OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

DOJ criticizes EU’s MS Ruling; Lindows Judge Proposes Compromise

Submitted by alan 2004-03-25 Legal 74 Comments

The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to ship a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player could stifle innovation and help Microsoft's rivals instead of promoting fair competition, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust chief said Wednesday.

Is the 2.6 kernel ready for general distribution?

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Linux 46 Comments

Mandrake 10 has it, SUSE's rolling it out in 9.1, Gentoo has had a "test" version with it since last year, and now we'll probably see almost every commercial distribution move to 2.6.x within the next month or two because of competitive pressure . This is not in line with the basic "it's ready when it's ready" dictum that is given as the reason open source software is often technically superior to proprietary competitors, says NewsForge.

Newly Released Documents Shed Light on Microsoft Tactics

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Microsoft 7 Comments

Testimony during the second week of trial in the consumer class-action lawsuit in Minnesota has revealed (free reg. req.) some embarrassing internal documents from Microsoft which were not disclosed in the bitter 1997 federal antitrust lawsuit that focused on the company's attempt to control the browser markets in the 1990's.

Interesting Uses of Trusted Computing

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Privacy, Security 10 Comments

Trusted Computing (TC) continues to be one of the most controversial technologies to come along in many years. Ross Anderson's (anti) TCPA FAQ, Lucky Green's apocalyptic DEFCON presentation, and sites such as notcpa.org and againsttcpa.com are full of predictions of online disaster if TC technology is allowed to go forward.

Qt# 0.7.1 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Qt 39 Comments

Qt# is back: a new build system has been hacked into place to avoid dependency on Portable.NET's csant. Miscellaneous bugfixes have also been made to this version.

Mac.Ars: Three Years of Mac OS X

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 macOS 68 Comments

Has it been three years already? A quick glance at the calendar tells us that the date is March 24, 2004, three years to the day after Mac OS X 10.0 began shipping. Join Mac.Ars in a trip down memory lane as they look at three years of Unix-y/NeXT-y/pinstripe-y goodness on the Macintosh.

GNOME’s Next Step Must Be a Big One

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Gnome 65 Comments

Recent advocacy from Havoc Pennington and Miguel de Icaza may disagree on the exact high-level language to use for GNOME, but they both agree that a change needs to be made. However, Edd Dumbill thinks the debate so far has been taking a rather introspective view. To focus purely on language choice is to miss the biggest part of the picture, he says.

The “Avalon” Input System

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Windows 6 Comments

The presentation subsystem in "Longhorn" (code-named "Avalon") provides powerful new APIs for input. This article gives an overview of these APIs: What services are provided to applications, the architecture of the input system, and how new input devices can be supported.

Gates’ Visual Studio 2005 Vision

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Microsoft 11 Comments

Bill Gates launched the combined VSLive!, Microsoft Mobile DevCon, and AVIOS SpeechTEK conferences on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 with his keynote speech to a standing-room-only crowd at San Francisco's Moscone Center West. The first of the three demos showed new productivity features for VB developers in the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP). The CTP is the second preview of the next version of VS.NET, formerly known as "Whidbey," scheduled for release in the first half of 2005.

Syllable Gets a New Installer

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Syllable, AtheOS 9 Comments

Syllable gets a beta of a brand new installer and an ISO is up for testing. Update: A VMWare driver too.

Best Practices for Representing XML in the .NET Framework

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 .NET 2 Comments

Dare Obasanjo looks at the available options for representing XML-based data that is shared between components within a single process/AppDomain and discusses the design tradeoffs of each approach.

Business Service Grid, Part 7: Keeping informed

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 General Development 1 Comment

Parts 1 – 6 of this series describe a service domain that represents a collection of comparable or related Web services through a common services entry point. In this article, we discuss how to keep up with the information that is available from the service domain. Why should you and why shouldn't you care about the information? We introduce several ways of using the information and discuss some approaches for optimizing its management.

Sun: No Open-Source Java

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-25 Java 59 Comments

Slashdot reports that Sun CEO Scott McNealy has finally answered the long awaited question that has been on the minds of open source and Java developers and the answer is "no". He stated today that Sun sees no solution solved from open sourcing Java that isn't already addressed.

A Look at CrossOver Office 2.1.0

Guest post by Daniel de Kok 2004-03-24 OS News 47 Comments

Last week I reviewed Win4Lin, a solution that makes it possible to run certain versions of Microsoft Windows on Linux. This week CrossOver Office is the next tool I am going to have a look at. Again my main focus will be programs I need to run myself.

Gates Unveils Windows Mobile Update

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-24 Windows 11 Comments

Microsoft plans to formally announce later Wednesday an update to Windows Mobile, the company's operating system for handhelds and cell phones. The press release is here while a translated article with many screenshots showing the new features of the new Windows Mobile operating system is here (IE now sports SSR, support for Landscape and VGA modes, pixel doubling etc).

Novell Eyes Move into Embedded Linux

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-24 Novell and Ximian 17 Comments

Novell, which sells Linux for servers and desktop computers, is considering a move into the market for embedded computing for devices such as cell phones and vending machines. Elsewhere, IBM has made a promised $50 million investment in new Linux power Novell, tightening the companies' technology partnership. Similarly, HP is expanding its own Novell relationship with a push into desktop PCs.

EU Slaps Record Fine on Microsoft

Submitted by biz 2004-03-24 Microsoft 138 Comments

In a decision that could affect consumers, competitors and PC makers, the European Commission requires Microsoft to unbundle Media Player from Windows and pay a $613 million fine.

Apple Updates Xgrid Clustering Software

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-24 macOS 14 Comments

Apple has released Xgrid Preview 2, the latest version of its powerful computational clustering software that turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer.

Microsoft Brings Vision for Mainstream Speech Technology to Life

Submitted by danjr 2004-03-24 Microsoft No Comments

From the PR: :"Microsoft Corp. today took another step forward in its strategy to make the business value of speech technology more broadly available to mainstream enterprise companies as Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates launched Microsoft Speech Server 2004 at the co-located AVIOS~SpeechTEK Spring 2004, Microsoft Mobile Developer Conference (DevCon) 2004 and Fawcette Technical Publications' VSLive! San Francisco 2004 events." Elsewhere, Microsoft has announced XNATM, a powerful next-generation software development platform. XNA empowers developers to deliver breakthrough games while combating rising production costs and ever-increasing hardware complexity.

Enterprise Kit Available Now to Speed Desktop Linux Evaluations

Eugenia Loli 2004-03-24 Linspire 1 Comment

All-in-One package of software and diagnostic tools helps enterprises evaluate and implement a migration strategy to LindowsOS.