ComputerWorld has an article about OpenVMS which maintains a substantial user base in large organizations, and there's promise of new interest as it moves to 64-bit Itanium.
Recent news has covered the release of many new smart phones. We have the new Treo650, the new Sony P910, the new Audiovox PPC 6000, the new Blackberry 7100, and the new Nokia 6670. Recently, I've been speaking via email almost daily with my AT&T (now Cingular) rep. For some reason, the conversation always steers towards his wanting to push the latest from Nokia, Blackberry, etc.
The next version of Mandrakesoft's Linux distribution comes with Wi-Fi roaming capabilities, Bluetooth support and improved power management for laptop users.
Just a few months ago, it seemed like games on Mac OS X were going great. Battlefield 1942 was out for the Mac, as was Unreal Tournament 2004. There was Homeworld 2, SimCity 4, Myst IV, and Splinter Cell. But the PC gaming industry is now striking back again, with Halo 2*, Counterstrike Source, Half-Life 2, Star Wars Battlefront, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault, Battlefield 2, and many more, says X-Net.
Unicode, or the Universal Character Set (UCS), was developed to end once and for all the problems associated with the abundance of character sets used for writing text in different languages. It is a single character set whose goal is to be a superset of all others used before, and to contain every character used in writing any language (including many dead languages) as well as other symbols used in mathematics and engineering. Any charset can be losslessly converted to Unicode, as we'll see.
Get a comparison of the strengths of the two most common .NET data providers for Oracle, and be prepared to select the right one for your next development project. Elsewhere, Dino Esposito builds an ASP.NET 1.x custom control that mimics the behavior and the programming interface of the ASP.NET 2.0 DetailsView control.
"Wireless access is all the rage. Wireless this, wireless that. Hot spots are turning up everywhere. Many are free. Many have absolutely no security. There are several in my neighborhood. I have no idea who is running them, but at least one is wide open."Read the article at OnLamp. My Take: At my apartment complex there are 3 other wireless networks, except ours. Two of them are open! I even warned one of the guys to secure it, but he doesn't seem to care! Funny how people don't care about data security.
When it comes to digital gadgets, Europeans are not impressed by do-it-all devices that play songs and films, keep track of appointments and play video games, a new survey on Monday said. In a survey of 5,000 consumers from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and Italy, Jupiter Research found that 27 percent of respondents expressed a preference for a gadget that plays music only while just five percent are interested in buying a device that plays both music and video.
Earlier this year Microsoft released a major security update for Windows XP, which was designed to strengthen the operating system’s defences against attack from viruses and hackers. One major part of the update was an improved version of its firewall software. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at antivirus firm Sophos, said the latest Bagle variants are designed to attack and disable Microsoft’s new firewall application.
Intel is expected to release a faster version of its powerful but expensive Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor this week, alongside the introduction of a chip set that uses a faster front-side bus to connect the processor and the memory. The Extreme Edition is basically the same as the Pentium 4, but features 2MB of Level 3 cache instead of 1MB. It's also extremely expensive: $999.
Apple decided to disable full dual head video in the new iMac in firmware, but intrepid hackers will not be daunted. The leading German language computer magazine c't has put an OpenFirmware hack into an Applescript for easy use.
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled the latest version of its Media Center OS, which turns a PC into a Tivo-like device and digital jukebox. While the last version only came pre-installed on rather expensive hardware, there are already vendors lined up with some less expensive (and pretty cool) hardware this time around. Read more in this Mercury News article.
Techworld just released an updated version of their Report on Windows vs. Linux. This report tries to separate myth from reality... In particular, we have looked at new technological developments since the last survey. We offer no blanket conclusion that Linux is better than Windows, or vice versa, but point out the technological areas where one scores highly and the other less well.
According to Distrowatch an evaluation edition of the Lycoris Desktop/LX 1.4 has been released. The edition only contains GPL components and the license prevents its use after the initial 45-day evaluation period. Get more information via their press release here and their sneak peak page. Update: 100 Lycoris screenshots.
The second beta of Arch Linux 0.7 code named Wombat has been released for public consumption and testing. Kernel 2.6.9 is included. Get it from the download mirrors.
BeOS/Zeta user group JPBE.net recently exhibited at the Kansai Open Source 2004 show held in Osaka, Japan, inviting yellowTAB Senior Development Engineer Bruno G. Albuquerque to host a seminar on OpenBFS, and to demo the latest version of Zeta OS. News site www.iscomputeron.com now carries a report of Kansai Open Source 2004, while videos of the OpenBFS session and an on stage Zeta demo are also available from JPBE.net. Also, C# for BeOS.
Here's the only recent and still valid book for Mono: "Mono: A Developer's Notebook" by Edd Dumbill and Niel M. Bornstein. The book is under O'Reilly's "notebook" series, which are meant to be books mainly consisted by notes. Here's our quick review.
