Review: Updated .Mac Tools Suite Disappoints

"Apple has updated its .Mac suite of online tools, giving subscribers more for their $99.95 yearly fee. They'll now get more storage (1GB, up from 250MB), a new service called Groups for creating instant online shared spaces, and a simplified backup tool. .Mac has always been good, but Apple has never committed the resources to make it great. More storage and top-notch backup and antivirus tools would seem essential. The suite no longer offers an antivirus utility either."

YellowTAB ZETA: An Alternative to Desktop Linux?

"When looking for an alternative to Windows most people think of either Apple's OS X or Linux. Of course, these are both viable alternatives but they are not the only options. One way to go is with yellowTAB's ZETA operating system. Though it is not yet very popular, ZETA is the successor to BeOS, the highly regarded OS from Be, Inc. This is a very interesting and beautiful operating system which may not presently be a threat to Linux but it does have more than a few things going for it."

Mobile Email Client for USB Devices

At the core of Mobility Email is Mozilla Thunderbird, the wildly popular open source email client. The best thing about Mobility Email is that it's totally mobile. You can take it anywhere with you on an iPod Shuffle (or any other USB device). Simply plug your USB key into any Windows computer in the world and boom. There's all your email and all your contacts.

FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long

BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux. Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.

Embeddable C/C++ Interperter Ch 5.1 Released

Embeddable Ch is a C/C++ interpreter for cross-platform scripting, 2D/3D plotting, numerical computing, shell programming and embedded scripting. It was announced the availability of Ch 5.1 and Embedded Ch 5.1. Ch which enhance embedded ch scripting with thread handling. They allow you to abort a run time embedded ch thread. It supports MingW for SDK and Embedded Ch. This release also fixes many bugs. More here.

Installing Fink on Mac OS X

At its heart, Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. This means that plenty of Unix open source software compiles and runs on it. However, compiling software can be tedious, especially if it has many dependencies, or if it hasn't been tested on Mac OS X. You have to perform the usual configure/make/make install process and hope it all works fine. Maybe you have to tamper with the makefile or even the source code. Moreover, you'll need to make sure all libraries used by the software are installed. Here is where Fink comes in.

What Is Quartz

Quartz is an open source job-scheduling framework written entirely in Java and designed for use in both J2SE and J2EE applications. It offers great flexibility without sacrificing simplicity. You can create simple or complex schedules for executing any job. It includes features such as database support, clustering, plugins, prebuilt jobs for EJB, JavaMail and others, support for cron-like expressions, and many more.