Such security is really consumer grade, its secure in the real world but may not be secure enough for driving Top most secret tasks like the ones Government agencies like NSA is involved with.

The National Security Agency (NSA) released the first version of their custom build of Google’s popular OS, called Security Enhanced Android. The system is designed to minimize the impact of security holes on Android. The SEAndroid project is enabling the use of SELinux in Android in order to limit the damage that can be done by flawed or malicious apps.

SEAndroid is born with robust support for:

• Per-file security labeling support for yaffs2,
• Filesystem images (yaffs2 and ext4) labeled at build time,
• Kernel permission checks controlling Binder IPC,
• Labeling of service sockets and socket files created by init,
• Labeling of device nodes created by ueventd,
• Flexible, configurable labeling of apps and app data directories,
• Userspace permission checks controlling use of the Zygote socket commands,
• Minimal port of SELinux userspace,
• SELinux support for the Android toolbox,
• Small TE policy written from scratch for Android,
• Confined domains for system services and apps,
• Use of MLS categories to isolate apps.

You can integrate SEAndroid into your own Custom ROM. First, you should make sure that you are able to successfully download, build and run the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) source code by following the instructions starting from http://source.android.com/source/initializing.html

Once you have successfully built and run AOSP, you can obtain a local manifest specifying the SE Android git trees from http://selinuxproject.org/~seandroid/local_manifest.xml. Copy this file to the .repo subdirectory of your AOSP clone, and then run repo sync. Your tree should now include the SE Android modifications. For further dev info, visit the official Wiki.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage, Google+:

There was time  when Desktop PC was considered to be the major part of the Computers segment. Times have changed, thanks to new powerful Clouds and computing grids, servers now form a big part of the computers.

On Desktop PCs, Windows is still holds the majority, followed by OSX which forms around 10% of the desktop market. But 2011 and 2012 are the years of smartphones and tablets, a domain where Windows has failed to compete with Linux based OS: Android.

In this article, we will cover the Linux Growth rate, Trends, Infographics for recent years.

Best metrics for popularity of an OS are Virus and the Games. Both of them are on the rise for Linux. Lets look at how Linux is doing in each computing segment.

Linux in Desktop PCs

Windows wins here, Linux loses by a large margin. Linux Desktop market share is nearly 0.83%  where as Microsoft Windows 7 claims the major share of 42.65% while the other releases of Windows XP and Vista claim 36.44% and 10.88%. However, beyond these numbers, the trend is somewhat bright for Linux. In the beginning of 2011, Linux was only 0.74% which rose to 0.83% by the end of the year. Its slow, but its going up. Same goes for OSX, but windows share is gradually falling.

Linux in Servers

Windows servers lead in the market share over Linux Servers but the trend is shifting towards Linux flavors. First quarter of 2010 in terms of units sold, Windows had a 75.3% market share, (1,379,487 units) compared to 20.8% for Linux (380,429 units) and 3.6% (65,451 units) for Unix.

When it comes to revenue, as you would expect, Windows Server-based systems have an even bigger lead. In the fourth quarter, Windows servers accounted for 48.9% of the market ($5.1 billion), compared to 16.2% ($1.7 billion) for Linux, and 22.2% ($2.3 billion) for Unix.

The truth is, both Windows and Linux will continue to thrive in the server market, and Windows will continue to dominate. Linux fans may like to think they’ll dethrone Windows, but this latest report is one more piece of evidence that’s not likely to happen.

Linux in Mobile devices: Smartphones, Tablets

2011 & 2012 are years of Mobile. People use smartphones more than they use desktops, so it s the most important OS of all.

In nutshell, Smartphone market is divided into Android, iOS or Blackberry. Android is based on the Linux Kernel and is by far the most popular smartphone OS in the world, with Symbian on the steep fall. According to the Global Stat Counter, Android took off with a 13.6% market share in December 2010 and rose to market share of 21.83% by the end of 2011. The numbers speaks for itself, Google is activating 700,000 new devices everyday, this doesn’t include unofficial, non-market android devices.

For iOS its started with 23.57%  and went down to 22% of mobile OS share in 2011. Windows is no where to be seen.

Linux has already won over Windows, smartphones alone take Linux market share to be higher than no. of windows PCs. Android is growing with over millions of apps for the OS already available in the appMarket, with 400,000 apps already.

Mobile OS usage:

Though 2011 was another year for iPad, the tech world witnessed some very fine Android Honeycomb devices; namely Samsung Galaxy Tab, ASUS Transformer, ASUS Transformer Prime, Motorola Xoom and ASUS Slider. And in the horde of tablets (about 45 notable tablets) there were only 5 tablets to have Windows OS, and unfortunately all of them failed to find any place in market. Tablets in 2011 aided with Windows OS were HP Slate 500, ASUS Eee Slate, Fujitsu Stylistic, MSI WindPad 110W and Acer Iconia W500.

Here’s an Infographic for Growth of Linux in last 20 years, every milestone detailed:

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizeron Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage, Google+:

Soon after the Oracle-Sun merger, James decided to move on and had being onto his night hacks, not working for a particular company. This year, he joined Google in pursuit of bigger ambitions. He quotes:

“I’ve surprised myself and made another career change. I had a great time at Google, met lots of interesting people, but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous, and after much anguish decided to leave Google.”

This Tuesday, he announced that he has moved on to Liquid Robotics, where he is chief software architect. He has solid belief in this startup and claims:

“They have a growing fleet of autonomous vehicles that rove the ocean collecting data from a variety of onboard sensors and uploading it to the cloud. The robots have a pile of satellite uplink/GSM/WiMax communication gear and redundant GPS units”

Gosling will be involved in both onboard software for sensing, navigation, and autonomy, as well as in the data center, dealing with rush of data:

“The current systems work well, but they have a variety of issues that I look forward to working on. This is going to be a lot of fun.”

“Liquid Robotics tackles a rocket science problem that does good for the world and is incurably cool, Liquid Robotics can totally change the way we look at oceans. We’ll be able to get a wide variety of detailed data more cheaply and pervasively than any other way. It involves a large data problem and a large-scale control problem, both of which are fascinating to me and have been passions of mine for years.”

It would be fascinating to see how a startup evolves with this mastermind.

via LiquidR pressRelease [pdf]

We write about Open Source, Programming, Java, Latest Tech news as they happen, get them @geeknizer on Twitter or Facebook Fanpage or subscribe below:

Oracle announced this morning that Java 7 has matured because of the hard work done by open review and extensive collaboration between Oracle engineers and members of the worldwide Java ecosystem.

