Sometimes, while browsing the net for news, I come accross things I just cannot not post. "Some enterprising Austrian Über-geeks a Telnet stream with, believe it or not, live ASCII footage of matches being played . Simply fire up a command prompt and type 'telnet ascii-wm.net 2006' and you'll find a live 'video' stream from 10 minutes before kick-off (or should that be boot-up?)." I also look forward to the Wimbledon version that resembles Pong.

"Each release of Mac OS X has brought increased support of 'Universal Access' for users with disabilities. Universal Access is Apple's collective name for the Mac OS X technologies, features, and components that provide users with disabilities with access to Macintosh computers. For Mac developers, making applications accessible to this audience is the smart thing to do, and it's easier now than ever before. This article will teach you how to fully implement support for accessibility through the VoiceOver interface in your Carbon application."

Xandros has announced pre-orders for the 4th version of their desktop Linux distribution, excitingly named 'Xandros 4'. The info page reveals little information beyond the usual marketing speak, which claims better wireless support, iPod syncing, NTFS read and write, all the usual suspects. Available 21st June.

Google has released a beta version of Google Earth 4, which runs on all the three major platforms. "We got so excited around here about the first anniversary of Google Earth that we decided to celebrate a bit early. Beginning today, you can download a brand new version, Google Earth 4. Running on OS X? Feel the love. Prefer Linux? Ditto. Yes, we're releasing simultaneously for PC, Mac (universal binary for full performance on both Intel and PowerPC based Macs) and for the first time ever, native support for popular Linux distributions." They have also seriously increased the amount of high-res images, so that now about 20% of the world's landmass is in high-res. Including my hometown, Warmenhuizen .

"There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. Contrary to conventional wisdom, unreliability is not an essential characteristic of complex software programs. In this article, I will propose a silver bullet solution to the software reliability and productivity crisis. The solution will require a radical change in the way we program our computers. I will argue that the main reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to develop has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. I will argue further that moving to a signal-based, synchronous software model will not only result in an improvement of several orders of magnitude in productivity, but also in programs that are guaranteed free of defects, regardless of their complexity."

KernelTrap reports on an interesting discussion on the lkml. The specific topic is the legality of the ACX1xx wireless driver, which, according to Andrew Morton, will be included in the next kernel release (2.6.18). Jeff Garzik opened the discussion: "I've never had technical objections to merging this, just AFAIK it had a highly questionable origin, namely being reverse-engineered in a non-clean-room environment that might leave Linux legally vulnerable." Christopher Hellwig posed an interesting point: "Please don't let this reverse engineering idiocy hinder wireless driver adoption, we're already falling far behind OpenBSD who are very successfully reverse engineering lots of wireless chipsets."

In November this year, Sony will launch the PlayStation 3. Apparantly, Sony has high expectations for the Linux-powered device, and Sony even claims it will render the PC useless. "We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other computer functions," said Sony exec Phil Harrison. "The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC." Let's see how Sony's Vaio devision feels about this.

Microsoft has taken another step in its effort to bring Windows in the world of supercomputing, having finished development of its computer cluster operating system. It has finalized the code for Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which is designed to allow multiple servers to work together to handle high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Such work, long handled by systems from SGI and Cray, has increasingly been tackled by Linux clusters, though Microsoft has been planning its entry for some time.

"UnixLite is a lightweight UNIX/Linux compatible operating system written in c++; it is open source and released under the GNU General Public License. The complete operating system is made up of a kernel and applications; just like Linux, UnixLite is only the kernel. The kernel itself is written from scratch and the biggest part is written in c++; however, the library used by UnixLite comes from uClibc and applicaitons running on UnixLite come from the GNU project."

The widely used uIP TCP/IP stack is a very small implementation of the TCP/IP protocols, designed for memory constrained networked embedded systems. Version 1.0 adds a number of features such as a new socket-like API, rudimentary IPv6 support, and a DHCP client, as well as fixes corner-case bugs in TCP that have been found through many years of real-world testing.