New Video/Screenshots of SkyOS

Video and new screenshots of SkyOS 5.0-beta6 available for download. (MPG, 352x240, ~7min). In other news, the Diff-Filesystem is almost finished. The Diff-Filesystem is a layer between the VFS and any disk's file system. Elsewhere, the Syllable team released experimental new USB drivers.

Intel can Switch on 64-bitness for Prescotts at Will

Paul Otellini showed an interesting slide at the NY analyst meeting last night which shows how fast Intel hopes to move to multicore processors. Otellini said: "What's next is something more profound, moving our product line from logical to physical parallelism. Parallelism is computer speak for taking a serial of tasks and doing them together. You need parallelism in the hardware and operating systems and apps that are aware the machine can handle multiple threads".

Red Hat Updating Both Linux Versions

The update for the company's Enterprise Linux product was released Wednesday, with added support for x86 chips and IBM JS20 blade servers. Up next, the new release of the cutting edge Fedora, News.com reports. Update and mini-commentary: Editorial at eWEEK: "Why Linux users hate Red Hat". We don't think so, Red Hat is still the most used/downloaded distro of all. However, it is true that people usually hate the No1 (just because it is No1) and favor any underdog. Having said that, I prefer Slackware because of its simplicity, app stability, fewer distro bugs and speed compared to Fedora.

WinOE Likely To Join Indigo, WinFS In Longhorn

It's looking more like the next-generation Windows Server, code-named Longhorn, will get key orchestration features derived from BizTalk Server. Microsoft is working on workflow and orchestration technology, called the Windows Orchestration Engine (WinOE), for the Longhorn/Orcas time frame, several sources familiar with the company's plans said. The technology manages how processes or software services interact in distributed systems. Elsewhere, Microsoft will 'componentize' both the client and server versions of Windows Longhorn, its next-generation platform.

File Alteration Monitoring Techniques under Linux

In a multi-user, multi-process operating system, files are continually being created, modified, and deleted, often by apparently unrelated processes. This means that any software that needs to keep aware of what is happening in a filesystem needs to employ a file monitoring technique. Monitoring, in this sense, means keeping a watch over a set of files, waiting for any of them to change. Read the article at DevChannel.

Opinions on the Open Source Economy Model

.NET developer John Carroll wrote two articles on F/OSS claiming that the proprietary model is what drives the economy (article 1, article 2) while Rebecca Reid wrote her own piece "Open-source development models fall flat". What these articles don't discuss is the "fully open standards" model, which is a model Sun Microsystems is particularly fond of, and in a way it falls in between of "closed" and "open". Here's a reply from Sun engineer Glynn Foster to the second article.