Here I want to discuss some features, Skype Access- its a service that lets you go to any of the 100,000 Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots and Skype allow you to connect to the Boingo hotspot. Another feature is “screensharing” means you can share either your entire screen or just a portion of your screen with the Skype. People could share photographs, and presumably videos as well. This screensharing feature support for Windows and Linux users also.

One excellent feature you will get noticed in the 2.8 beta is the ability to set the priority of a chat session and then sort your chat sessions according to your priority in the Mac’s drawer. Boingo- Its a connector application for the iPhone & iPod Touch available For $7.95 just a month, those users can access the entire Boingo Wi-Fi network.

Skype2.8 features-

• Screen Sharing
• Skype Access
• Sort and set priorities to chats in the drawer
• Add your own notes to contacts
• Mood message updates from your friends as chat messages
• Large avatars: 256×256 pixels
• Hidden avatars in incoming contact requests
• Add your own notes to contacts

System requirements

• Mac computer with G4 800 Mhz processor or faster.
• Mac OS X v10.3.9 Panther or later.
• 512 MB RAM.
• 40 MB free disk space on your hard drive.
• Microphone and speakers or headset.
• Internet connection – broadband is best (GPRS is not supported for voice calls).

Download here Skype 2.8 for Mac

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The Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems.Now Users will be able to build AIR applications by using Web development technologies such as JavaScript, HTML, ActionScript and Adobe Flex. The same AIR installer runs on all three platform Linux, Windows, and Macintosh.

Features of AIR 1.5

• Includes Flash Player 10 capabilities
• Support for custom filters and effects
• Native 3D transformations & animation
• WebKit JavaScript engine
• SquirrelFish,to make JavaScript execute faster
• An encrypted database

System requirements for Linux

• Intel Pentium III 1GHz or faster processor, 512MB of RAM
• Recommended: Pentium 4 2GHZ or faster, 1GB RAM
• Fedora Core 8, Ubuntu 7.10, openSUSE 10.3

This product is available in 16 languages.

Adrian Ludwig said, group product manager for the platform business unit at Adobe-

"We’re experiencing nearly 100 million installations of Adobe AIR on Mac and Windows by the end of this year, that strength of platform across Mac and Windows is going to make it very easy for developers to build applications that will end up running on Linux as well."

Download the latest version of Adobe AIR 1.5

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Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system. According to insiders the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of ditching Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said. An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company. Intel’s decision is certain to sting Microsoft because the two companies have worked closely to align hardware and software from the earliest days of the personal computer. Indeed, the corporate duo is known as “Wintel” in the PC industry.

When a company as tech savvy as Intel, with full source code access and having written several large chunks of the OS, says no thank you, you know you have a problem. Well, everyone knows Microsoft has a problem, but it is nice to see it codified in such a black and white way though. Reassuring, like a warm cup of tea, or a public kick to the corporate crown jewels.

The Inquirer, a London-based technology website, was the first one to report Intel’s decision not to roll out Vista across the entire company. Intel is hardly alone in its reluctance to embrace Microsoft’s latest operating system, which was available to corporate customers in November 2006 and to consumers in January 2007. Large companies routinely hold off a year or so after a new version of Windows is introduced before adopting it, waiting for initial bugs to be eliminated and for applications to be written. “But by 18 months, you’d expect to see a significant uptake, and we haven’t seen that,” said David Smith, a Gartner analyst. “There’s not much excitement.”

His Gartner colleague, Michael Silver, said that about 30 percent of corporate customers skip any given new version of Windows. But the percentage will be higher for Vista, Mr. Silver predicted. Gartner’s corporate clients that plan to skip Vista, like Intel, do not see value of this upgrade, particularly since it requires new PC hardware at the time when the economy is weak and corporate budgets are tight. In the end, you have Intel flipping MS the bird, and telling them what they already know, Vista in undeployable by anyone with a grain of common sense.

