OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

Linux: Low Latency and Filesystems

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-15 Linux 16 Comments

Continuing the earlier discussion about low latency and Ingo Molnar's voluntary kernel preemption patch, the conversation moved onto the affect a filesystem can have on latency. Specifically, 2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton noted that ReiserFS was known to have some latency issues in both 2.4 & 2.6 kernels.

J2EE vs .Net Web Services Performance

Submitted by Jayson Knight 2004-07-15 Benchmarks 28 Comments

Sun claims for Java performance Vs .NET and the MS counter-claim.

Document Indexing Systems Comparison

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 General Development 3 Comments

Here's an interesting article by Seth Nickell, comparing Metadata Index Systems and Document Stores.

Music and network theory: a plan to improve Shuffle

Guest post by Manuel Amador 2004-07-14 Multimedia, AV 35 Comments

One of the ultimate goals of music is to provide enjoyment. Be it through association of memories, stimulation, rhythm or melodic messages, music fans all over the world enjoy listening to music.

Apple posts 61 million USD profit; G5 to power new iMac

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 Apple 42 Comments

Apple posted a net profit of US$61 million, or 16 cents a share, for its fiscal 2004 third quarter ended June 26, 2004. Apple said it shipped 876,000 Macs and 860,000 iPods during the quarter, representing a 14 percent increase in CPU units and a 183 percent increase in iPods over the year-ago quarter. During Apple's third quarter conference call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that the next generation iMac, which will begin shipping in September, will be powered by the PowerPC G5 processor.

ReactOS Concept is More Promise Than Production

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 ReactOS 24 Comments

"ReactOS is an open source (GPL) operating system built to be compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers. ReactOS is currently just a development platform; it is not a useful desktop system for the average user in any way, but it has potential." Read the review at NewsForge.

Ballmer: Xbox ‘can take Sony’

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 Microsoft 51 Comments

Although much has been made of the challenges Microsoft faces in readying the next version of Windows, CEO Steve Ballmer said that "big bets" like Longhorn are not a reason for concern.

Ex Red Hat heavies launch fancy package manager

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 Red Hat 24 Comments

Former high-ranking Red Hat executives are behind a commercial package management tool said to facilitate system modifications better than dpkg or rpm. The 2003 startup Specifix says its "Conary" tool enables even heavily modified development systems to track upstream versions easily. The company was co-founded by a former Red Hat chief developer and a former VP of engineering services. More here.

Critical Fixes Top MS List for IE, Outlook

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 Internet Explorer 10 Comments

Microsoft's "critical" security bulletins target holes in the Windows HTML Help system and the Task Scheduler. Still, researchers warn of new IE vulnerabilities.

Interview with Charles Simonyi on Intentional Programming

Submitted by Marc van Woerkom 2004-07-14 General Development 4 Comments

"Last week we spent some time with Sergey Dmitriev who talked about his Meta Programming System, which he says fits Charles Simonyi's model of Intentional Programming. This generated a lot of interest, so I contacted Charles himself to see if we could talk with him about it and he graciously accepted to talk about his work at Intentional Software. He was also very speedy in his response to my questions, which allowed me to publish his interview this following week." Read the interview here.

Java rave Bitter rivals, best friends

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 Java 1 Comment

A lot was brewing at Sun Microsystems' recent JavaOne developer conference in San Francisco, California. Between bouts of latter-gulping, M. Madhavan checked out what was happening with Sun's platform-independent programming language.

Is Internet Explorer Living on Borrowed Time?

Guest post by Roberto J. Dohnert 2004-07-14 Internet Explorer 86 Comments

The other day I attended the Chat with the Internet Explorer team. While I found it interesting and the fact that Microsoft is opening itself up more to the public by allowing developers to blog and allowing more public exposure at their conferences I will say I was very disappointed in the chat. Microsoft totally ignored the issues and the questions that really mattered were deflected and basically passed on for something more that Microsoft wanted to talk about.

MorphOS v1.4 installation guide

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 Morphos 7 Comments

Here is a step by step guide: Installing MorphOS is what this guide is all about. The MorphOS CD which comes with your PegasosII have some errors on it and can confuse you so hopefully this guide can help clearing up a few things.

OpenVMS: An Old Dog Still Doing New Tricks

Submitted by Ken Farmer 2004-07-14 OS News 39 Comments

Datamation takes a look at OpenVMS. Thought by many to be long since dead and buried, the OpenVMS operating system persists inside many enterprises.

Is Mac OS X ‘Tiger’ Rolling Over on Windows Support?

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-14 macOS 17 Comments

Could Apple be skimping on Windows integration with its forthcoming "Tiger" version of Mac OS X? Support for Mac clients in the enterprise still looks scant to many on the front lines, says eWEEK.

PHP 5 Released; PHP Compiler, Too

Submitted by Henrique Neto 2004-07-14 General Development 31 Comments

After years of anticipation, PHP 5 was released today. This release represents a milestone in the evolution of PHP. It sports the new Zend Engine II, a completely re-worked object model, and many many new features.

Development Release: Progeny Debian 2.0 Beta 1

Submitted by Philipp Esselbach 2004-07-14 Debian 16 Comments

The beta release of Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition is now available. "This version of Progeny Debian was built using the new Anaconda for Debian, based on Anaconda from Fedora Core 2, and contains many updates to components from Debian's current testing distribution ("sarge")." This is the second snapshot of Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition and it contains three ISO images.

Building The Next Generation, Part 1: Hardware

Guest post by Nicholas Blachford 2004-07-13 Hardware 32 Comments

After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.

How Linux boots

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-13 Linux 13 Comments

This articles teaches you how a Linux system starts, or boots -- that is, how the kernel gets into memory and how the regular system processes get started.

Ballmer Vs. Linux, IBM and Novell

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-13 Rumors 84 Comments

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer came out swinging -- verbally and even physically at times, at the Worldwide Partner Conference where he mocked open source technology, Linux in particular, while touting opportunities on the company's own platforms. During a keynote address, Ballmer also identified Novell customers as prime targets for Microsoft's partners to pick off as potential new customers.