to be fun! (for programmers, at least)

From BBC News: "A row has erupted after Blizzard - the publishers of the popular online game World of Warcraft - announced that users on its site forums would have to post under their real names. The firm say the move is to put an end to heated online arguments and topics started purely to cause trouble. But users reacted angrily, citing concerns about safety and privacy." The take away quote: "one Blizzard employee posted his real name on the forums, saying that there was no risk to users, and the experiment went drastically wrong. Within five minutes, users had got hold of his telephone number, home address, photographs of him and a ton of other information. The post and topic has since been removed from the Blizzard forum."

Microsoft have released IE9 Platform Preview 3, an application that gives developers access to the IE9 rendering engine (it's not a full browser). In this update they have added hardware accelerated HTML5 Video, Canvas, Fonts (using WOFF) and big improvements in JavaScript with ES5, DOM Traversal, L2 and L3 events and 83/100 Acid3 score. It sits between Firefox and Chrome 6 on JavaScript speed, but outperforms every browser in real tests.