There are more than 140 million copies of Vista installed on machines worldwide. Consumers and small businesses simply get the operating system that is on a new machine when they buy a PC, and that is Vista. Meanwhile, the Microsoft operating system engine chugs on, phasing out the old and proclaiming the new. The company reiterated this week that, despite some customer protests, it would halt shipments of the previous version of Windows, XP, to retail stores and stop most licensing of XP to PC makers next week. Microsoft also announced that the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, is scheduled to go on sale in January 2010.

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I was curious to know what makes people talk about Windows collapsing. I did some spadework and dug into the Window’s success story. Here is what I discovered.

The Windows Success Story

The most important factor behind Windows success is the huge number of third party software available to run on the Windows operating system. Also, developers find developing Windows based applications very simple. One does not require much computer expertise to operate Windows. Further, Windows can run on different hardware platforms ranging from tablet PCs, hand-held devices to desktop workstations. Almost all devices available in the market are supported by Windows through drivers provided either by Microsoft or by other hardware manufacturers.

Why Windows May Collapse

The problem started when Microsoft’s much hyped operating system “Windows Vista” arrived in the computer world. Microsoft has designed Vista as an operating system for people who need the operating system fully loaded with lots and lots of features. Run the default installation for Microsoft Windows Vista, and you find all the extra features too installed and running. This leaves no room for user configuration.

Windows Vista also has very big issue with device drivers. Users face many problems while trying to find device drivers for their devices. Drivers for some popular printers/scanners have been made available neither by Microsoft, nor by hardware manufacturers.

Further, Microsoft has changed the user interface of Windows Vista a lot. For example, in Windows XP you have Add/Remove Programs while in Windows Vista Microsoft gives a new name to the same feature – Programs and Features. It has also replaced the familiar Start button with the Windows Vista Logo.

Windows Vista’s nemesis lies in the fact that it does not support third party software. Also, Vista requires a high hardware configuration for running it, something the Windows user is not accustomed to. I see Windows Vista operating system becoming more and more hardware dependent. It requires a graphics card, a high-end motherboard and much more for running it. We can see the user-friendly Windows transforming into a combination of Mac and Linux minus their positives.

These are some points that I found, which if included in the next Windows operating system will prevent Windows from collapsing:
• Configurable nature of Operating System
• Support for third part software and hardware
• Avoiding unnecessary changes in the Operating System User Interface
• Operating System must not be dependent on Hardware.
• Build Operating system in a modular manner.

Source []

• Information Week
• PC World
• Arstechnica
• Techcrunch
• Readwriteweb

Special thanks to WriteUpMaster

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Why Operating systems are Unreliable?

• Current operating systems are huge for example Linux kernel has more then 2.5 million lines of code, Microsoft Windows XP has around 4 million lines of code. Studies said there may be 2 to 75 bugs per 1000 lines of executable code.
• Current operating systems are getting bigger and bigger in size, this makes software developer to understand the system and after understanding the system to fix problems in the system. These fixes also introduce some new bug in operating system.
• Operating system’s 70% code contains device drivers and in device drivers the probability having a bug per 1000 line of executable code is three time higher then the original code.
• Isolation is another problem. Modern operating system contains hundreds or thousands of procedures linked together as a single binary program running in kernel mode. Any of the procedure can overwrite the key data structure or any key data. This makes hard to detect the crash.

Some real world examples

• Can our operating systems be developed like aircraft carrier, no person know about how aircraft carrier works either, but the subsystems on an aircraft carrier are well isolated. A problem with a clogged toilet cannot affect the missile-launching subsystem.
• Modern ships have multiple compartments within the hull; if one compartment springs a leak, only that one is flooded, not the entire hull. Current operating systems are like ships before compartmentalization was invented: Every leak can sink the ship.

I will be continuing to write about the operating system and in upcoming posts I will write some solutions that are given in IEEE computer society website.

Reference Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure?

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