Interview with an 8Ball..

Apple 14 Comments
From the time at which Steve Jobs announced that Apple will be using Intel processors rather than PowerPC ones, every analyst, armchair CEO, and every anonymous forum poster with a two bit opinion suddenly became an 'expert' on the proper way to execute Apple's plan. "jwdsail" submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which offers an equally if not more accurate way to predict Apple's future plans... by consulting his Magic 8-Ball.
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The need for GPL Free Apps on Mac OS X

macOS 76 Comments
The Mac platform was always considered a premium platform, hence much of its software is shareware or commercial. In the recent days more freeware applications have emerged, but the majority are small utilities and not full scale applications. Enter the world of GNU which can not only provide "free" applications as in beer, but most importantly, "Free", as in Freedom.
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Xen growing up

  Submitted by Andrew Z. OS News 25 Comments
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.
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New Recommendations for Using Strings in Microsoft .NET 2.0

.NET 4 Comments
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.
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JS/UIX: UN*X in JavaScript

  Submitted by Geert Hendrickx Unix 58 Comments
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.
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Mandriva acquires Lycoris

  Submitted by Patrick Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 52 Comments
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.
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QNX 6.3 Lags Behind The Big Three

  Submitted by Kelly McNeill QNX 85 Comments
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.
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Debian: Where should we/we should go from here?

Debian 46 Comments
"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.
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