At The People Behind KDE this week and interview with the man who represents what working and contributing to a project like KDE stands for. He's from Cowtown, in The Great White North, Canada's own Aaron Seigo.
Yet another interesting project comes from Mozilla: MiniMo is a mini-Mozilla browser for PDAs and embedded systems. It requires anything between 32MB and 64MB of RAM and it currently runs on ARM CPUs using GTK+ (screenshots). Having just uploaded our latest OSNews web site for mobile devices, we hope that the MiniMo developer team have added a special/unique word in its user agent, so we can add it in the list of browsers that render our mobile version of our site instead of the desktop version.
When a good idea fails the loss is not just that idea, the failure scares away potential investors from anything resembling that idea; consequently,
innovation suffers and everyone pays the price. The software industry is especially good at killing good ideas, and Usman Latif's article "Why Good Ideas Fail" discusses the reasons behind this terrible record.
The KDE project started an effort to redesign its Kcontrol panel and here is the outcome so far (in CVS). Update: A developer's article, how to build a KDE plugin structure.
The second generation of OSNews' mobile web site is now up and running. The new version has an even simpler design than before which makes it much easier to render on under-featured HTML browsers, usually found on phones, PDAs or other embedded devices. The new design does not display any ads or a sidebar, but goes directly to the "meat" of the information. Read more for info & screenshots.
The Inquirer reports that Microsoft released the Xbox 2 SDK for the Apple Power Mac G5s, but no one knows as of yet if it runs natively or via VirtualPC or if it is 64bit or not.
The recent released new version of Nmap (a security scanner) refuses, despite the usage of GPL, any usage by SCO. This is valid for all nmap versions: "we hereby terminate SCO's rights to redistribute any versions of Nmap in any of their products".
"Windowing environments are in their third decade, and they still do little more than open and close. There's no reason windows can't be more sophisticated", Daryl Blakeslee writes on NewsForge.
Mindwarp wrote a quick guide which shows step-by-step how to setup a CVS pserver in FreeBSD over at mindwarp.net: "CVS stands for Concurrent Versions System. You can check out the official homepage at cvshome.org. Basically what it comes down to is tons of projects, open source, free software, and commercial use CVS to manage their code. It lets you go back to previous versions."
People who use Microsoft's Windows XP operating system aren't taking advantage of many of the systems best features, a top executive said - and the world's largest software maker has only itself to blame. Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for software platforms, including Windows, said he thinks customers aren't using gadgets like Windows Messenger and Movie Maker because Microsoft hasn't done a good enough job telling people about them.
Red Hat has maintained the pure open-source approach, making open-source software available to users, says Gartner analyst George Weiss. "For the end-user, the software may be open source, but the question is, 'How much do I have to pay to enable the software with a subscription?'"
A new version of Kaffe has been released. Kaffe is a free software runtime environment for programs written in Java. Among many bug fixes, and code cleanups, the new release added support for policy files, and improved posix threads, crypto, SSL and sound support.
While sizing the heap for 32-bit Java applications on AIX, you can sometimes run into situations where a segment is claimed by two or more parts of the process simultaneously. This article shows how to detect this situation by using a well-established set of applications as examples, and we also show the reasoning behind the configuration changes suggested to avoid this situation.
Before beginning, I must offer my profuse apologies to Shawn Gordon and the rest of theKompany crew. Shawn sent me the Black Adder software several months ago; however, my schedule ballooned beyond all believable bounds and has stubbornly maintained that ludicrous pace; unfortunately. I have not had an opportunity to write this review until recently, so I am sorry for my tardiness. And now to answer the most obvious question; what is Black Adder?