“Java 7 is the release everybody has been waiting for quite a long time,” said Ben Evans of the London Java Community (LJC). Evans, who also is the LJC’s representative on the Java Standard Edition/Enterprise Edition (Java SE/EE) Executive Committee, added that Java 7 is “an enabler” that will give developers more options for building better Java applications.

Java 7 New Features

Java 7 gives the Java platform a significant facelift not just in performance benchmarks but also on bunch of new features. Below are the features, enhancements in detail:

Full feature set is available here, you also checkout other features that were included to Java 7 a while ago.

Dynamic Language Performance Boost

Java 7 gets a new InvokeDynamic feature, enhancing the support for dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python and JavaScript to run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). InvokeDynamic is responsible for making these languages trun at a much faster speeds on top of JVM.

The JVM was obviously designed for Java, and all the invocation modes are organised around Java semantics, however, low-level support and a stronger under girding for other language features has now been officially added to JVM.

API for Parallel Programming / Multicore programming

Java Development Kit (JDK) 7 also features a new API for parallel programming or building applications for multicore systems. The new Fork/Join Framework enables developers to break down problems into subtasks that can be executed in parallel across a number of processors.

New I/O optimized for different Filesystems

Java 7 adds a new I/O for working with different file systems, new networking and security features, and backward compatibility with other versions of the platform.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@taranfx on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

The announcement of Linux 3.0 comes from the founder Linus Torvalds himself as he mailed it to the Linux Kernel Mailing list.

“As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it’s simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux. In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than most, and apart from some excitement from RCU I’d have called it really smooth.”

Beyond the numbering scheme change, this kernel includes POSIX alarm timer support, a just-in-time compiler for BPF packet filters, a new sendmmsg() system call, ICMP sockets, the merging of the Xen backend driver (completing the long process of getting Xen Dom0 support into the kernel), namespace file descriptors, and more.

Other New Features in Linul Kernel 3.0

See the KernelNewbies 3.0 page for lots of details.

Skype is the undisputed leader in VoIP services both in quality and security. For years, hackers had been working hard to crack the strong Encryption Skype Protocol uses to Obfuscate its voice packets.

Encryption was so good that almost no one has been able to reverse engineer it out of the numerous Skype binaries.

The developer claims that most of hard things have already been done for 1.x/3.x/4.x versions of skype arithmetic voice compression. The source code is now available along with the binaries. This is a working code for “send message to skype”. However, it is based on old skype 1.4 version protocol, which no longer compatible with the server.

Skype Downloads:
skype_part1_binaries.zip
skype_part2_ida.zip
skype_part3_source.zip

If you look carefully at the source code, you will observe that it uses strong AES and RSA encryption with public key infrastructure. You can also download it via torrent.

Checkout the discussions at hackernews.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us @geeknizeron Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Qemu is popular and open source emulator that lets you virtualize nearly any OS on any other OS. Qemu has now been ported to a new platform: Browsers. Most modern browsers like Chrome 11 and Firefox 4 can run this javascript based Emulator making it possible to run an actual Linux in your browser.

Since javascript is slower than native code, one would expect slower boot times for the Linux, but it boots amazingly fast. With a very minimal download and couple of seconds, your browser window boots into an actual Linux based on commandline. Ofcourse CLI-only makes the OS snappy for executing all your shell commands.

If you aren’t excited so far, read this again: “A PC emulator written in javascript, and running solely in browser“.

Try it now

Technical details of the Javascript based Qemu (read full)

This PC emulator is written entirely in Javascript. The emulated hardware is:

• a 32 bit x86 compatible CPU
• a 8259 Programmble Interrupt Controller
• a 8254 Programmble Interrupt Timer
• a 16450 UART.

The code is written in pure Javascript using Typed Arrays which are available in recent browsers. It was tested with Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 on Linux, Window and Mac. It doesn’t work with Opera.

CPU Emulation

The code is inspired from my x86 dynamic translator present in QEMU, but there are important differences because here it is an interpreter. The exact restrictions of the emulated CPU are:

1. No FPU/MMX/SSE
2. No segment limit and right checks when accessing memory (Linux does not rely on them for memory protection, so it is not an issue. The x86 emulator of QEMU has the same restriction).
3. No CS/DS/ES/SS segment overrides. FS/GS overrides are implemented because they are needed for Thread Local Storage in Linux.
4. A few seldom used instructions are missing (BCD operations, BOUND, …).
5. No single-stepping
6. No real mode
7. No 16 bit protected mode (although most 16 bit instructions are present because they are needed to run 32 bit programs).

Most of these restrictions are easy to remove.

Linux distro & kernel

It runs 2.6.20 Linux kernel with configuration available here.

Boot

The disk image is just a ram disk image loaded at boot time. It contains a filesystem generated with Buildroot containing BusyBox. I added my toy C compiler TinyCC and my unfinished but usable emacs clone QEmacs.

Javascript Performance

PC emulator is about 2 times slower using V8 than Jaeger Monkey on 32bit desktops.

I still have to try this on mobile browsers, let me know if that works for you.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Update: Keynote Video now available (scroll to bottom)

Here’s a list of things that were announced:

1. Movie Rentals:

You can now rent and watch movies on any android device or via browser as low as $1.99. The rental is valid for 30 days and 24hours after starting the video first time. You can even download the whole movie, and watch it offline on your tablet or phone.

2. Android Honeycomb 3.1

• Full support for Google TV along with Tablets. Same UI, same apps. New Google TV PArtners: Samsung, Vizio in addition to Logitech, Sony.
• Resizable widgets on homescreen, plus other ui improvements.
• USB host mode that will let you connect any USB device with your Honeycomb device beit be  importing photos from your digital camera, or an Xbox 360 controller.
• Google’s new Movies app that will let you rent thousands of movies from the Android market, and it will be available on Google TVs as well
• New Apps: Books
• New graphical transitions, animations, more GPU powered (hardware accelerated), faster, better UI.
• Data storage encryption.

3. Google Music

• A free beta service for you to upload 20,000 songs to google’s cloud, free of cost
• Playback anywhere: Browser, any android phone, Tablet.
• Cached locally on phone/tablet.
• iTunes, Media player compatible desktop clients that syncs your playlists.
• “No wires, no painful syncing — it’s all just available instantly.”

4. Android IceCream Sandwich (Android 4.0)

• Unified for Smartphones + Tablets goodbye fragmentation
• New innovative features like face-tracking and camera focus shifting based on voice recognition.

5.  Guaranteed updates:

Manufacturers and carriers committed to making sure their Android devices receive the very latest updates. All four major US carriers (and Vodafone) as well as HTC, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG and Motorola are on board, and all will guarantee you timely upgrades to the latest version of Android for eighteen months after release, provided the hardware’s capable.

