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Apple in a gesture to the community started up the Apple Lossless Audio Codec project to open-source its lone proprietary audio standard. Its change lets developers implement and modify the format for both encoding and playback. Codes also get an example app that can read or write audio to Core Audio and WAV, along with a "magic cookie" to use when making M4A and MP4 clips.
VIA this week introduced its M’SERV S2100 mini server meant for home and small business users. Powered by VIA's own 1.6GHz Nano CPU, the server has the capacity to hold two 3.5-inch SATA II hard drives with up to 4TB of space. There is an integrated CF card slot from which users can boot the S2100, two gigabit Ethernet ports, three USB 2.0 ports and a VGA output. VIA says the server can perform network video recording and virtual server applications thanks to its VT virtualization support, among others.
Grand Central Dispatch, originally introduced with Mac OS X Snow Leopard, has been ported to its first third-party operating system, says the team behind FreeBSD. When it is released, FreeBSD 8.1 is expected to support Grand Central by default. The technology is said to have been harder to adapt than some other Unix-compatible frameworks, due to the need to make kernel modifications. Mac OS X blends elements of BSD and Mach.
The work of a current Microsoft executive is behind the existence of Mac OS X and the iPhone firmware, a report suggests. The head of Microsoft's Research division, Rick Rashid, claims that code of his remains within the Mac OS, and by extension the iPhone OS, even after decades of design and evolution. "If you use a Macintosh or an iPhone, which honestly I would not recommend," says Rashid, "you would be using code that I wrote more than 25 years ago."
