The Future of Mobility is Linux

"Okay, I’ve had an opinion change I’d like to announce. I’m betting that the future of mobility will be Linux, and not Symbian, Windows or anything else. This is quite a change from my previous pro-Symbian stances, but I’ve been sort of leaning this way for a while - or rather, leaning away from Symbian as it fails to live up to its potential - and now I’ve finally come to a religious change of faith when it comes to mobile OSes."

3840×1024: the Widest RISC OS Desktop Yet?

RISC OS has recently benefitted from a number of projects to improve its graphics capabilities including, most recently, 3D acceleration. And as more development occurs for multi-display support, Drobe asks the question whether this is the widest RISC OS desktop yet. But more interesting is the insight into the RISC OS world that this view of the desktop provides.

Review: Inexpensive “VR” Specs

OSNews takes a look at some inexpensive "Virtual Reality" monitor specs. You wear them like a pair of glasses, and your eye sees the equivalent of a relatively large monitor. It's been a science fiction dream for years, and now it's available for under $200 at Geeks.com, albeit in rudimentary form. So how do they work in real life? Read more to find out.

Xfce 4.4 Preview

"Every major release of the 4.x series of Xfce has been pretty major. 4.0 was the result of over a years work, a major rewrite of the entire desktop. 4.2 saw the introduction of major features and enhancements that were incomplete for 4.0, and new developers as Xfce4 gained popularity. 4.4 is going to be a major upgrade to Xfce, with new components, major upgrades to old ones, and more tools for developers. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what’s coming."

OpenOffice.org Goes LGPL

On 2nd September 2005 Sun announced the retirement of the Sun Industry Standard Source License. As a consequence, no future Sun open-source project will use the SISSL. Projects currently using the SISSL under a dual-license scheme, such as OpenOffice.org, are dropping the SISSL and thus simplifying their license scheme as soon as the development cycle allows. Effectie with the announcement that Sun is retiring the SISSL, OpenOffice.org will in the future only be licensed under the LGPL (.pdf). A FAQ is also available.

Open Virtuozzo Released

Open Virtuozzo (GPL/QPL) is an operating system-level server virtualization solution, built on Linux. Open Virtuozzo creates isolated, secure virtual private servers or virtual environments on a single physical server enabling better server utilization and ensuring that applications do not conflict. Each VPS performs and executes exactly like a stand-alone server; VPSs can be rebooted independently and have root access, users, IP addresses, memory, processes, files, applications, system libraries and configuration files.

History of VisiCalc

Apple Computer without VisiCalc would have been an entirely different company. VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, was a major cause of the success of the Apple II, and attracted the attention of IBM to the microcomputer market. Read about VisiCalc at creator Dan Bricklin's site and a brief history at Braeburn.

Objective Modula-2 for Cocoa and GNUstep

Objective Modula-2 (or ObjM2) is an extension to Modula-2 which follows the Objective-C object model and retains the bracketed Smalltalk message passing syntax introduced in Objective-C. Like Objective-C, Objective Modula-2 is a reflective, object oriented programming language with both static and dynamic typing. It is intended as a safer alternative to Objective-C for Cocoa and GNUstep software development.

Hefty Hardware Requirements for Vista

Just weeks after releasing Windows Vista Beta 1, Microsoft has shifted our paradigms again, unveiling a preview of beta 2 at the TechEd 2005 developer conference. Also, "hardware vendors are going to love the news that Windows Vista is going to need very beefy hardware to run well. At Microsoft's TechEd conference, Dan Warne finally managed to squeeze blood from a stone - or rather, answers about Longhorn's hardware requirements from Microsoft."

Loosely Coupled Desktop Integration Via RuDI

"RuDI is an architectural approach whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software components instead of linking to libraries. A service is a unit of work of the desktop done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a 3rd party service consumer. How does RuDI achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents? It does so by employing two architectural constraints: An extensible XML schema allows new versions of services to be introduced without breaking existing services. Second we send messages over a protocol instead of calling explicit individual member functions."

Solaris9 9/05 Released

"Solaris 9 users and customers will be happy to know that 9/05 is out. Get it for both SPARC and X86. Sadly the Whats New docs for Solaris 9 don't include a per-update review of changes, however the customer notification mail states: "It supports the newer hardware models such as SPARC servers based on the UltraSPARCIV+ processor and the Galaxy x64 servers." So, the big news here boils down to multi-core support for Solaris 9."

Localhost: an Internet-Wide Decentralized Filesystem

"Localhost is a program that lets you access a shared, world-wide file system through your web browser. This file system is maintained in a fully decentralized way by all of the computers running Localhost. The program uses BitTorrent technology, and new distributed hashtable technology called Kademlia. Every user accesses the system from the same root folder. You can change any folder (including the root folder) by adding files and/or folders to it."