6.  Android Hardware accessory support:

• Use any external hardware/accessory with your Android device e.g. workout machine or a massage chair.
• Full sport for DIY Arduino based hardware projects using ADK.
• Several hardware accessories to be available soon.

7.  Android@Home

• Google wants to think of “every appliance in your home” as a potential accessory for your phone. this brings endless possibilities. You cna do nasty stuff like turning on and off based on calendar events, applications talking to washing machines, games automatically adjusting for mood lighting, and basically little green dudes taking care of all the menial duties in your house.
• One amazing demo was a concept, Android-powered device hub called Tungsten. Using NFC tag embedded into CD cases the device was able to detect the CD and add it to your library. Another touch and it started automatically.

Google has really taken a step further in Openness of Android, the excitement is sky high. Keynote video after a break!

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@geeknizer on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Ruthless Software Patents are Evil

The tech world has recently seen remarkable number of instances driven by patent litigations, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to decelerate innovation. The problem with it is that most Patents are held with people/companies that have never actually materialized any of it. The patent system  should instead concentrate on rewarding patents to those innovators who create the most useful applications from ideas, for the good of the society.

Google is taking a step here to lighten things up, both in the best interest of the company’s products and for its partners. Google has bought all of Nortel‘s remaining patents and applications for $900 Million for a total of 6,000 patents covering wired, wireless and digital communications technologies. Google would get patents for wireless, 4G, data networking, optical, voice, semiconductors and other telecom areas.

What would Google Do with Telecom patents? Google would use these patents to innovate in its own products like Android, Chrome and let anyone in the Open Source community play with all of it. In other words, these patents will now be owned by everyone, thereby not restricting in sort of innovation, which could have been stuck for years.

Google adds:

Today, Nortel selected our bid as the “stalking-horse bid,” which is the starting point against which others will bid prior to the auction. If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate. In the absence of meaningful reform, we believe it’s the best long-term solution for Google, our users and our partners.

O yeah! Openness, the way to go. But what would Google do with the non-related Telecom patents? Build another Gigabit fibre ISP? We would have to wait for that.

We write latest and greatest in Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Tablets, Android,  Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@taranfx on Twitter OR on Facebook Fanpage:

Nokia diverted its plan towards new Open source mobile OS, MeeGo. The strategy had big backing from Intel but it never paved off, and Nokia nearly ditched the future of its own OS. Now that Nokia has moved to Windows Phone 7, Nokia would no longer support existing Symbian OS devices, but would continue to play tits n bits with the code. ITs of course a good time to Open source the whole of project and let innovators from around the globe pitch in.

Nokia is now announcing that the Symbian code has been fully Open sourced and is available at symbian.nokia.com. The transition phase is pretty much in works, but once done collab.symbian.nokia.com will have full documentation & tools available for developers.

The documentation page shows “coming soon” for all but the GIT repository guide. However, any interested and informed parties can always go and contribue to the Symbian Wiki.

According to Nokia’s head of open source, Petra Soderling:

“We have been working hard to turn most Symbian Foundation era materials into the new framework – for example, checking ownerships and use of rights for masses of documents – and are proud to announce that almost all of the source code is now uploaded to collab.symbian.nokia.com. The few remaining source files, tools and documents will be uploaded over the next few weeks.”

The situation surrounding contributing code back to Symbian’s source code. She responded by stating:

“As we committed when the Symbian Foundation announced its plans to ramp down, Nokia is offering Symbian through an alternative, open and direct model for those who wish to use the platform. We encourage potential collaborators to discuss with the package owners at Nokia if they have enhancements that are really useful and they believe could be incorporated into the platform. Currently they can get in touch with us through the ‘Contact us’ function on the website.

We write about Open Source,Programming, Java, Latest Tech news as they happen, get them@taranfx on Twitter or Facebook Fanpage or subscribe below:

James Gosling, previously an employee of Sun Microsystems, had left Oracle as he thought staying with the company wasn’t good for him or the industry.

Gosling announced his new job at Google “I don’t know what I’ll be working on. I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon,” he said.

Oracle’s ways evidently didn’t agree with Gosling. He called Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison “Larry, Prince of Darkness.” And, he said, “During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle.” It was definitely against the ethical limits of Sun or Gosling. Suing is the last part Sun thought about.

Google had been sued by Oracle over Java patents in Android, Gosling being a true Open source professional punched Larry Ellison’s face by joining Google. Gosling’s choice was obvious since it has the same research-intensive practices that built Sun, but only more successful. And unlike Sun, Google has managed to become famous for endorsing ‘Open’.

Over the last year, he was all on his own and now after a year he claims that “One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying ‘no’ to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.”

Outside of Oracle, Google is the no. 1 contributor for Java and Open source standards. With Gosling on the board, the internet giant is bound to make things better.

We write about Open Source, Programming, Java, Latest Tech news as they happen, get them@taranfx on Twitter or Facebook Fanpage or subscribe below:

Roger: One last question here. What’s Oracle going to do to make Java successful on the desktop?

Adam: … JavaFX bla bla … another way is this strategy we have around running Java inside of a JavaScript environment. So there the programming language is Java, but the platform is not a JVM platform.

This is a little bit of a scary thing, honestly, for Oracle, because while the language is something we know and love, a lot of the value we have comes from the stack underneath the JVM, the library, and so on and so forth.

But we think it’s something that we need to do for the community so we can make Java available more places from tablet devices like the iPad where there is not an easy way to get Java there today, to desktops where, while there are applets, some people choose not to use applets, and we want a solution that works there.

Clearly, Oracle is working on a way to use Javascript as a runtime environment for Java byte code. To be more precise, they are moving along the lines of Orto (a ptorotype of implementation of the JVM in Javascript) which would allow one to cross-compile existing Java libraries to Javascript – a far more interesting prospect as it would make Java truly portable, going beyond restrictions of the platform. However, its much harder to get around access to hardware, OS features via javascript in brwosers like Chrome, Firefox.

However, this could become an interesting topic altogether as world moves towards hardware accelerated (and faster) browsers like Chrome. I can foresee how Chrome OS (& chrome browsers) could take speed advantage using Native compilation (NaCl) to run Java byte code, as fast as the native JVM code, right inside the javascript embedded in web pages.

We write latest and greatest in Google, Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone,Tablets, Android, Open Source, Latest in Tech, subscribe to us@taranfx on Twitter OR:

Despite all efforts, Piratebay has lived and its estimated that it will continue to do so, forever.  Its really hard to stop BitTorrent ffile sharing today coz of its peer-2-peer nature. however, it can be blocked at the gateways if ISP chooses to. But that is never the case, unless they wish to lose all the subscribers.

