What’s New in Eclipse 3.1
In late June of this year, the latest release of the Eclipse Platform, version 3.1, will be available for download from eclipse.org. Read more here.
Xen growing up
In August, XenSource will release Xen 3.0, software for running multiple operating systems on a single server. The Register's Ashlee Vance writes about big companies helping to make Xen a strong competitor with VMWare. New Xen features coming August and soon include better SMP support; x86 64-bit, Itanic, Power, and Intel VT CPU support; and Solaris and Windows support.
Java flaws open door to hackers
Sun Microsystems has fixed a pair of security bugs in Java that could be exploited by attackers to take over computers running Windows, Linux and Solaris.
Sun has second thoughts about Linux on Solaris
Sun Microsystems is guiding the spotlight away from a once-prominent feature of Solaris 10. Elsewhere, Solaris Engineering: huge amount of technical articles. Sun Microsystems is revamping the start-up process for its Solaris operating system, scrapping an awkward, elderly approach for one the company promises will be faster, more familiar and more useful on a wide variety of computers.
‘Mactel’ Desktops May Offer Triple-Threat OS
Apple won't stand in the way of people who want to run Windows on its forthcoming Intel-processor Macs. But whether or not users will be able to run Windows directly on the machines is still a mystery. Analysts fear short-term hit to Apple in wake of Intel deal: See sales of PowerPCs suffering if buyers wait until 2006 for Macs with new chips
New Recommendations for Using Strings in Microsoft .NET 2.0
Code owners previously using the InvariantCulture for string comparison, casing, and sorting should strongly consider using a new set of String overloads in Microsoft .NET 2.0. Specifically, data that is designed to be culture-agnostic and linguistically irrelevant should begin specifying overloads using either the StringComparison.Ordinal or StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase members of the new StringComparison enumeration. These enforce a byte-by-byte comparison similar to strcmp that not only avoids bugs from linguistic interpretation of essentially symbolic strings, but provides better performance.
PC makers snub Windows sans media player
Four major PC makers have no plans to sell the media-player-free version of Windows, which Microsoft was ordered to offer by Europe's competition commissioner.
BSD cognoscenti on Linux
Recently NewsForge published an interview with Linus Torvalds on the similarities and differences between the Linux kernel and the BSD operating systems. As a follow-up, NewsForge asked similar questions of OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt, and NetBSD's Christos Zoulas.
Sun’s Pay-per-use model
Stuart Wells, VP of Strategic Development and Sun Financing, shares his insights on how the Sun grid and utility computing will change the business of buying and using computer assets.
JS/UIX: UN*X in JavaScript
JS/UIX is an UN*X-like OS for standard web-browsers, written entirely in JavaScript (no plug-ins used). It comprises a virtual machine, shell, virtual file-system, process-management, and brings its own terminal with screen- and keyboard-mapping.
Mandriva acquires Lycoris
On the heels of its recent acquisition of Brazilian Linux vendor Conectiva and name change from Mandrakesoft to Mandriva, Mandriva will announce today that it has acquired Lycoris, a US maker of user-friendly desktop Linux distributions. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Mandriva's February acquisition of Conectiva SA was valued at $2.3 million in stock. The DesktopLinux.com news item is here, and an associated interview with Lycoris founder/CEO Joseph Cheek is here.
QNX 6.3 Lags Behind The Big Three
QNX (pronounced either Q-N-X or Q-nix) is a commercial POSIX-compliant Unix-like real-time operating system, aimed primarily at the embedded systems market. The system is quite small, fitting in a minimal fashion on a single floppy, and is considered to be both very fast and fairly "complete." But how does it perform? Stuart Goddard submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which shows his experiences after installing version 6.3 of the operating system. Update: The story was removed at osViews.
Debian: Where should we/we should go from here?
"If you ask me (and you didn't, but I'm going to tell you anyway), Debian should have two overarching priorities for the next release: 1. putting a timed release cycle in place, so what happened with sarge never happens again; and 2. keeping the growing family of Debian derivatives united around a common core -- namely, Debian itself. What's at stake? If we don't do something about both of these problems, actual and potential, Debian will be irrelevant by the time etch is out" says Debian's founder.
Fixes in for critical IE, Windows flaws
Microsoft on Tuesday issued three "critical" patches for flaws that could allow a malicious attacker to take remote control of a computer.
Solaris engineers offer personal source-code tours
Sun Microsystems chose to employ the human touch when it introduced more than 5 million lines of Solaris source code onto the Internet on Tuesday.
Office developer speaks about the Office XML format
Brian Jones, a Microsoft employed Office developer, speaks about the new XML format to appear in the new version of Microsoft Office and answers a lot of questions about the OASIS issue. No the formats will not be compatible and Brian takes the time to say why: "Our primary goal at Microsoft was to create an open format that fully represented all of the features that our customers have used in their existing documents, documents that have been created using the existing Office products over the past couple decades."
The slow road to Windows XP
Use of Microsoft Windows XP has grown inside corporations, but a new study shows that nearly half of business PCs are still running the older Windows 2000.
Public Beta of REALbasic 2005 for Linux, for free
REAL Software announced today that REALbasic 2005 for Linux, a groundbreaking new visual development environment for Linux, is available for public beta and can be downloaded now from www.realsoftware.com/demo. REALbasic 2005 for Linux Standard Edition will be offered for free when it ships in August. The Mac OS X version was posted today.
Opensolaris.org now live
The opensolaris.org community site is
now live. Source code (some 20,000 files) is available for
download, torrent
and perusal.
Mailing lists,
a project overview
and a community
portal are also live.
JSR-275 to add units to Java has been approved.
The executive committee for Java SE/EE has approved the new JSR-275 to add units/quantities to the Java platform (see JSR-275 results). Although the early specification/implementation of the units package provided by the wide-ranging JScience open-source project has to be simplified significantly according to Google Inc. executive member.