OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Dell, Alienware Equip Products with PhysX Processors

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-22 Hardware 25 Comments

The much-talked about PhysX processor by Ageia is now finally obtainable for consumers-- sort of. Dell has launched the XPS 600 Renegade: a limited edition computer with four GeForce 7900 cards connected via SLI, Intel Pentium D 965 Extreme Edition (overclocked to 4.26 Ghz), and 2GB of GDDR3 memory, and of course the PhysX processor. That's a $10000 gamer's wet dream. Alienware couldn't watch silently by the sideline of course, and it also equipped some of its digital solitare machines with the PhysX processor.

Submitted by masterjack 2006-03-22 OS News 27 Comments

The C64 group 'Singular' has released 'Singular Browser' - a graphical web browser with CSS support for the C64. It's still in the early beta stages, but looks quite impressive for a computer launched in 1982.

Mac Viruses: the Hen’s Tooth of Malware

Submitted by jack 2006-03-22 macOS 45 Comments

"As a long serving citizen of the Internet I have, in my time, accumulated membership to a number of email groups. It was in one of these groups that I first heard reports of a virus (Leap.A) that had started to infect Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. I was not surprised that this had happened; in fact I was quite taken aback that it had not happened before! But I was flabbergasted by the response of the Mac Mafia to this news. The assumption that something is infallible is at best naive and at worst stupid; it can only invite trouble."

Submitted by rft183 2006-03-22 Windows 9 Comments

Yesterday ActiveWin had the exclusive of Windows Vista's official release date. Today, Microsoft confirmed all that by updating its release schedule and making an official press release. "Microsoft today confirmed that Windows Vista, the next generation of the Windows client operating system, is on target to go into broad consumer beta to approximately 2 million users in the second quarter of 2006. Microsoft is on track to complete the product this year, with business availability in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007."

Java Theory and Practice: Good Housekeeping Practices

Submitted by anonymous 2006-03-22 Java 6 Comments

"Putting your toys away when you are done is always a drag, but if you dont take the time to do it, you would have a huge mess over time. Garbage collection does an awful lot of the cleanup for us, and it simplifies development and eliminates entire categories of potential code errors, but some java resources still require explicit action on our part. This article discusses the limitations of garbage collection and identifies situations when you have to do your own housecleaning."

Firefox ODFReader Extension

Submitted by Wily Yuen 2006-03-22 Office 13 Comments

Several months ago there was an OSNews article which discussed why browsers should be able to display OpenDocument. It's been a while now and recently Wily Yuen, the reader who submitted this to us, discovered on the OpenOffice.org Wiki that there is indeed somebody working on a Firefox extension called ODFReader, which will display ODF within the browser using XSLT. The extension only reads OOo Writer documents and displays only text so far. You can check it out here.

The Speed of Software Halves Every 18 Months?

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-22 General Development 82 Comments

"Newer software does try to be sexier by doing flashy things such as the talking paperclip. This causes a tendency for the software to bloat to the point of saturation, i.e. until it performs at barely acceptable speeds. But application programming seems to get worse with faster processors. Even with more memory, faster disks and multiple CPUs, your average web application runs slower. Is it possible that the faster hardware has made us worse programmers?"

MEPIS Founder Plots Transition to Ubuntu

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-22 Linux 23 Comments

Mepis LLC, a long-time Debian Linux distributor, is switching from Debian to Ubuntu as the basis for its SimplyMEPIS Linux distribution. It seems MEPIS founder Warren Woodford has decided that MEPIS will do better for its users by depending upon Ubuntu, rather than Debian, for its foundation.

Two-in-One DNS Server with BIND9

Submitted by Falko Timme 2006-03-22 Internet 4 Comments

"This tutorial shows you how to configure BIND9 DNS server to serve an internal network and an external network at the same time with different set of information. To accomplish that goal, a new feature of BIND9 called view is used. As a tutorial it'll walk you through the whole set up, but initial knowledge of BIND and DNS is required, there are plenty of documents that cover that information on the Internet."

Vista Graphics Tools to Reach Mac, Phones

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-22 Windows 18 Comments

Microsoft will bring some of the graphics destined for Windows Vista to the Macintosh, phones and older versions of Windows next year through a user interface toolkit. Company executives at the Mix '06 Web developer conference on Monday provided anticipated dates for delivery of Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, or WPF/E, a user interface design software for operating systems other than Windows Vista.

OS X Sudo vs. Root: The Real Story

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-22 macOS 40 Comments

In Mac OS X, the root account is disabled by default. The first user account created is added to the admin group and that user can use the sudo command to execute other commands as root. The conventional wisdom is that sudo is the most secure way to run root commands, but a closer look reveals a picture that is not so clear.