It is hard today, and could become impossible int eh future to block or censor content in the future. Piratebay founder has started to work on a new standard that would make it impossible to block P2P file sharing, and uncensor the Internet  forever.

For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta version of the client can be released relatively shortly. Being backed by some great developers and geeks, it bound to get popular and effective.

How it would work:

The .p2p domain registration will be handled by OpenNIC (OpenNic DNS), an alternative community based DNS network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several other geeky top level domains.

On the other hand, there are also thoughts that favor distributed domain registration, which would keep the system entirely decentralized. Unlike the popular domain registrations, the domain registrations on p2p network will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers, spammers from taking over a brand.

However,  new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application on their own computer to access the domains, but there are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a complimentary service for all its .p2p domains.

Technology always stays ahead of rules, the more aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated adopters of the Open Internet will respond in ways no one has thought about before.

For latest Google, Open Source, iPhone, Android, Tech news @taranfx on Twitter or subscribe to us below:

Developed by PS3 game console hacker-modder Mathieu Hervais, and PS3 Hacking community folks, PSGroove open source code requires purchasing a a small silicon chip to jailbreak the PlayStation 3 gaming console. Its is totally a DIY project for the Electronics Hardware geeks.

Note: If you’re looking for “Easy jailbreak”, then this method is not meant for you.

PSGroove aims on jailbreaking PS3 game console is to run unsigned (non Sony approved) applications and  Games on PS3 console.

PSGroove’s source code is available at Github Repository which requires the hardware – Teensy++ USB Development Board with Automatic Voltage Regulator (AVR) microcontroller built along with AT90USB key.

And with that code compiled one could even flash it to a Teensy++ USB Development Board ($24) or anAT90USBKEY($31).
Teensy++ is geek’s favorite USB Development Board chip and micro-controller key (ATB90USB and others) that executes the open-source PSGroove code. Teensy++ can do lots of custom USB hacks n Mods including Hacking a PC without touching it. If you plan on working with it, here is some basic stuff from Readme:

This is the PSGroove, an open-source reimplementation of the psjailbreak exploit for AT90USB and related microcontrollers.

It should work on:

AT90USB162
AT90USB646
AT90USB647
AT90USB1286
AT90USB1287
ATMEGA32U4
…and maybe more.

Although, the first thing that comes to the  mind is piracy, this software is not intended to enable it, PS JailBreak isn’t just about backups and to show the strong emotions associated with the cause, such features have been disabled. Only execution of unsigned third-party apps and games is allowed, which is an attempt to make the system “More Open”.

The PS3 hacking community celebrates its brave attempt to release an open-source version of PS3 jailbreak. However, this might not be up for mass adoption and application since it’s a DIY method. No matter where this project heads, guys back at Sony might be already looking to fix the vulnerability.

Read the full README.

In case you need any assistance, Follow Mathieulh and RichDevX on twitter, the masterminds behind the hack.

Update: These BlackcatUSB boards work too.

Source: ps3wiki.lan.st | psgroove (source code @ github)

Ubuntu has announced that full multitouch gesture-based support will arrive in Ubuntu 10.10, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. Multitouch will be coree component of Unity UI (the netbook distro).

A new software framework called uTouch has been developed intended on simplifying gesture handling. Some of the common grammar of gestures that will be incorporated in Ubuntu 10.10 has been demonstrated in an early draft.

The uTouch wont do all this on its own. Unless and until you have a kernel that’s touch aware, user experience will suffer. That’s why Ubuntu’s multitouch relies on some of the recent improvements in the Linux kernel, the Xorg display server, and the Gtk+ toolkit. Multitouch X Input Extension is the heart of all these improvements that would enable multitouch-enhanced user experience on the desktop.

However, there is still a lot more work to do before touch will be a first-class input mechanism for the platform. The standard applications that are included in the GNOME desktop environment are not particularly touch-friendly and will need some significant user interface refactoring.

“In Maverick, quite a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling. We’ll enhance Evince to show some of the richer interactions that developers might want to add to their apps,” Shuttleworth wrote in his blog. “The roadmap beyond 10.10 will flesh out the app developer API and provide system services related to gesture processing and touch. It would be awesome to have touch-aware versions of all the major apps—browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback—for 11.04, but that depends on you!”

Another problem would be to overcome hardware compatibility. Initially, it plans to support convertible notebook/tablet devices such as the Dell XT2 and HP tx2. But the Canonical, founder of Ubuntu assures this would be taken care over time as they plan to cover all touch devices including laptop touchpads and devices like Apple’s Magic Trackpad.

Canonical’s multitouch efforts could make Unity an appealing option for users to lookout for Linux and Open source projects.

We write about Latest in tech, Apple, iPhone, Android, Tablets, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them @taranfx on Twitter or below:

Few months back they made Solaris 10 a shareware which was limited from Free to 90days trial. We knew this was coming — a leaked Internal mail from a Oracle’s memo that was sent out to Oracle Solaris Engineers, describes Oracle’s true intentions towards the OpenSolaris project and the future of Oracle Solaris.

Its a shame that 4 years of external + internal effort on a quality product like  OpenSolaris will now ship as an Oracle product that original innovators can no longer obtain on an unrestricted to.
Isn’t this against Open source ?

Here are the shameless excerpts from the email:

“We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris
binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.”

via OpenSolaris thread

Solaris Engineering,

Today we are announcing a set of decisions regarding the path to Solaris 11, and answering key pending questions on open source, open development, software and binary licenses, and how developers and early adopters will be able to use Solaris 11 technology before its release in 2011.

As you all know, the term “OpenSolaris” has been used colloquially to refer to any or all of a collection of source code, a development model, a web site, a logo, a binary release, a source license, a community, and many other related things. So it’s taken a while to go over each issue from an organizational and business perspective, and align on the correct next step. Therefore, please take the time to read all of the detail here carefully. We’ll discuss our strategy first, and then the decisions and changes to our policies and processes that implement that strategy.

Solaris Strategy
———————-

Solaris is the #1 Enterprise Operating System. We have the leading share of business applications on Solaris today, including both SPARC and x64. We have more than twice the application base of AIX and HP-UX combined. We have a brand that stands for innovation, quality, security, and trust, built on our 20-year investment in Solaris operating system engineering.

