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Operating Systems

Submission + - Symbian soon to be Free Open Source Software (infoworld.com)

Submitted by xlotlu
xlotlu writes: InfoWorld reports that Symbian is to become Free Open Source Software in a matter of hours.

108 packages will be available at Symbian's website, mostly under the Eclipse Public License, in what is probably the largest open source migration project in history: more than 40 millions line of code representing 10 years of development, currently in use on 330 million devices.

In the Wired coverage of the story, Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, picks on the Android platform, saying that "About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more. And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary."
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun boss Schwartz signs off with a strange Tweet (pcpro.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Barence
Barence writes: Jonathan Schwartz, the outgoing boss of Sun Microsystems, has signed off with an unusual update to his Twitter account. Confusion remains over whether he left the company of his own volition or was asked to leave, and Schwartz's final Tweet certainly suggests a hint of bitterness at the manner of his departure. "Today's my last day at Sun," Schwartz tweeted. "I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."
Operating Systems

Submission + - ReactOS gets Wine infusion (phoronix.com)

Submitted by xlotlu
xlotlu writes: ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system, binary-compatible with Microsoft Windows. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability.

Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be a much too complex task, holding the project back. Given the deficiencies of the current implementation, developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch, drawing heavily from the Wine project.

Bragin's announcement on the ReactOS mailing list makes a compelling argument for this decision. Here is to hoping this will boost development for both projects.

Comment Funny as it may be... (Score 3, Insightful) 208

by xlotlu (#30647184) Attached to: 2009 Darwin Award Winners Announced

There's two sides to every story. Watch this piece of reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PbFeIxrilI -- Don't you start feeling for that guy? Don't you hope he gets rescued? Well, it's the same priest that got the Darwin Award, so how is this possible? Moments ago you were amused by his idiocy...

Of course the video comes packaged in church marketing, so it's supposed to make you feel like that. But would you still call him an idiot? Or rather a stupid but noble man?

I for one would call him naive. Naive for the cause he chose, naive thinking he'll be alright after getting drifted away, naive not bailing out when he had the opportunity. And that got him killed, but he didn't give up because he thought his cause was just.

Maybe we should take pride in such naivety, instead of branding it as utter idiocy.
Data Storage

Archiving Digital Artwork For Museum Purchase? 266

Posted by timothy from the just-put-something-on-youtube dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I am an artist working with 3d software to create animations and digital prints. For now my work just gets put on screening DVDs and BluRays and the original .mov and 3d files get backed up. But museums and big art collectors do want to purchase these animations. However as we all know archival DVDs are not really archival. So I want to ask the Slashdot readers, what can I give to the museum when they acquire my digital work for their collection so that it can last and be seen long after I am dead? No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet, so I thought Slashdot readers may have an idea. These editions can be sold for a large amount of money, so it doesn't have to be a cheap solution."

Comment Fast BIOS done before. (Score 2, Informative) 437

by xlotlu (#29538501) Attached to: New Phoenix BIOS Starts Windows 7 Boot in 1 Second

This is hardly some major breakthrough.

Asus came up with a nice hack on their EeePC dubbed "Boot Booster". It dumps the system state right after POST on a HDD partition, and on subsequent boots it reads that straight into memory, so you have 1-second "POSTs" going straight to the bootloader.

And then you have coreboot, which is as fast as the machine it runs on: without taking any shortcuts, it can do all the grunt work in 3 seconds or so.

Maybe the breakthrough is Windows booting fast, but that's a different story.
Google

Published Google Docs To Appear In Search Engines 62

Posted by kdawson from the expectation-of-privacy dept.
dotancohen writes "Google plans to make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site. No official announcement appears to have been made, just a short blog post on the subject by a Google employee in a help forum. (One comment on the ghacks.net post linked above says that email was sent to the admins of Google Apps accounts.) There does not seem to be any way to make an individual document not crawlable; you can only un-publish it, at which point Web links to it will not work any more." The move makes sense from one point of view — Google is just making crawlable a document linked from another crawlable document — but it's likely to catch a lot of people by surprise.
Linux

Submission + - Nokia will use KOffice in Maemo 5 (trolltech.com)

Submitted by
xlotlu
xlotlu writes: "Thomas Zander of Trolltech announced on the Qt Labs Blog that Nokia has created a document viewer based on KOffice 2.1 RC1 for their upcoming Maemo 5 OS.

Dubbed Freemantle, the document viewer is to be released as open source, and will be demoed at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam (starting on October 9th). Maemo 5 will be first used in Nokia's N900 "mobile computer"."

Submission + - ARM Joins The Linux Foundation (linuxfoundation.org)

Submitted by
Xerfas
Xerfas writes: "ARM Joins The Linux Foundation
With more than 10 billion ARM processors shipped in mobile devices to date, ARM furthers community collaboration
SAN FRANCISCO, September 15, 2009 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that ARM (LSE: ARM; Nasdaq: ARMH) has become a member.
ARM designs the technology that lies at the heart of advanced digital products, from wireless, networking and consumer entertainment solutions to imaging, automotive, security and storage devices."
The Courts

Lawyer Demands Jury Stops Googling 517

Posted by CmdrTaco from the justice-has-no-wifi dept.
coomaria noted an unsurprising story about how courts are having problems with jurors Googling during cases. As anyone who has ever been called for jury duty knows, you aren't allowed to get outside information about the case you are hearing, but apparently the iPhone makes it far too easy to ignore this advice. A lawyer is trying to get jurors to sign a form explicitly stating they won't "use 'personal electronic and media devices' to research or communicate about the case." Of course, I'm not exactly sure why a juror should need to sign something for your iPhone but not a newspaper.
Science

Darwin's Voyage Done Over, Live 147

Posted by timothy from the it-was-live-the-first-time-too dept.
thrill12 writes "Almost 178 years ago, Charles Darwin set sail in the HMS Beagle, to do the now famous explorations that formed the basis for Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. Now, a group of British and Dutch scientists, journalists and artists set sail again to redo the voyage of the Beagle. This time, they are taking modern equipment with them and they have live connections through Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Flickr. As they re-explore, and (re)discover, we can join that 8-month-long trip, live over the internet."

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