OSNews

Last updated
OSNews
OSnews logo.png
Type of site
Online newspaper
Available inEnglish
EditorThom Holwerda (managing editor), David Adams (contributor)
URL www.osnews.com
RegistrationOptional
Launched1997;27 years ago (1997)
Current statusActive
OSnews as of 2012 OSnews website.png
OSnews as of 2012

OSNews is a computing online newspaper. It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. [1] As of 2014, its managing editor is Thom Holwerda, who joined in 2005. [2]

Contents

OSnews has been referenced by TIME , [3] Ars Technica, [4] [5] Wired , [6] [7] Computerworld , [8] [9] LifeHacker, [10] [11] [12] Linux.com, [13] OMG! Ubuntu! [14] and lwn.net. [15] Wired described OSnews as "an alternative operating system Web magazine", [16] and in 2011 Holwerda noted that "while the alternative operating systems scene might no longer be the prime focus of OSNews due to a lack of activity in that field, it's still where our heart lies." [17]

Staff

Function

Besides its main site, OSNews previously detected hundreds of mobile browsers and handsets [1] and redirected them to a specially formatted cHTML version of the website at mobile.osnews.com. Eugenia Loli-Queru, the author of this script, open sourced it in 2008. [21]

The editors contribute original articles and manage the submissions of news bits, articles, editorial comments and reviews that are submitted by readers. OSNews serves daily 275,000 page views on average (as of October 2005).[ citation needed ]

Like other technology news sites such as Slashdot, it has a free user/subscription model, and allows viewers to add commentary to articles. In 2005, OSNews published version 3 of its website, which includes an all-new commenting engine. Instead of reporting comments to moderators, this system now relies on votes. Readers can vote comments up or down, and readers can set a score threshold, which can eliminate the down-voted comments from view.

In late 2007, version 4 was launched, which completely overhauled the backend of the website, and was followed by version 4.1 [22] which added a brand new theme and look to the website.

On February 12, 2007, managing editor Thom Holwerda published the 1.0 version of the OSNews Style Guide. [23] This style guide is licensed under a Creative Commons license so that other websites and publications can use and adapt the guide to their liking. OSNews is one of the few sites of its kind with such a style guide.

In January 2008, Thom Holwerda launched Focus Shift, [24] a webcomic based on the various news items OSNews carries. Focus Shift was updated tri-weekly, until it was discontinued in mid-2008.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BeOS</span> Discontinued operating system for personal computers

BeOS is a discontinued operating system for personal computers that was developed by Be Inc. It was conceived for the company's BeBox personal computer which was released in 1995. BeOS was designed for multitasking, multithreading, and a graphical user interface. The OS was later sold to OEMs, retail, and directly to users; its last version was released as freeware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Galeon</span> Discontinued web browser

Galeon is a discontinued Gecko-based web browser that was created by Marco Pesenti Gritti with the goal of delivering a consistent browsing experience to GNOME desktop environment. It gained some popularity in the early 2000s due to its speed, flexibility in configuration and features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MenuetOS</span> Operating system

MenuetOS is an operating system with a monolithic preemptive, real-time kernel written in FASM assembly language. The system also includes video drivers. It runs on 64-bit and 32-bit x86 architecture computers. Its author is Ville M. Turjanmaa. It has a graphical desktop, games, and networking abilities. One distinctive feature is that it fits on one 1.44 MB floppy disk.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iyonix PC</span> Acorn-clone personal computer

The Iyonix PC was an Acorn-clone personal computer sold by Castle Technology and Iyonix Ltd between 2002 and 2008. According to news site Slashdot, it was the first personal computer to use Intel's XScale processor. It ran RISC OS 5.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SkyOS</span> Operating system

SkyOS is a discontinued prototype commercial, proprietary, graphical desktop operating system written for the x86 computer architecture. As of January 30, 2009 development was halted with no plans to resume its development. In August 2013, developer Robert Szeleney announced the release of a public beta on the SkyOS website. This allows public users to download a Live CD of the SkyOS operating system, for testing and to optionally install the system.

MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the Efika and mobileGT. Since MorphOS 2.4, Apple's Mac mini G4 is supported as well, and with the release of MorphOS 2.5 and MorphOS 2.6 the eMac and Power Mac G4 models are respectively supported. The release of MorphOS 3.2 added limited support for Power Mac G5. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as the Ambient desktop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ReactOS</span> Free incomplete Windows NT-like operating system

ReactOS is a free and open-source operating system for i586/amd64 personal computers intended to be binary-compatible with computer programs and device drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows. ReactOS has been noted as a potential open-source drop-in replacement for Windows and for its information on undocumented Windows APIs.

Light Weight Kernel Threads (LWKT) is a computer science term and from DragonFly BSD in particular. LWKTs differ from normal kernel threads in that they can preempt normal kernel threads. According to Matt Dillon, DragonFlyBSD creator:

The LWKT scheduler is responsible for actually running a thread. It uses a fixed priority scheme, but the fixed priorities are differentiating major subsystems, not user processes. For example, hardware interrupt threads have the highest priority, followed by software interrupts, kernel-only threads, then finally user threads. A user thread either runs at user-kernel priority, or a user thread runs at user priority.

DragonFly does preempt, it just does it very carefully and only under particular circumstances. An LWKT interrupt thread can preempt most other threads, for example. This mimics what FreeBSD-4.x already did with its spl/run-interrupt-in-context-of-current-process mechanism. What DragonFly does *NOT* do is allow a non-interrupt kernel thread to preempt another non-interrupt kernel thread.

The mainframe z/OS Operating system supports a similar mechanism, called SRB.

SRB's represent requests to execute a system service routine. SRB's are typically created when one address space detects an event that affects a different address space; they provide one of several mechanisms for asynchronous inter-address space communication for programs running on z/OS.

An SRB is similar to a Process Control Block (PCB), in that it identifies a unit of work to the system. Unlike a PCB, an SRB cannot "own" storage areas. In a multiprocessor environment, the SRB routine, after being scheduled, can be dispatched on another processor and can run concurrently with the scheduling program. The scheduling program can continue to do other processing in parallel with the SRB routine. Only programs running in kernel mode can create an SRB.

The Windows Operating System knows a similar light weight thread mechanism named "fibers". Fibers are scheduled by an application program. The port of the CICS Transaction Server to the Windows platform uses fibers, somewhat analogous to the use of "enclaves" under z/OS.

In UNIX, "kernel threads" have two threads, one is the core thread, one is the user thread.

PearPC is a PowerPC platform emulator capable of running many PowerPC operating systems, including pre-Intel versions of Mac OS X, Darwin, and Linux on x86 hardware. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can be used on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and other systems based on POSIX-X11. The first official release was made on May 10, 2004. The software was often used to run early versions of OS X on Windows XP computers.

ZETA, earlier yellowTAB ZETA, was an operating system formerly developed by yellowTAB of Germany based on the Be Operating System developed by Be Inc.; because of yellowTAB's insolvency, ZETA was later being developed by an independent team of which little was known, and distributed by magnussoft. As of February 28, 2007 the current and last version of ZETA was 1.5.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A9home</span>

The A9home was a niche small-form-factor desktop computer running RISC OS Adjust32. It was officially unveiled at the 2005 Wakefield Show, and is the second commercial ARM-based RISC OS computer to run a 32-bit version of RISC OS. When the Iyonix PC was withdrawn from sale, the A9home remained the only hardware to be manufactured specifically for the RISC OS marketplace.

Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is known in the free software movement due to his work on HAL, GNOME, Metacity, GConf, and D-Bus.

