XFCE project released a new development version of its Xfce Foundation Classes, which is a "set of integrated C++ classes for developing Xfce applications on UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux". Here you gain access to the full annoucement (description, minimum dependencies, enhancements from 4.3.0, fixes and, of course, packages downloads).

The last time the Qt 4 Resource Center had a look at Qt 4 Designer there where some problems. Now, a follow-up article tries a later version and finds that Designer has improved dramatically.

Separation of concerns is increasingly on the programmer's radar. Given the growing range of data access products and platforms, it is now essential to separate data producers from data consumers. The observer pattern provides a simple but powerful model for achieving this crucial design goal.

The tools to analyze the performance of applications are varied and have existed in one form or another since the early days of UNIX. It is critical to understand how an application is interacting with the operating system, CPU, and memory system to understand its performance. This chapter will help you understand where the bottleneck in your system is occuring, and how to fix it.

Expert Zone reports: "A lot of reviews of the Pegasos have been published since its release, more than two years ago. Unfortunately, most were written from a fan point of view and were not really objective so I decided to write my own review. The goal of this article is to present the Pegasos/MorphOS couple so I won't mention anything about other OSs running on the machine, such as Linux, or even MacOSX." This review, translated from French to English at Expert Zone's request, covers the hardware and software of the Pegasos I machine. Photos and screenshots included.

A new video from the SkyOS site shows off the IndexFeeder and the Viewer displaying live results. The video was captured in VMWare showing a few queries made over a 40GB attribute and file content indexed filesystem. There is also a document explaining a few internals of the indexing system used in SkyOS.

Today Miguel de Icaza announced that Wikipedia is using Mono and dotLucene (the same search backend used by Beagle) to enable indexing and search for their large content base. As well, his blog announced that Mono 1.1.x has been integrated into Ubuntu and Debian.

Nokia will donate the proceeds from the sales of 500 Nokia 770 Internet Tablets to the GNOME foundation.

According to this Computerworld report, industry hype surrounding Microsoft's decision to go with IBM's Power processors over Intel for its next generation Xbox, won't translate into Windows for Power servers in the near future, despite a pledge by IBM to support the operating system.

Software developed by S.R.D. (Systems Research and Development), recently acquired by IBM, allows huge collections of personal data (travel manifests, medical data) to be compared with other databases, such as terrorist watch lists, while not actually disclosing the data between two entities. What's actually compared is a one-way hash, and any "hits" between two lists, would identify a record number that would presumably lead to a request for the whole record. S.R.D. was originally funded by the CIA's In-Q-Tel venture capital arm.

In an editorial at Newsforge, Richard Stallman notes that, unlike IBM's announcement last year granting open source software authors amnesty from 500 patents, Nokia has only made its recent pledge about the Linux kernel, leaving the door open for an attack on other software projects. Meanwhile, Nokia continues to push for more software patent protection from government. He says their gesture isn't nothing, but it's next to nothing.

Desert Spring-Time (DST) is an OS based on the OCaml runtime+native code compiler. Their goal is to build a robust system through extensive use of OCaml language features, such as static type checking. Currently, this is only a prototype, and is best tested with qemu. More information can be found here.

VIA issued a press release on Friday announcing their new C7 Processor. Noteworthy PVR related features include its low power consumption (2.0GHz at 20W, idle at 0.1W) and support for SSE2 and SSE3 (in addition to existing MMX and SSE support). In the crypto department, they've expanded their PadLock™ hardware crypto/security suite with this CPU by adding in full hardware SHA-1 and SHA-256 (20BGps), hardware assisted RSA (hardware Montgomery Multiplier), a beefed up RNG that feeds directly into the SHA units, and the NX bit.

Power consumption, supply voltage, junction temperature, system cooling requirements, and processor clock rate are all physically and thermodynamically related. By understanding the relationships, system cost and complexity trade-offs, and resource requirements, system designers can strike a better balance between requirements. See how you can incorporate emergent cooling and adaptive power control methods into embedded system designs.