What Does Linux Cost?

Linux 42 Comments
"The worst part about this is that the MCSEs involved are right: Linux can never be as good a Windows 2003 server as is Windows 2003. Linux isn't a cheaper form of Windows; direct substitution without change in thinking fails initially from a technology perspective and fails in the longer term from a cost perspective", says Paul Murphy.
Read More

Integer Handling with SafeInt Class; Visual C++ FP Optimization

General Development 4 Comments
David LeBlanc introduces a C++ template class that helps reduce the chances of incurring integer arithmetic errors in your code. The code is fast, flexible, and easy to use. Get a handle on optimizing floating-point code using the Microsoft Visual C++ (v8.0) method of managing floating-point semantics. Create fast programs while ensuring that only safe optimizations are performed on floating-point code.
Read More

Microsoft Research Ready with Aura

Microsoft 5 Comments
Microsoft's Research organization is preparing to publicly release in a few weeks the client application for its Aura research project, a researcher told attendees of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Research Sociologist Marc Smith, demonstrating Aura during his keynote presentation, explained that the project uses mobile devices to interact with physical objects to retrieve information about them from the Internet as well as to automatically capture and annotate data from them.
Read More

Desktop Linux Share Overtaking Macintosh

Linux 156 Comments
Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh software (as reported a few weeks ago it has fallen at 1.8%, for the first time). And the researcher expects Linux to capture 6% of this market by 2007. That's still tiny compared with Microsoft's 94% share. Desktop Linux hasn't had any appreciable effect on Microsoft's finances yet, but it could do damage if Linux manages to grab a 10% share of the market, say analysts. IDC estimates that desktop Windows' share will shrink slightly, to 92% in 2007 as Linux' share doubles. The first big question though is how all this will have an effect to Apple's business.
Read More

FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC2 Released

  Submitted by Matthew Baulch FreeBSD 50 Comments
The second release candidate of the 5.2.1 is now available (mirrors). It includes fixes to mksnap_ffs, SysV Shared Memory, devfs, IPSec, GEOM, the ata driver and many others. This is probably users' last chance for bugfinding as the final release is expected to be less than a week away.
Read More

Sun CEO: Open source is our friend; ESR Replies

Oracle and SUN 74 Comments
Sun may have been the last major server maker to embrace Linux, but Chief Executive Scott McNealy argues that the company will benefit more than its competitors from the open-source software. Update: A day after Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy said open-source software is his company's friend, a prominent advocate of the collaborative programming philosophy, Eric S. Raymond, has called upon the server maker to open the code of Java.
Read More

Programming: A Conversation with Sun’s Victoria Livschitz

General Development 18 Comments
Is there something fundamentally misguided about the way we write programs today? Why is it so difficult, if not impossible, to write bug-free programs that contain more than 20 to 30 million lines of code? Do we need a radical new paradigm shift in programming? If so, what might it look like? One response came from Sun's Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect and Java Evangelist who has an interesting history.
Read More

Torque Turbo Gets Blender Support for Multiplatform Game Creation

Games 16 Comments
GarageGames announced the availability of an exporter tool that allows Blender, the Open Source 3D content creation suite, to be used with GarageGames' flagship Torque Game Engine technology (the power behind Tribes2). The Blender exporter and Torque runs on the Mac OS X, Linux and Windows platforms. The Torque Game Engine (TGE) is a fully featured AAA game engine with a multi-player network code, seamless indoor/outdoor rendering engines, skeletal animation, DnD GUI creation, a built-in world editor, and a C-like scripting language. Unlike most commercial game engines, as part of the low cost license ($100), you receive all C++ source code to the multi-platform gaming engine.
Read More