OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

GCC 3.3 Released; Squeak 3.5 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 General Development 18 Comments

The team released the new major version of their multi-platform compiler suite, GCC 3.3.
Update: In other development news, Squeak 3.5, an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, is released.

What Will It Take To Put Apple Back on Top?

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 Apple 58 Comments

There is a possibility that Apple could reshape itself as a consumer entertainment company, according to Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata. In fact, he said doing so would be a smart move. Also, Apple announced that it has sold over 2 million songs in the first 16 days of the iTunes Music Store.

Visual Studio .Net Makes Compelling Gains

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 General Development 24 Comments

The most powerful synergy in Microsoft Corp.'s technology portfolio is between its powerful platform services and its reasonably priced, highly capable tools. Wooing developers with seductive ease of use, Microsoft's tools then pave a path of least resistance toward the adoption of each new wave of Windows features. Read the review of Visual Studio.NET at eWeek.

NTFS Support for OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 OpenBSD 9 Comments

Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support.

The Web Browser’s Unfinished Basement

Submitted by Yama 2003-05-14 Internet 16 Comments

E-Commerce Times builds upon the 'Web browser as an operating system' notion, recommending that Web browsers focus on reliability rather than features.

RISC OS Here and Now: Wakefield Show Presentation Report

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 RISC OS 10 Comments

Mark Stephens reports on the Wakefield show theatre presentations given by the RISC OS' leading developers. Four companies demonstrated what they've been up to and suggest what's to come, providing an insight into perhaps where RISC OS is now heading.

Red Hat’s Tiemann: Architectural Vision Must be 20/20

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 Red Hat 20 Comments

"Bad architecture and the proprietary lock-in has frozen out innovation," Tiemann, Red Hat CTO, said. "That makes it difficult to bring new ideas to market. The open-source platform with open-source standards has liberated the playing field." Tiemann urged chief information officers to approach their planning from this perspective, and he provided more detail in this interview at SearchEnterpriseLinux.

Borland Unveils .NET Tools, JBuilder 9

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 General Development 20 Comments

Borland Software last week unveiled the latest update of its flagship Java IDE, JBuilder 9, and disclosed plans for an upcoming line of development tools for the .NET Framework. Version 9 of Borland's venerable JBuilder development environment adds Web services support enhancements and a new integrated solution for developing mobile and wireless applications to run on many devices.

More to SciTech SNAP than X

Submitted by Andrew 2003-05-13 Hardware 22 Comments

Andrew Bloo from SciTech Software sent us in a clarification to our yesterday's story: "The SciTech SNAP drivers are not actually XFree86 specific at all, but rather the XFree86 driver is just a small module that interfaces to SciTech SNAP. Once SciTech SNAP is installed on the system, developers can actually code directly to the SciTech SNAP API's via the SDK, and bypass X entirely.

Carving up Apple

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 Apple 71 Comments

Deal.com has an analysis of the Apple situation and they suggest a restructuring of the company, even if that might mean break up into smaller companies a'la Palm/PalmSource.

Has Microsoft Delivered Trustworthy Computing in Server 2003?

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 Privacy, Security 37 Comments

A fundamental constituent of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative is "Reliability. The customer can depend on the product to fulfil its functions." No-one wants to be a guinea pig and, after all, Microsoft hardly have a track record of designing secure platforms. Not entirely true. Recent accreditation to CM-EAL4 puts Windows 2000 on a security par with most hardened versions of Unix.

A ‘Longhorn’ View for Microsoft

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 Windows 21 Comments

Microsoft's plans for "Longhorn," the next version of Windows, include a new graphics subsystem, a new file system and a new security system. But, so far, users aren't nearly as excited about the features as Microsoft is, eWeek says. In the meantime, The Register reports that Microsoft sidelines Longhorn database caper: Microsoft has scaled back its 'Big Bang', and its Future Storage initiative will build on, rather than supersede the NTFS file system, when the next version of Windows appears in 2005.

Editorial at BeOSJournal: The BeOS Landscape

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 Haiku 16 Comments

"From my perspective the work being done by OpenBeOS is amazing and the concept was acceptable last year. Zeta has changed the landscape now and their approach, offering backwards compatibility but trying to move BeOS forward as Zeta is a good one and with luck they will succeed. My only question is whether they've gone far enough to warrant the interest they hope to attract." Read the editorial at BeOSJournal, written by David Reid.

SCO Interview: Unix plus Linux equals trouble

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 SCO 25 Comments

SCO executive pleads case against Linux distributors using pieces of Unix. Read the interview.

Athlon: The Beginning of the End

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 AMD 20 Comments

AMD released the Athlon XP 3200+ for desktops, the last scheduled member of a chip family that helped turn the company's fortunes around. Benchmarks here ("it should have been called a 2800+").

Sun’s Schwartz on the Future of Software

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 Oracle and SUN 9 Comments

This is the final segment of a 3 part interview series with Jonathan Schwartz, EVP of Sun Software. In part 1, Mr. Schwartz talked about how Sun is expanding its software business. In part 2, he talked about why Sun isn't worried about Linux. Today, Mr. Schwartz talks about the future of the software business.

Four New Linux Server Tutorials/References

Submitted by Steve Litt 2003-05-13 Internet 1 Comment

Here are 4 new server tutorial/references for Linux: Tripwire, IPTables, NFS and NFS Linux installs. Two of these are Linux Productivity Magazine issues, and two are Troubleshooters.Com documents. Taken together, these documents provide a tutorial for the new Linux administrator, and a basic reference for the more experienced.

SuSE Linux Demonstrates Old PCs Still Have Use

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-13 SuSE, openSUSE 56 Comments

"What? Are you nuts? Running SuSE 8.2 Linux Professional on a 150 Mhz Pentium? That will never work. That's exactly what I did do and it did work, admirably." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

SciTech Upcoming 2D Linux Drivers Promise Speed Enhancements

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-12 Wayland 47 Comments

The well-known graphics driver development company, SciTech Software, are closing on releasing a beta of their Linux port of their SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux. These drivers replace the 2D XFree86 modules for a large number of graphics chipsets. SciTech claims that their latest beta drivers have shown up to 12-15% faster 2D performance than their XFree86 counterparts (for some chipsets). In the initial final release, accelerated 3D via DRI won't be supported though.

SGI Releases IRIX 6.5.20

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-12 SGI and IRIX 16 Comments

IRIX 6.5.20 is releasing with all new systems shipping from SGI worldwide manufacturing centers. The IRIX 6.5.20 release contains both maintenance and feature updates.