HP has notified its partners and customers of the end of the line for its AlphaServer systems. According to a document seen by the Inquirer, the last order date is planned for the 27th of October 2006, with those systems delivered by December next year. The end of an era.

A new initiative by the Brazillian government will see low cost KDE based computers on sale throughout the country from next week. The Computers for All scheme will bring "cheap and accessible" computers following a recent law cutting taxes and encouraging affordable financing for low income buyers of computers preinstalled with Free Software operating systems. Several companies are involved in the scheme with most using KDE desktops.

Transgaming has released Cedega 5.0 today. "TransGaming is very excited about the introduction of the new Cedega scheduler which allows for better control over processes and threads under the Linux 2.6 kernels. With pixel shaders 1.4, your games will look more realistic and deliver better graphics quality than ever before. Preliminary FBO support has also been added as an experimental feature for users to try out on their favorite titles. Other improvements to Cedega designed to improve correctness and performance have also been included." Read the release notes.

"What the heck is it? would be the average observer’s first question. Looking at the 3Dconnexion SpacePilot, it is difficult to discern exactly what a device like this could be used for. Somewhere between a doorknob, a calculator, and a fragment of a stealth bomber cockpit, the SpacePilot clearly means business. But what type of business?"

Modern memory management isn't as simple as knowing that you have 150MB of programs to run and 256MB of memory to do it in. Modern Unix-like operating systems have their own characteristics for allocating and using memory. Howard Feldman explains how this works and shows how to analyze and reduce the memory consumption of your programs, no matter what language you use.

The Nexenta OS project has released its first publically available release. NexentaOS pre-alpha 1 has been released (also trying to beat this, I guess). You can download it from this page. This release contains OpenSolaris kernel build 26, GNOME 2.12.1, GNOME Office, Xorg 6.8.2, and much more. Update by AS: Screenshots!

The momentum generated by Apple's iPod digital music players and related products continues to translate into new Macintosh sales according to one Wall Street analyst who estimates that over one million Windows users have purchased a Mac in the first three quarters of 2005.

"Simplifying software installation is a popular pastime for Linux developers. It has given us useful tools like Synaptic, YUM, checkinstall, and autopackage. A new kid on the block, Klik, approaches the problem differently, by avoiding the installation altogether."

"Whether you're a buyer or a seller of a product, the essential goal of standardization is to make interoperability possible, allowing communication with anyone else using the same protocol and media. In some cases though, vendors have specific reasons for not being compatible - and those vendors have developed a standard for incompatibility, digital rights management. The goal of DRM is to limit compatibility because things which are compatible can be copied and distributed freely. In this article, Peter Seebach looks at a potential oxymoron - standards designed to subvert and prevent interoperability."

PostgreSQL 8.1 has been released. You can download from here, and the source code from here. The release notes are here.

In light of the many misunderstandings about Linux, software repositories and installation of packages, part one of this season's Mandriva Linux 2006 review includes an extensive background article about it. It explains why the nature of Free Software leads to a more userfriendly software installation setup for Linux distributions in general, as compared to proprietary systems such as the current desktop market leader. The process is illustrated with Mandriva Linux tools. This first part of the Mandriva Linux 2006 review also contains information on the installation and benchmark figures against previous Mandriva/Mandrake products, amongst other things.

This chapter explains why you need a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server and a domain name system (DNS) server. You'll also learn how to configure DHCP services on Mac OS X Server to provide address, lease and renewal, and directory information. You will then change settings on the client computer to access Internet Protocol (IP) information via DHCP.

Coming from his background in Java development, the concept of using delegates and categories, as opposed to subclassing, was a bit foreign to Marcus Zarra. In Java subclassing, nearly everything was quite common. So common in fact, that Sun provided generic subclasses in quite a few cases. Objective-C and Cocoa, however, have a different approach. Marcus walks you through the different approaches used in Objective-C programming. Also: the Java platform includes a number of packages that are concerned with the movement of data into and out of programs. These packages differ in the kinds of abstractions they provide for dealing with I/O (input/output). This chapter covers primarily the stream-based model of the java.io package.

Activities are the building blocks of a workflow. A number of activities are provided in the Visual Studio 2005 toolbox to create basic workflows. You can also easily create your own activities, which can be added to the toolbox for use in your workflows. This chapter introduces you to all the activities that come with Windows Workflow Foundation.