Zune is an object-oriented GUI toolkit which is part of the AROS project and nearly a clone, at both an API and look-and-feel level, of Magic User Interface (MUI), a well-known Amiga shareware product by Stefan Stuntz.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam440ep</span> Type of motherboard

Sam440, also known by Sam or its codename Samantha, is a line of modular motherboards produced by the Italian company ACube Systems Srl. The Sam440ep version is a motherboard based on the PowerPC 440EP system-on-a-chip processor which includes a double-precision FPU. It is made by AMCC. Their primary targets are the industrial and embedded markets, running operating systems such as Linux and AmigaOS 4.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pinta (software)</span>

Pinta is an open-source, cross-platform bitmap image drawing and editing program inspired by Paint.NET, a similar image editing program which is limited to Microsoft Windows. Pinta has more features than Microsoft Paint. Compared with open-source image editor GIMP, Pinta is simpler and has fewer features.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Red Star OS</span> North Korean Linux-based operating system

Red Star OS is a North Korean Linux distribution, with development first starting in 1998 at the Korea Computer Center (KCC). Prior to its release, computers in North Korea typically used Red Hat Linux, and later switched to modified versions of Microsoft Windows with North Korean language packs installed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Access (company)</span>

ACCESS CO., LTD., founded in April 1979 and incorporated in February 1984 in Tokyo, Japan, by Arakawa Toru and Kamada Tomihisa, is a company providing a variety of software for connected and mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, video game consoles and set top boxes.

<i>No Gravity</i> (video game) 1990 video game

NoGravity is a space flight simulation and space shooter developed by realtech VR, a Montreal based, French Canadian independent computer games company. The game was ported to many platforms over the years as it was open sourced in 2005. NoGravity drew comparisons with the Wing Commander series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM ThinkPad Power Series</span>

The IBM ThinkPad Power Series(800/820/821/822/823/850/851/860) is a laptop series from the ThinkPad line that was manufactured by IBM. It is based on the PowerPC architecture.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing". OSNews. Retrieved 2013-01-05.
  2. "User Page: Thom_Holwerda". OS News. Retrieved 2014-01-05.
  3. Newman, Jared (29 February 2012). "Raspberry Pi $25 Computer on Sale, but Good Luck Getting One". Time.com. Retrieved 2014-01-05.
  4. Salter, Jim. "OSNews has published an introduction to programming on the Haiku operating system. It describes the platform architecture and basics of application development". Arstechnica.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  5. Fisher, Ken (2002-09-30). "OS News reviews Red Hat 8.0". Arstechnica.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  6. James Glave (2013-03-28). "Think Different: Hack a New Mac OS". Wired.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  7. James Glave (2013-03-28). "An OS Is As an OS Does - Any Questions?". Wired.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  8. Ryan Faas (2009-08-28). "What's the real deal with 64-bit computing in Snow Leopard?". Computerworld. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  9. Ken Mingis (2004-11-07). "Macintosh Highlights From Around the Web (April-June 2004)". Computerworld. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  10. 12/24/09 7:00am 12/24/09 7:00am (24 December 2009). "Cygwin 1.7 Adds Windows 7 Support and Many Improvements". Lifehacker.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  11. 4/26/10 4:00pm 4/26/10 4:00pm (2010-04-26). "Remains of the Day: Say Goodbye to the Floppy Disk Edition". Lifehacker.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  12. 4/16/09 5:00pm 4/16/09 5:00pm (17 April 2009). "Remains of the Day: XP is Officially Old Now Edition". Lifehacker.com. Retrieved 2014-01-23.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  13. "Maemo To Switch To Qt". Linux.com. 2009-07-06. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  14. Joey-Elijah Sneddon (2009-10-19). "Re-enable Missing Icons In Ubuntu 9.10". Omgubuntu.co.uk. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  15. "Genode 10.08 Comes with Gallium3D, MadWifi, Qt4.6.3 (OSNews) and". Lwn.net. 2010-08-11. Retrieved 2014-01-23.
  16. "An OS Is As an OS Does - Any Questions?". Archived from the original on 2012-09-17. Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  17. "OSNews Browser & OS Stats" . Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  18. "User Page: Thom_Holwerda" . Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  19. "User Page: Eugenia" . Retrieved 2014-01-11.
  20. "What happened here?".
  21. "Open Sourcing OSNews' Mobile Detection Kit". osnews.com. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
  22. "At Long Last... A New Look for OSNews". osnews.com. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
  23. "The OSNews Style Guide v1.0". osnews.com. Retrieved 2014-04-04.
  24. "OSNews Announces Focus Shift". osnews.com. Retrieved 2014-04-04.