OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Confidence Games in Software Engineering

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-20 General Development 4 Comments

Have you heard the pitch for the tool that gives a 600% productivity improvement, or the new programming language that will solve all of your problems? Matt Heusser explains that confidence games abound in software development—and suggests what to do about them.

Fedora Core 5 Released

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-19 Fedora Core 91 Comments

Fedora Core 5, 'Bordeaux', has been released to mirrors. The release notes are posted, along with sets of screenshots of the installation procedure and the resulting desktop, by Linux-Noob, so boys and girls, rejoice. The main new features of Fedora Core 5 are the latest GNOME and KDE desktops (2.14 and 3.5 respectively), integration of early work on the Fedora Rendering Project, Mono installed by default, new pakage manager front-ends, better sleep/hibernate support, and much, much more. Update: Screencast and screenshots.

Iron Chisels, Invisible iPods, Stick Castles

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-19 In the News 36 Comments

As I sit back, here on March 19th 2019, to review the past 13 years, I cannot help but feel slightly melancholic. I felt it was time to summarize the period in the tech industry between 2006 and 2019. Where did we leave off, where did we go, and where are we going to end up? Note: Yes, the Sunday Eve Column.

Review: GNOME 2.14

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-19 Gnome 26 Comments

Linux.com reviews GNOME 2.14, and concludes: "GNOME 2.14 continues the steady improvement visible in the last few releases. It is an incremental upgrade, consisting largely of tweaks and the filling in of gaps in functionality. If few of these changes are major by themselves, the overall result is welcome. Perhaps the best way of looking at the release is not as an end in itself, but as a milestone on the road to desktop usability in free operation systems. From this perspective, GNOME 2.14 is a sign that much of the journey is already over - and that the remaining distance is less than many observers think."

Scanning in Geek History

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-19 OS News 5 Comments

For almost two decades, Jason Scott squirreled away thousands of pages of old advertisements, mailers, and brochures left over from the genesis of personal computing. Whether people see it as geek history or just junk, he now wants to share his stash with the world. Maybe Mac fans can't recall what that Apple II they considered so cutting-edge back in the mid-1980s looked like. Perhaps video-game aficionados forgot that Atari once pinned dreams of dominating the PC market on the now long-forgotten 1450 XLD computer. Scott's site can jog their memory.

Judge: Google Must Give Feds Limited Access to Records

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-19 Google 8 Comments

In a move that alleviates some privacy concerns, a federal judge granted part of a Justice Department request for Google search data but said users' search queries were off-limits. The 21-page order issued Friday by US District Judge James Ware, represented little change from his stance at a hearing earlier this week.

Apple Issues Updated Security Fix

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-19 macOS 15 Comments

Apple released another version of the security patch it distributed on March 13 to users of its OS X operating system software, in order to address a problem reported with the update. The company said it distributed the new patch, dubbed Update 2006-002 v1.1, in order to fix an issue with Apple's Safari Web browser that some users observed after installing its 2006-002 security update. According to a post on the company's Web site, the previous update had caused some Safari users to have problems launching the browser.

Building a Virtual Private Server with Debian, OpenVZ

Submitted by Falko Timme 2006-03-19 Debian 4 Comments

"In this HowTo I will describe the steps to be taken to prepare a server for OpenVZ virtual machines on Debian 3.1 32Bit Linux. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernal patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license."

Getting Back to Basics with Arch Linux

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-19 Linux 50 Comments

"The recent emphasis of the Linux community has been on desktop distros that make it easy to install and configure the system without venturing beyond the GUI. Despite the success of these beginner-friendly systems, a significant segment of the Linux population prefers a simpler approach. These back-to-basics users want clarity, stability, and speed, and they do not care about the proliferation of redundant tools and glossy configuration helpers that populate the GUI-based systems. In the past, no-frills Linux users gravitated to systems such as Slackware, Gentoo, or Debian, but another back-to-basics distro is gaining favor among the Linux faithful: Arch Linux."

Writing Managed 3D Apps for Mobile Devices

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-19 .NET No Comments

Chris Muench is a mobile and embedded MVP. Here he shows how to write a managed Direct3D application for Windows Mobile devices.

