ALT Software is a company well-known in the embedded market, offering several solutions via firmware, device driver and system level programming . Desktop users used ALT's graphics drivers (2D and OpenGL) on BeOS back when ALT was working with Be. Today we feature an interview with Dan Joncas of ALT regarding the company's current projects.

This whitepaper provides an overview of the architecture, benefits, and features of the Platform Innovation Framework for Extensible Firmware Interface, a modular, platform-independent architecture for implementating boot and other BIOS functions recently. The Framework, developed by Intel, is driver-based, enabling binary-linking of modules; and it is C-based, clean, scalable, and modular, allowing it to support diverse CPU architecures - such as Intel's IA-32, Itanium & XScale - within a single source tree.

There is a three day X Developer's meeting from Wednesday, April 28, through Friday, April 30, 2004, at the Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ximian's Federico Mena-Quintero was there and outlined the talks of Keith Packard & Jim Gettys regarding where X11 should go.

This critical update for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 enhances the stability and performance of Media Center Edition 2004 and resolves these issues.

Here's a review of Corel's new WordPerfect products: WordPerfect Office 12 for Windows, and WordPerfect for Linux. The latter is an improvement on their previous WP for Linux products that were discontinued some time ago. Could this be the start of big-name proprietary software for GNU/Linux?

While most people bicker about which OS is best, the truth is much vaguer: what computer is sitting on your desk has more to do with your comfort level than intellectual choice.

"When you think of a personal computer, you probably think of one running Windows. Microsoft's near-ubiquitous operating system runs on 94 percent of desktop PCs, according to experts. But could the upstart Linux OS soon replace Windows on a computer near you?" Read the article by Scott Spanbauer.

The Gentoo Linux Release Engineering team is proud to announce the release of Gentoo Linux 2004.1. Read more on DistroWatch or the press release.

"It looks like Sun is indeed going to re-run Caldera, right down to creating a Linux distro (Java Desktop) with lots of proprietary addons in an attempt to enforce per-seat/per-employee licensing," writes Groklaw founder and editor Pamela Jones ("PJ" to the online world). If Sun's hope is that we "will all be foolish enough to not care about the GPL and thus forsake Red Hat and SuSE, etc. Dream on," she continues. "The real question," Jones says, "is - when that fails - then what will Sun do?" Read the full article.

At this week's Smart Network Developer Forum, QNX Software Systems Ltd. was to unveil the latest version of its RTOS and a new open-source licensing model. Also, QNX Software Systems announced that its comprehensive suite of pre-integrated protocol stacks now supports IKE, RADIUS, SSH, and SSL, as well as other advanced security features. Running on the QNX Neutrino RTOS v6.3, the new additions leverage the powerful security engine on selected PowerQUICCTM processors from Freescale Semiconductor, a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola Inc., to deliver highly optimized encryption and authentication for next-generation network elements.

ReactOS, the open source operating system which is compatible with Windows NT/2000 applications and drivers has been released.

The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) is an open source framework for developing model-driven applications. It creates Java code for graphically editing, manipulating, reading, and serializing data based on a model specified in XML Schema, UML, or annotated Java. This article will step you through the process of creating a model, generating code, using the generated apps, and customizing the editor.

Japanese distributor Turbolinux announced that their next distribution will include support for Windows Media files, including DRM. The development cost are said to be around $75,000, including license fees paid to Microsoft.

Garbage collection (GC) is a technology that frees programmers from the hassle of explicitly managing memory allocation for every object they create. Traditionally, the benefit of this automation has come at the cost of significant overhead. However, more efficient algorithms and techniques, coupled with the increased computational power of computers have made the overhead negligible for all but the most extreme situations.