From a business perspective, the purpose of our investment in Solaris engineering is to drive our overall server business, including both SPARC and x64, and to drive business advantages resulting from integration of multiple components in the Oracle portfolio. This includes combining our servers with our storage, our servers with our switches, Oracle applications with Solaris, and the effectiveness of the service experience resulting from these combinations. All together, Solaris drives aggregate business measured in many billions of dollars, with significant growth potential.

We are increasing investment in Solaris, including hiring operating system expertise from throughout the industry, as a sign of our commitment to these goals. Solaris is not something we outsource to others, it is not the assembly of someone else’s technology, and it is not a sustaining-only product. We expect the top operating systems engineers in the industry, i.e. all of you, to be creating and delivering innovations that continue to make Solaris unique, differentiated, and valuable to our customers, and a unique asset of our business.

Solaris must stand alone as a best-of-breed technology for Oracle’s enterprise customers. We want all of them to think “If this has to work, then it runs on Solaris.” That’s the Solaris brand. That is where our scalability to more than a few sockets of CPU and gigabytes of DRAM matters. That is why we reliably deliver millions of IOPS of storage, networking, and Infiniband. That is why we have unique properties around file and data management, security and namespace isolation, fault management, and observability. And we also want our customers to know that Solaris is and continues to be a source of new ideas and new technologies– ones that simplify their business and optimize their applications. That’s what made Solaris 10 the most innovative operating system release ever. And that is the same focus that will drive a new set of innovations in Solaris 11.

For Solaris to stand alone as the best-of-breed operating system in Oracle’s complete and open portfolio, it must run well on other server hardware and execute everyone’s applications, while delivering unique optimizations for our hardware and our applications. That is the central value proposition of Oracle’s complete, open, and integrated strategy. And these are complementary and not contradictory goals that we will achieve through proper design and engineering.

The growth opportunity for Solaris has never been greater. As one example, Solaris is used by about 40% of Oracle’s enterprise customers, which means we have a 60% growth opportunity in our top customers alone. In absolute numbers, there are 130,000 Oracle customers in North America alone who don’t use our servers and storage yet, and a global customer base of 350,000 (the prior Sun base was ~35,000). That’s a huge opportunity we can go attack as a combined company that will increase Solaris adoption and the overall Hardware server revenue. Our success will also increase the amount of effort ISVs exert optimizing their applications for Solaris.

We will continue to grow a vibrant developer and system administrator community for Solaris. Delivery of binary releases, delivery of APIs in source or binary form, delivery of open source code, delivery of technical documentation, and engineering of upstream contributions to common industry technologies (such as Apache, Perl, OFED, and many, many others) will be part of that activity. But we will also make specific decisions about why and when we do those things, following two core principles: (1) We can’t do everything. The limiting factor is our engineering bandwidth measured in people and time. So we have to ensure our top priority is driving delivery of the #1 Enterprise Operating System, Solaris 11, to grow our systems business; and (2) We want the adoption of our technology and intellectual property to accelerate our overall goals, yet not permit competitors to derive business advantage (or FUD) from our innovations before we do.

We are using our investment in core Solaris innovation and engineering to drive multiple businesses, through multiple product lines. This already includes our Solaris operating system for Enterprise, and our ZFS Storage product line, and will soon include other Oracle products. This strategy is all about creating more value from a set of common software investments: it makes everything you do more
valuable and used by more people worldwide. It also means you as an individual engineer or manager have an even greater responsibility to understand the broader business and technical contexts in which your engineering is deployed.

Solaris Decisions
————————

We will continue to use the CDDL license statement in nearly all Solaris source code files. We will not remove the CDDL from any files in Solaris to which it already applies, and new source code files that are created will follow the current policy regarding applying the CDDL (simply, that usr/src files will have the CDDL, and the very small minority of files in usr/closed might not have it). Use of other open licenses in non-ON consolidations (e.g. GPL in the Desktop area) will also continue. As before, requests to change the license associated with source code are case-by-case decisions.

We will distribute updates to approved CDDL or other open source- licensed code following full releases of our enterprise Solaris operating system. In this manner, new technology innovations will
show up in our releases before anywhere else. We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time while it is developed, on a nightly basis.

Anyone who is consuming Solaris code using the CDDL, whether in pieces or as a part of the OpenSolaris source distribution or a derivative thereof, would therefore be able to consume any updates we release at that time, under the terms of the CDDL, LGPL, or whatever license applies.

We will have a technology partner program to permit our industry partners full access to the in-development Solaris source code through the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). This will include both early access to code and binaries, as well as contributions to us where that is appropriate. All such partnerships will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but certainly our core, existing technology partnerships, such as the one with Intel, are examples of valued participation.

We will encourage and listen to any and all license requests for Solaris technology, either in part or in whole. All such requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but we believe there are
many complementary areas where new partnership opportunities exist to expand use of our IP.

We will continue active open development, including upstream contributions, in specific areas that accelerate our overall Solaris goals. Examples include our activities around Gnome and X11, IPS
packaging, and our work to optimize ecosystems like Apache, OpenSSL, and Perl on Solaris.

We will deliver technical design information, in the form of documentation, design documents, and source code descriptions, through our OTN presence for Solaris. We will no longer post advance
technical descriptions of every single ARC case by default, indicating what technical innovations might be present in future Solaris releases. We can at any time make a specific decision to post advance technical information for any project, when it serves a particular useful need to do so.

We will have a Solaris 11 binary distribution, called Solaris 11 Express, that will have a free developer RTU license, and an optional support plan. Solaris 11 Express will debut by the end of this
calendar year, and we will issue updates to it, leading to the full release of Solaris 11 in 2011.

All of Oracle’s efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11. We will not release any other binary distributions, such as nightly or bi-weekly builds of Solaris
binaries, or an OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later distribution. We will determine a simple, cost-effective means of getting enterprise users of prior OpenSolaris binary releases to migrate to S11 Express.

We will have a Solaris 11 Platinum Customer Program, including direct engineering involvement and feedback, for customers using our Solaris 11 technology. We will be asking all of you to participate in this endeavor, bringing with us the benefit of previous Sun Platinum programs, while utilizing the much larger megaphone that is available to us now as a combined company.

We look forward to everyone’s continued work on Solaris 11. Our goal is simply to make it the best and most important release of Solaris ever.

-Mike Shapiro, Bill Nesheim, Chris Armes

Hey Oracle, Stop suing, start doing. Unfollow @Oracle on twitter if you care. (few people have done it already)

We write about Open Source, Programming, Java, Latest Tech news as they happen, get them@taranfx on Twitter or subscribe below:

For most, the first thing to quote would be:  ”it works as advertised”. As we analyzed from the early screens, it does runs on Android 1.6 and surprisingly enough, the hardware makes it run fast enough. This is what makes me wonder how fast would it go with Android 2.2 Froyo, when its get its port.