Official: Windows Vista Available January 2007

Submitted by Bob Stein 2006-03-21 Windows 86 Comments

Microsoft has officially announced to ActiveWin (over a conference call) the release date of Windows Vista. Windows Vista will be made officially to consumers in January 2007, while making Windows Vista available to businesses only in November 2006. In addition, there will be a feature complete Beta 2 CTP released in the next quarter.

French Lawmakers OK Online Copyright Bill

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-21 Legal 49 Comments

French lawmakers approved an online copyright bill Tuesday that would require Apple to break open the exclusive format behind its market-leading iTunes music store and iPod players. The draft law - which also sets new penalties for music pirates - would force Apple, Sony, and others to share proprietary copy-protection technologies so that rivals can offer compatible services and players. An analyst expects that Apple is more likely to leave the French market, than to open its format in France. My take: Just buy CDs. They play in every CD player, and have no weird restrictions. In case you forgot, CDs look like this.

An Inside Look at Windows Vista

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-21 Windows 24 Comments

"The new OS is designed to offer a shiny new user interface, better security, improved data organization and near-instantaneous search. It will be a major gaming platform release because it includes DirectX 10, an upgraded and rebuilt collection of application programming interfaces that, according to Microsoft, will offer six to eight times the graphics performance of DirectX 9.0. We're opening our series of Windows Vista features with a look at the most striking feature of Vista, the 3D desktop and the new Aero interface."

Sun Expands OpenSPARC Program

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-21 Oracle and SUN 9 Comments

A month after releasing the architecture specifications and hypervisor APIs for its UltraSPARC T1 processor to the open-source community, Sun is putting out more information on the chip. Sun on March 21 will publish the hardware design for the T1 - formerly codenamed Niagara - and the Solaris operating system simulation specifications for the chip. The move is the latest in the company's OpenSPARC project, designed to enable hardware and software developers to build atop the new chip's architecture. The goal is to build an ecosystem around the processor that will expand the reach of the SPARC platform. In addition, Sun's grid will finally launch this week.

Novell Focuses on Open Sources

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-21 Novell and Ximian 21 Comments

Novell will support its NetWare network operating system at least until 2015. However, its focus will be open source. "While not abandoning its current NetWare users, Novell officials on Monday made it clear that the company's focus is on open-source and open-standards computing. Kicking off the annual BrainShare conference at the Salt Palace, Novell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman and others praised how open source and open standards - and Novell products based on them - can help businesses work more efficiently, provide them flexibility and agility and save them money."

Review: Fedora Core 5

Submitted by Ki Mun 2006-03-21 Fedora Core 40 Comments

Lunapark reviews Fedora Core 5, and concludes: "I would only recommend FC5 to people who do not own Nvidia video cards or do not mind tweaking a lot default settings to get things working. Otherwise stay with what you are using and wait for SUSE 10.1 or Ubuntu’s Dapper. But if you do stick with FC 5 and get past the quirks, it is quite impressive and I am already eagerly awaiting FC 6."

Submitted by fylfot 2006-03-21 RISC OS 2 Comments

"Of the 344 functions in the Castle Shared C Library, Graham Shaw has so far managed to implement 200 in his alternative module. A hundred of those have been fully tested, and this is after six weeks of development. By Graham's reckoning, his target is to recreate the official SCL's 48 base functions, 185 C library functions, and 111 functions related to 64bit support, the C99 standard and other bits and pieces. The module is an open source affair, but will allow applications to use it without repercussions, such as requiring proprietary program authors to reveal their own source code. Developers can, it's expected, choose to use their own choice of 'stubs' library, as provided by the Castle C/C++ compiler kit, RISCOS Ltd's StubsG or with the GCCSDK."

Submitted by Bink 2006-03-21 OpenBSD 49 Comments

OpenBSD has asked for donations: "To fulfill most development goals OpenBSD should be generating about $100K USD. With that amount of money the project can finance 1 large and 4 small hackathons per year. Pay the bills and a part-time developer to mind the shop when Theo isn't around. In an ideal world we would have a sponsor per hackathon and the CD sales would be paying for other expenses." On a very related note, pre-orders for OpenBSD 3.9 are now available.

Submitted by jayson.knight 2006-03-21 Internet Explorer 10 Comments

At the MIX06 conference, Microsoft handed out new builds of Internet Explorer 7. They now also made it available for people who will not attend the conference. Also MIX06, Bill Gates promised more frequent updates to Internet Explorer in the future.