Happy 10th Birthday to all Slackware Fans

One of the oldest GNU/Linux distibutions, Slackware, is ten years away from it's v1.00. You could read the announcement here. Slackware has proven to be one of the most stable distros in these 10 years. It has clean design, and by rule avoids unnecessary changes to the prepackaged software. It's package management is elegant and fault tolerant. Slackware is also known to be the closest cousin to UNIX from all the Linuxes. We wish bright future and tons of new users to Slack!

yellowTab Goes KHTML

As seen on the yellowTab website: "JavaScriptCore and WebCore are two technologies, ported from Apple's work on KHTML (the engine from Konqueror, a "modern Net+" for Linux's KDE), by YellowTab. These components will allow both developers and users to take advantage of the latest technology available, in their everyday Zeta usage." The article can be found here.

Microsoft Admits and Fixes Windows Flaw

Microsoft has admitted to a serious flaw in their windows sharing component that affects nearly all Windows version, including the latest "most secure" Windows server 2003. The flaw was discovered by Polish researchers, known as the "Last Stage of Delirium Research Group". This comes as a big blow to the since Windows Server 2003 was the first product sold under a high-profile "Trustworthy Computing" initiative organized last year by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Original article here.

FreeBSD 4.x Forked Into DragonFly

DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. Prominent former FreeBSD developer Matthew Dillon is a major player in the development. According to the website, DragonFly gives "the BSD base an opportunity to grow in entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."

Book Review: Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming

Aaron Hillegass' new book, titled "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming", is now available in the stores. In the past, we reviewed his previous book "Cocoa Programming for MacOSX" and we got a good idea of Aaron's elegant writing style, descriptive chapters and advanced development under Mac OS X. In this book, he goes down under, teaching us how to handle and develop for the underpinnings of OSX, the core of the OS.

Torvalds Gets Down to the Kernel

At this week's CA World 2003 show in Las Vegas, Torvalds sat down with InfoWorld to talk about the completion this past weekend of Version 2.6's first test release; what will keep him up at night worrying about that test release; his thoughts about the impending SCO-IBM suit and possible impact on Linux development; and something of a wish list of technologies to be included in upcoming versions of the open source operating system.

Report: Embedding Windows Costs Less than Embedding Linux

Market research firm Embedded Market Forecasters released a report today with data that indicates that embedded development projects using Microsoft's "Windows Embedded" operating system platforms (including Windows CE .NET and Windows XP Embedded) is 43% faster and costs 68% less on average than projects using Embedded Linux. Further background, an executive summary, and a link for free downloading of the full report are available in this WindowsForDevices web site.

Windows Server 2003 Approaching 100,000 Active Sites

When Netcraft first reported on Windows Server 2003 they gave an indication on the numbers of sites that had been put up prior to the official launch. In the three months since the launch the number of active sites has increased by over 300% and now stands at 88,400. Microsoft will take some considerable encouragement at the number of sites that have switched from Linux (8,000).

TRON Man Shuns Gates-like Fortune

He could have been as rich as Bill Gates, but Ken Sakamura says he's fine earning enough to lead an "ordinary life." In the world of computers, the obscure Japanese engineer stands in the top rank along with Gates, having developed an operating system that is more widely used than even Microsoft Corp's Windows. Sakamura's system, TRON, is used to run items ranging from digital cameras to car engines, just as Windows operates personal computers.

Should your Application be on the Grid?

A Grid computing environment provides the virtual computing resource that will be used to execute applications. The functional components(security, resource managament, informations services, and data managament)of a grid environment, as well as non-functional considerations such as performance requirements or operating system requirements, must be well understood when considering enabling an application to execute in a grid environment. This article helps you determine whether an application is a good candidate to execute in a grid environment.

Apple Offers Premiere-Trade-In Program

In response to Adobe's decision to drop the Mac version of Premiere, Apple now offers a trade-in program to entice Premiere users to move to Final Cut Pro/Express. If Adobe users trade in their disks with Apple, they will receive a free copy of Final Cut Express, or a $500 rebate for Final Cut Pro. In other Apple multimedia news, Apple released Soundtrack for $299, a music composing application.

Apple Games: Leveraging Small Market Share

How many hardcore gamers do you know who are also avid Mac users? Probably not many. Windows users have thousands of titles to choose from, and cheap hardware to run their games on. Despite the many virtues of the Mac platform, it is not the first choice of serious gamers. Even the speedy new G5’s will not change that.

AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla Hackers

"It has been learned through public and private sources that AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape (they've even pulled the logos off the buildings). Some will remain working on Mozilla during the transition, and will move to other jobs within AOL." Read the article at MozillaZine. Elsewhere, the MozillaFoundation was created. In other browser news, Epiphany 0.8 was released, and OmniWeb 4.5 beta3 too.

Introducing NeXT – The Wonders of NEXTSTEP and OpenStep

Every so often I have this urge (maybe more of an itch) to spend hours and hours on the web trying to find information about old, obsolete computers of the past. I am intrigued by the XEROX Alto and Star ('70s-'82), the Apple Lisa ('83) and, of course, CRAYs ('75-ish). These were revolutionary machines indeed, they wrote golden pages in the history of computing. In the end of the 1980s, a new innovative product was ready to ship, created by a bunch of people coming from Apple: The NeXT platform.

New YellowTAB Screenshots Posted

Here are a few screenshots of applications on YellowTAB's Zeta: "BeTunes is coming along well, the TimeLiner management app looks promising, the Tracker configuration is easy and very useful. MeTOS, the developing tool is fully functional and will speed up your coding adventures. AbiWord is a tight word processor and for simple editing use Zedit, the enhanced text editor. As you will see, the Network configuration has dramatically improved over R5. If you develop an app that requires network settings you can add a tab to the configuration panel."