The bad side is of course the Resistive touchscreen which works with and without stylus, but that’s fine for a device that costs 1/15th of the iPad.

Overall Feel of the Device [Early Thoughts]

As Vikram chandra, Rajiv review it, it had been a stable journey even after use for long hours. As far as the design goes, you cat expect much. But the performance of the device is way better than what one would expect at this price. It plays videos, handles OS animations/transitions pretty smoothly.

Watch the video of the whole Interview + Review after the break:

Specs of the Indian $35 Tablet:

The Tablet device will be available in different form factors with screen size of roughly 5″

• Android 1.6 (atleast initially) preloaded with default apps + educational software.
• A rear Video camera for video-conferencing, plus stills.
• Word, excel, Office document support etc using Documents to go, plus iReader.
• Full multimedia support
• Video Out (VGA, not HDMI)
• Connectivity: 3.5mm jack, USB, WiFi & 3G (via SIM card)
• RAM: 2GB
• Endless possibilities with Android (CyanogenMod? anyone?)

It’s Just $35

As Sibal claims, if they manufacture just 1 million devices, the cost of one device would be $35, without any external help of any sort. What they are looking for is innovating this device further. They are already in talks with Google, Microsoft for further improvements, and thats why its not limited to Indian market. After its initial launch in India, at sometime around mid 2011, the device would go global.

We write about Android, Apple, iPhone, iPad, Android, Open Source and latest in Tech @taranfx(Twitter) or subscribe below:

Open source is always open to innovation whether its building a More capable Tablet than iPad or making it ultra affordable.

Related: NotionInk ADAM: Android Tablet vs. iPad

After having built World’s cheapest car: Tata Nano, and world’s cheapest Green car: Tata nano EV, India is now all set for another move to make technology affordable for it’s residents.

Indian Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Kapil Sibal has  launched a $35 computing device that is targeted on ‘learners’ right from primary schools to universities. The touch-enabled tablet device will eventually drop prices to $20 and subsequently $10, making it ultra-affordable. The Ministry has also begun discussions with global manufacturers to start mass production of arguably the world’s cheapest computer.

“This is part of the national initiative to take forward inclusive education. The solutions for tomorrow will emerge from India,” said Sibal.

The Tablet device will be available in different form factors with screen sizes 5″, 7″, 9″ featuring”

• A full internet browser
• a PDF reader,
• Video conferencing support,
• Word, excel, Office document support etc using Open Office
• Sci-lab
• Media Player
• REmote device management (like remote installations/ wipe)
• Connectivity: 3.5mm jack, USB, WiFi
• OS: Linux
• RAM: 2GB

Update: Here’s news coverage from an Indian channel:

This fully Open source friendly device would get attachments for running on solar power apart from the regular battery. As of now, there’s not word on the processor and other detailed specs, but it won’t be long.

There will be two variants of this device: One that is targeted for school students that will have limited memory and no harddisk., the second one  (costing Rs 1,500/$35) would have decently-sized disk space primarily targeted at higher education institutions,  colleges. the plan is to start shipping the device as early as beginning of 2011.  Even though the price would go low with mass production, Indian government is willing to subsidize it furhter by upto 50 per cent of this cost, bringing down the price  even further.

Update 2: On a closer look to the higher end device, it appears to be using Android:

It would be interesting to some freaking affordable Tablets like WePad, Notion Ink Adam, Samsung Galaxy Tab and most of them would be either Android or Linux.

[via IndianExpress]

We write about Android, Apple, iPhone, iPad, Android, Open Source and latest in Tech @taranfx (Twitter) or subscribe below:

With this guide you can DualBoot Android with Ubuntu on Nexus One.

All you need is a rooted Android Nexus One, but if your phone has similar hardware, you might get lucky on other phones too.

Note from developers at Nexusone hacks: This Ubuntu install will not affect your existing Android system, the Ubuntu terminal will run in the background while the Ubuntu X11 graphical user interface will run as an app under Android VNC app.

How to Install Ubuntu 9.1 on Nexus One

Download : ubuntu.zip [Megaupload] | Mirror: ubuntu.zip [FileFactory]

Note: For people having trouble getting it to work (thanks to people testing it at XDA Developers), try downloading the new bootubuntu file here.

Step 1. On your rooted nexus one, install the latest Busybox.

Step 2. Once you have a “rooted” Android phone, you will be able to run Ubuntu under Chroot.

What is Chroot: Chroot is the ability to run other operating systems under your current system (in this case Android).  So its as good as running apps on VMware or Virtualbox. You can only “chroot” another operating system made for your system’s architecture, in this case its ARM.

In this case, we are lucky because Ubuntu has an ARM-port.   It’s most likely the case that you can also “chroot” other linux devices that support ARM.  I am also working on chrooting other popular distros like Fedora, Gentoo, and more.

Step 3. Copying files for chroot:  image file of Ubuntu ARM, setup script file (ubuntu.sh), chroot boot/launch file (bootubuntu), unionfs, fsrw, and mountonly.

Copy these six files over into your SD card’s root folder under folder name “ubuntu”.

Step 4. Next, “Turn off USB storage” on your phone, connect usb and check if SD card is accessible from ADB Shell (component of Android SDK). (make sure USB debugging is enabled)

Go to your Android SDK Tools directory such as c:\fx\android-sdk\tools and type “adb shell“.

Step 5. Once you are in the ADB shell, you should see a “#”symbol.  Type “su” to enter superuser mode.  Btw, if you get error here, that means you have not rooted your phone!

Step 6. Next, type “cd /sdcard/ubuntu“, which will take you to the directory where you’ve copied the Ubuntu files over to. Type “sh ./ubuntu.sh” to run the setup script.  You only have to run this once or whenever you change the script file bootubuntu.

Step 7. Type “bootubuntu” to “chroot” or boot into your new Ubuntu on your Android!

You should see  “localhost” sign, congratulations!

But, there’s no UI till now, its all command line, proceed to next step if you need the UI.

Step 8.Installing UI elements: We will install some mandatory UI stuff from apt-get. In the terminal type thee commands one by one: “apt-get update” to update your Ubuntu packages followed by : “apt-get install tightvncserver” to install the TightVNCServer and “apt-get install lxde” to install the LXDE.

Step 9. Setting Screen resolution: run the following commands:

export USER=root
vncserver -geometry 1024×800

Here you can also change 1024×800 to the exact resolution of your Android phone’s LCD resolution,  Nexus One has 800×480

Next,  add the following to /root/.vnc/xstartup file using cat command:

cat > /root/.vnc/xstartup
#!/bin/sh
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
icewm &
lxsession

Then hit Ctrl+D twice and Enter key.

