A Windows User Spends a Week with a Mac

Steven Garrity, graphics designer at ActsofVolition writes: "I've been conducting a user interface experiment with myself as the subject. A long-time Windows user and armchair graphical user interface critic, I have spent a week working in Mac OS X. What follows is my review of the experience."

Opera is Spyware? Dodgy Goings on Backstage

"I was Running Opera on a nephew's system, specifically ver 7.03 US - the adware version. I didn't mind ignoring the ads too much, and even occasionally clicked on a few to feed the clikthru hungry bannerati. Lo and behold, without entering any voluntary location data, and always entering such info in a dodgy fashion when it was a "required field", the banner ads started getting personal, or at least - local, advertising businesses very close by. It seemed as if the browser might be feeding back URL lists, or perhaps, gasp, form field content, or XML. Naw... I thought - not Opera. I like those folks, and have recommended it to so many." Read the article at The Inquirer.

Application Development on Linux Power

Deploying and developing your application on Linux for the IBM pSeries and iSeries POWER platforms is similar to deploying and developing on other Linux systems. In this article the similarities and differences that you need to be aware of for the Linux POWER systems are discussed.

Smart Pointers and Exception Handling in C++

Andrei Alexandrescu discusses smart pointers, from their simplest aspects to their most complex ones and from the most obvious errors in implementing them to the subtlest ones -- some of which also happen to be the most gruesome. Also, learn how to throw an exception, how to associate handlers, or catch clauses, with a set of program statements using a try block, and how exceptions are handled by catch clauses, exception specifications, and design considerations for programs that use exceptions.

Get Set for Another ‘Office Suite’ Shakeout

"Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who's the prettiest suite of them all?" Suddenly it seems, the fierce contests to find the most popular computer `Office suite' ? a combo-pack of softwares to perform common tasks like word processing, spread sheeting, presentation and e-mailing ? are to be replayed all over again, a decade after the first shakeout. Read the article at The Hindu. In other office news, Gobe now sells GobeProductive for a low price, while it seems that the new AppleWorks 6.2.7 is available for purchasing. Update: Native Abiword port for Mac OS X abandoned.

Is AMD Being Coy with its Clockspeeds?

With Opteron now officially set to debut at 1.6 and 1.8 GHz clockspeeds (and no 2 GHz model as initially hoped) discussions have resurfaced as to how well AMD is able to scale the Hammer architecture. 1.8 GHz, after all, is nothing new for the AthlonXP? AMD reached this speed nine months ago with the nuclear-furnace original-model 2200+ and shot nimbly past that speed once AMD revised their .13 micron process and cut their heat dissipation." Read the article at The Inquirer. Athlon64 benchmarks here.

NeXT Still Stands Out in its Mac Incarnation

During the past few weeks, I've installed a batch of new programs on my Macintosh computer running the OS X operating system. In this case, however, 'new' is a relative term. All share a legacy from NeXT -- the technology Apple Computer acquired in 1997 as the foundation of what became OS X. NeXT, founded about a decade earlier by Steve Jobs, was so advanced for its time that the world is still catching up in some ways." Read the article at SiliconValley.com.

SkyOS 3.9.7 Released

After six months of bug-fixing and development of new features, SkyOS 3.9.7 is now available to download. There is a new installer, automatic device mounting, VMWare 3/4 support, a media player, SkyKruzer the web browser and more. The OS can be installed on the hard drive or can be used with the ISO "live" CD (29 MB).