Internet Explorer Has a Future

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-19 Internet Explorer 34 Comments

At its Mix '06 designer confab next week, Microsoft will distribute a 'layout-complete' IE 7.0 test build, yet another step along the way toward the final IE 7.0 release, and talk IE futures, too.

Mandriva One 2006.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-19 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 10 Comments

The inaugural release of Mandriva One, a new live CD that aims to simplify the installation of the Mandriva Linux operating system to a hard disk directly from the live CD, has been released: "An operating system is generally available as a live CD or a set of installation CDs, but not both on the same disc. Mandriva One differs in offering an all-in-one CD based on Mandriva Linux 2006."

Submitted by Ralf. 2006-03-18 macOS 16 Comments

Learn Objective-C with Xcode in the new free PDF book from Bert Altenburg, Alex Clarke and Philippe Mougin. Jump into Cocoa Development with some ready made classes and example code for XCode 2.0 and above. The book starts from scratch with basic programming knowlegde and ends up in the depth of Objective-C and Cocoa.

Submitted by ormandj 2006-03-18 Solaris 32 Comments

Solaris Express 3/06 was released today. This is build 33 of Nevada. Various additions have been made, as well as the general slew of bug fixes. There is an .iso image for DVD available for download as well.

Math for Programmers: What You Need to Know

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-18 General Development 39 Comments

"I've been working for the past 15 months on repairing my rusty math skills, ever since I read a biography of Johnny von Neumann. I've read a huge stack of math books, and I have an even bigger stack of unread math books. And it's starting to come together. Let me tell you about it," writes programmer Steve Yegge.

Intro to the Eclipse Communication Framework

Eugenia Loli 2006-03-18 Java No Comments

The Eclipse Communication Framework (ECF) is a new Eclipse project devoted to providing an open source framework supporting the creation of communications-based applications on the Eclipse platform. This article gives gives you a quick glimpse into ECF and an example that demonstrated one of the many capabilities the framework provides, and its future direction.

Submitted by misha 2006-03-17 Fedora Core 62 Comments

Many Fedora users are anxiously waiting for the Fedora Core 5 release, scheduled for Monday, March 20. Be warned that some of you may have to wait a little longer, however: the kernel shipped with FC5 effectively disallows the loading of any non-GPL modules. That behavior was a mistake, and a fix has already been made, but it is too late to get that fix into the initial FC5 release. So binary module users will want to wait until the first errata kernel is released (a few days, at most) before upgrading. Update: Elsewhere, an interview with Greg DeKoenigsberg who presently serves as Red Hat's Community Relations Manager and is on the Fedora Extras Steering Committee.

Submitted by dhaneshr 2006-03-17 Apple 53 Comments

A very detailed how to for installing and running Windows XP on an Intel iMac have been posted on the contest website. And on a related note, someone who almost won the contest posted his findings too: "While I’m disappointed not to have won, I’m encouraged to see that our approaches were remarkably similar. We both wrote custom EFI CSM drivers to emulate the BIOS functions Windows requires to boot. I’m very curious how they managed to get VGA working, and I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t work in either the Mini or the Macbook Pro, as it looks like they did all their development on an iMac."

Submitted by Anonymous Penguin 2006-03-17 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 66 Comments

"Duval details his side of the story: "Fired. Yes. Simply fired, for economical reasons, along with a few other ones. More than 7 years after I created Mandrake-Linux and then Mandrakesoft, the current boss of Mandriva 'thanks me' and I'm leaving, sad, with my two-month salary indemnity standard package. It's difficult to accept that back in 1998 I created my job and the one of many other people, and that recently, on a February afternoon, Mandriva's CEO called to tell me that I was leaving." Mandriva's CEO replies: "Gael was not fired. This term would imply something wrong on his part, which was not the case. He was laid off."

Windows Performance Rating for Vista Examined

Thom Holwerda 2006-03-16 Windows 20 Comments

"The latest Community Technology Preview version of Windows Vista contains a new feature aimed at helping the average Joe and his friendly Best Buy shopping assistant figure out what kind of horsepower is needed to run the new OS. The rating consists of an aggregate total rating on a scale from 1 to 5 and a number of sub-ratings on a scale yet to be specified, broken out by hardware categories like processor, memory, video card, and hard drive."