Step 10. Next open up the Android VNC app on your Nexus One/Android phone and enter the password you set earlier in step 13 and set the Port to 5901.

Step 11. Next hit connect and voila, you should get something like this, a cool GNome Ubuntu screen!!!

Step . AutoRun VNCServer: Let’s add some code to the /root/.bashrc file:

cat > front
export USER=root
cd /
rm -r -f tmp
mkdir tmp
cd /
vncserver -geometry 1024×800

Then hit Ctrl+D twice and Enter key.

cat front /root/.bashrc > temp

cp temp /root/.bashrc

To check that it’s working you can exit out of Ubuntu back into Android shell:

exit

bootubuntu

Now everytime you chroot/boot your Ubuntu, the VNCServer is start automatically at start-up.

You can use Terminal Emulator app (freely available on Android market) to start the Ubuntu chroot by entering:

su
bootubuntu

so you don’t need to connect  to ADB shell to launch Ubuntu, giving you the freedom to use Ubuntu along with Android whereever you go.

Now fire up your VNC client from Android (available in market) and configure it to connect to localhost.. Boom, you’ve the Ubuntu running.

via NexusOne Hacks

We write about Latest in tech, Apple, iPhone, Android, Tablets, Gadgets, Open Source, Programming. Grab them@taranfx on Twitter or below:

That’s it!

Since those old days, I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Microsoft’s Windows-based servers still exist in the market having a share as large as 20% where Linux was 65+%. Sooner I realized, easier it became to grasp  that I wasn’t  the only one troubled with it.

Java may not still be the best Web (internet) programming language but there’s always win of Open standards like PHP  because of the ease of programming. But, Java still is the weapon of choice in the Enterprise Business market.

JavaWorld has come up with a trailer for a mock movie called “Java 4-ever,” where a young man is born in a Microsoft fan .Net-obsessed family and due to some inevitable consequences falls in love with Java and Open Source. Featuring in the movie are mock characters “William Windows”, “Mona Lisa Harddrive,”, “Scala Johansson”, “Eddie Larrison” and “Lenny Linux”

I wish this movie was for Real!

Yesterday at  Motorola Droid X release with Verizon, Eric Schmidt announced Launch of Android froyo and industry adoption of Android as high as 2 phones per second.

Android Froyo brings lots of new goodies, best one being the speed improvements with Android Dalvik JIT.

With some awesome features highlighted in iOS 4 vs Android 2.2, War seems to be Over!

Few Android Facts:

• Over 160,000 Android devicesAndroid devices activated per day. In Google’s words that’s nearly 2 devices per second .
• There are over 60 Android devices, through a network of 21 OEMsOEMs , 59 carriers in 49 countries.
• Android devices are selling faster than they can be manufactured.
• Android 2.2 Froyo is now being open-sourcedopen-sourced and made available to device manufacturers !

Froyo is now Open sourced and here is some outline of upgrades from Google:

• Migration to Android Froyo: In order to make it easier for device manufacturers and custom system builders to use Froyo, we’ve restructured our source tree to better separate closed-source modules from open-source ones. We’ve made many changes to the open-source code itself to remove unintentional dependencies on closed-source software. We’ve also incorporated into the core platform all the configuration files necessary to build the source code of Android Open-Source Project on its own. You can now build and boot a fully open-source system image out of the box, for the emulator, as well as for Dream (ADP1), Sapphire (ADP2), and Passion (Nexus One).
• Device Support Speaking of device support, Google also open-sourced several additional hardware-related libraries that had been closed-source in previous releases, which will open the door to more contributions. Some examples are the recovery UI code for Dream, Sapphire and Passion, and the interface between the media framework and Qualcomm chipsets.

We are expecting to hear from news about the Android 2.2 compatibility from major Android handset makers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung !

For latest Google, Open Source, iPhone, Android, Tech news @taranfx on Twitter or subscribe below:

Android is a Linux based OS with 2.6.x kernel, stripped down to handle most tasks pretty well. It uses native open source C libraries that have powered Linux machines for years. All the basic OS operations like I/O, memory management, and so on, are handled by the native stripped-down Linux kernel. On top of it all, the application layer is exposed in Java APIs. These Java APIs internally use JNI calls to native libraries of the Operating system — The benefit being: Your application code always remain platform independent no matter which processor architecture (x86, ARM, etc) it runs on. As Google plans to take android from Mobiles to Android TVs, Tablets, and Cars, and what not, you won’t have to worry about porting your application (apart from screen resolutions).

Dalvik VM was developed to accommodate very efficient java runtime for devices having low memory footprint. It’s brilliantly smart in memory management and can proactively work on phones having memories as low as 32mb (or even lower with Older Android releases).

Dalvik doesn’t run the Sun Java Byte code, instead it runs DEX files a.k.a Dalvik executables. Java byte code is recompiled into Dex, every time ADT plugin (installed in eclipse) detects a change in the .class files. This dex then runs in the Dalvik with Just in time compilation. Why Just in time?

JIT has lots of potential merits which makes it a sure shot winner in VM based languages. A normal compiled application has a pre-compiled binary. Whereas, the interpreted languages do this dynamically as the code execution is requested. JIT is hybrid of both.

Why JIT is Faster: Indepth

Much of the “heavy lifting” of parsing the original source code and performing basic optimization is often handled at compile time, prior to deployment. Obviously, compilation from bytecode to machine code is much faster than compiling from source.

At the time the bytecode is run, the just-in-time compiler will come into action and readily compile some or all of it into native machine code for better performance. This is purely selective, it can be done per-file, per-function or even on any arbitrary code segment; the code can be compiled when it is about to be executed.

Lets assume that a pre-compiled binary runs, say, on all x86 machines. This binary is then made to run on two different machines: Intel Processor with MMX on Windows, and then on AMD with some SSE2 or SSSE3 capability on a Linux. The x86 binary is not optimized to run better on one than the other in any way. The purpose of the binary is to be “compatible” with x86 architecture more than being performing for the processor and platform, and that’s what makes the difference.

This is just one of the reasons why JIT could be faster.

At the runtime JIT can perform a large number of optimizations that will efficiently use the hardware to give out the best performance. Primarily there are three kinds of optimizations that we are interested in:

1. Instruction set optimizations
2. Resource Reuse
3. Runtime Analysis & Optimizations
4. Superior Memory Management

1. Instruction set optimizations: With JIT active on a platform, translation from C (underlying language of Java) to Machine code (instruction set) would happen most optimally. e.g. The application that does lots of mathematical operations with one of them being, say, subsequent Multiply and Add. There might be an instruction set available for performing “Multiply and Add” within single clock cycle, JIT if aware, can use it thereby, reducing clock cycles for execution of that task.

