FreeBSD Release Engineer Scott Long responds to questions relating to the stability and viability of FreeBSD 5.x releases.

When Netscape 8.0 came out a few days ago, I decided to read about its improvements. Well, I was surely surprised when I saw that it gives you the option of rendering "trusted" pages (as to how it determines what to trust, I have no clue) with the Internet Explorer rendering engine. It didn’t take long before this gave me an idea however. I decided to install Netscape on a copy of Windows that did not have IE installed. From there I would see how Netscape ran. As you can tell from this screenshot, I did this with 98lite. Interestingly enough, it turns out that you must have Internet Explorer before you can even install Netscape 8.0!

The number and variety of computing devices in the environment are increasing rapidly. Real computers are no longer tethered to desktops or locked in server rooms. PDAs, highly mobile tablet and laptop devices, palmtop computers, and mobile telephony handsets now offer powerful platforms for the delivery of new applications and services. These devices are, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Hidden from sight are the many computing and network elements required to support the infrastructure that makes ubiquitous computing possible.

Not so long ago, adopting Linux for any endeavor was a radical idea. But for the radicals — early adopters and those asked to implement bleeding-edge technologies during the Internet boom — Linux was a perfectly reasonable solution. Paired with Samba, Linux offered more robust file and print services than Windows. Combined with the Apache web server, Linux powered web sites. The latter mixed with OSS tools such as Perl and MySQL transformed the Internet into a World Wide Web of possibilities.

The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. A number of feature enhancements, the most notable of which is support for locking are to be found on version 1.2.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple and Intel executives have been in discussions about Apple using Intel chips in its hardware. Apple's only official response at this point is that it's "rumor and speculation," but the Journal implies that it's nearly a done deal. No word on whether Apple would use Intel chips across its product line or just in one or two products, like the Xserve. And this could all just be maneuvering to extract a better deal out of IBM. Losing Apple would be a major blow to IBM's chip business.