2. Resource Reuse: Resource re-use can be done in multiple ways. It can be something as simple as re-use of String objects, to reuse of an I/O by dynamically compiling code to reuse an existing stream/connection instead of creating a new one, when possible.

In JIT, translations occur continuously with caching of translated code to minimize performance degradation. Apart from performance, it also offers other advantages over statically compiled code, such as handling of late-bound data types and the ability to enforce security guarantees.

3. Runtime Analysis & Optimizations

The system is able to collect statistics about how the program is actually running in the environment it is in, and it can rearrange and recompile for optimum performance. This is a complex to implement Java has done it nicely, but Dalvik VM in Android 2.2 Froyo is way ahead in leveraging performance boosts.

The system can do global code optimizations (In most cases: inlining compilation of library functions) without losing the advantages of dynamic linking and that too without the overheads inherent to static compilers and linkers.

4. Superior Memory Management

A bytecode system can more easily rearrange memory for better cache utilization. apart from performance caches, memory allocation is less fragmented, more reusable.

Dalvik JIT Benefits  in Real world

The Android JIT is designed to speed up with the execution of the areas of code that touch more mathematical computations. e.g. In a typical OpenGL Game/graphics, there could be use of a large number of integer and flotating point mathematical calculations that can go crazy slow down under normal VMs.

Dalvik would actually take advantage of the JIT environment which can boost the productivity  by consuming as little as  100k of RAM. With each Android process, JIT will typically only use another 100k or so from the RAM. On the current generation of Android phones, device users won’t even notice this additional memory usage.

Performance Varies, But Android Dalvik Rocks

Many previous JIT implementations react slowly, delivering performance improvements only after a long warm up period.

This delay is due to the time taken to load and compile the bytecode.The delay called “startup time delay” Evidently, the more optimization JIT performs, the better code it will generate, but the initial delay will also increase. A JIT compiler therefore has to make a trade-off between the compilation time and the quality of the code it hopes to generate. However, it seems that much of the startup time is sometimes due to IO-bound operations rather than JIT compilation (for example, the rt.jar class data file for the Java Virtual Machine is 40 MB and the JVM must seek a lot of data in this huge file). Dalvik does it much more efficiently. Dalvik VM being lightweight has stripped down version of the  desktop JVM which loads selective and stripped down runtime jars.

In certain implementations the warmup time can be extreme: minutes or even hours before the code is fully up to speed. Dalvik JIT rather reacts quickly, seconds after you hit the App Icon on your favorite game, you are already benefiting from JIT performance improvements.

Why Now?

I remember the time when Android 2.1 was getting ready for release, JIT was all in there ready for the showtime. But for some unknown reasons, it was disabled, just a switch away from 2x – 4x times performance boost. But question is why wasn’t it unveiled at that moment. I could be wrong, though was in good-enough shape, it seemed like more of a marketing strategy.

Whatever the case is, Performance improvements always are of the order of “Observable” index. In gaming you can achieve anywhere between 2x – 5x performance boost, on contrary, light weight apps would not see more than 10% difference.

Dalvik VM, though first built in a closed system, has all the richness of the Open Source. It has evolved a lot since the time it had been open sourced nourishing Android to the peek of the smartphone industry.

I love iPhone for what it has done to the smartphone industry. But, I agree even more with what Vic Gundotra said at the Google IO:

“If Google didn’t act, we face a draconian future. One man, one company, one device would control our future, If you believe in openness and choice, welcome to Android.”

Update: Google I/O Video for Android 2.2 Froyo Dalvik  JIT now available:

For Latest Tech updates in Open Source, Programming, Java, Tech News find us on Twitter  @taranfx or subscribe below:

Scala is widely adopted for popular Social networking sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and FourSquare. An estimated 100,000 programmers are already using the language and it continues to attract attention from industry for its elegance and muscle. Currently Scala v2.8 is capable of delivering some amazing scripting features which somehow Java and several other programming languages failed to: Boost development productivity, application scalability and system reliability

What are the other benefits? The name Scala itself means “scalable”, a programming language that can scale  to increasing user and hardware demands, making it effectively “future-proof”.

How Scala works
Scala runs on the Java platform (i.e. Java Virtual Machine aka JVM) and is compatible with existing Java programs. It also runs on Java Platform, J2ME CLDC. Scala has the same compilation model as Java and C#, so Scala code can call Java libraries or .NET libs.

Just like Java, Scala compiler generates byte code that is nearly identical to the Java compiler. In fact, you can decompile Scala code to readable Java code. To the JVM, Scala code and Java code are indistinguishable. The only difference is a single extra runtime library, scala-library.jar.

Learn Scala [Video Tutorials]

Alright, there are 100s of other reasons why you should consider learning Scala, but I’m not getting into them. You can start learning it as soon as you realize it’s importance.

Understanding Scala and It’s Importance

Your First Application in Scala using Eclipse

Part 2 & Part 3

Scala Topics and discussions from Scala Days 2010. There are some great talks in there that talk about how to scale applications, best practices, industry lessons, and lots of other good stuff, a must for all Scala enthusiasts.

For Latest Tech updates in Open Source, Programming, Java, Tech News find us on Twitter @taranfx or subscribe below:

With Virtualbox 3.1 came the Live Migration feature as the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved between hosts — including different operating systems, types of computer (server to client) and CPUs (Intel to AMD).

Virtualbox 3.2 takes it further, and supports  ”Experimental support for Mac OS X guests”. We already published an guide on how to Install Snow Leopard on Virtualbox, now it’s seemed to get official, atleast starting with Virtualbox 3.2 Beta 1.

Let’s take a look at other major additions:

• Dynamic RAM allocation: Dynamically increase or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (aka Memory ballooning)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance. On VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported.
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only)
• Delete snapshots while the VM is running
• Multi-monitor support
• USB tablet/keyboard Emulation via Guest Additions
• Better Remote Desktop: RDP video acceleration
• Advanced Networking: NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system

In addition, there are large number of bugfixes and performance improvements in 3D support, Mac OS X hosts, Linux, solaris guests, and Virtual machine manager.

On the other note, now Virtualbox has been rebranded to: Oracle VM Virtualbox.

Download Virtualbox 3.2 Beta 1

[via Virtualbox forums]

For Latest Tech updates in Open Source, Programming, Java, Tech News find us on Twitter @taranfx or subscribe below: