Next XP revision Longhorn a 2003, Client-only Product?

Windows 5 Comments
"The Grand Old Duke of York is clearly in charge of Microsoft's operating systems roadmaps for, having marched Longhorn up to the top of a distant (2005, said his Billness) hill earlier this year, he has now marched it straight back down again. Longhorn, the next version of Windows XP, will not after all be a 2005 product, but will quite possibly be a next year product after all." Read the article at TheRegister.
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Why is the Web Still Only a Single-User System?

  Submitted by Jared White Internet 18 Comments
In spite of the major advances in Web technology and the explosion of communication methods on the Internet, the simple act of Web browsing has remained fundamentally single-user in its implementation. Why is Web browsing still a solitary activity? Researchers at Microsoft and Harvard were excited about their proposal for a multi-user Web six years ago, and yet here we are and nothing much has changed. Jared White of The Idea Basket gives us his take on the matter, and offers a new proposal for a multi-user Web experience.
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Voices in Your Head? Check That Chip in Your Arm

Geek stuff 42 Comments
"Miniscule mobile telephones, tiny electronic organizers and portable DVD players are nice. But they'd be so much less cumbersome if they were surgically implanted under your skin. The chip, called the VeriChip, is about the size of a grain of rice, carries a number that identifies you and, the company says, may eventually provide a way to make sure that only the right people gain access to secure sites, corporate offices or even personal computers. The chip could also carry access to personal data, like medical information." Read the (enthusiastic!) article at NYTimes. Our Take: Implantable chips? Over my dead body. I have hard time liking the tooth implants already.
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Microsoft: Still a Smartphone Player?

Wireless 13 Comments
"Shortly after one of Microsoft's key partners unceremoniously dumped its software for one made by Nokia, the company said it remains a player in the combination cell-phone and PDA smartphone market. In a move industry analysts called a "blow" and "stumble" into the marketplace by Microsoft, cell-phone maker Sendo scrapped plans to release a Microsoft-powered smartphone just days before it was due to launch." Read the rest of the article at Wired.
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Tablet PCs Mix Science Fiction and Real-World Friction

Windows 23 Comments
"Put an absolute beginner in front of a computer and he'll try to touch the screen to make things happen. The revolutionary thing about Microsoft's new tablet PC is that it transforms this wishful-thinking behavior into reality: You can write on its screen and the thing will respond! This is the stuff of science fiction, and it makes the tablet PC an unusually ambitious venture for Microsoft. It's just not a successful one." Rob Pegoraro tells it like it is for WashingtonPost.
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Linux Multithreading Advances

Linux 26 Comments
"Recent advances in Linux's threading implementation are expected to continue to ease migration from other Unix-like operating systems. These advancements have arrived with intense activity on two fronts. First, thread-handling improvements have greatly enhanced the kernel's scalability even to thousands of threads. Second, there are now two fresh, competing implementations of the POSIX pthreads standard (NGPT and NPTL) set to replace the aging LinuxThreads library." Read the article at OnLamp.
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Original Mac Veteran Leads Sun Desktop Charge

Oracle and SUN 32 Comments
"Sun's Desktop strategy - "Project Madhatter" - is taking shape and it dominated questions from the floor at an analyst session in San Francisco today. In charge of Madhatter is Curtis Sasaki - Sun's VP of Desktop Software - who was at Apple at the launch of the original Macintosh in 1984, led the IIGS project and then followed Steve Jobs to NeXT where he spent several years. More from Curtis in a moment. Read the story at TheRegister.
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When Good Interfaces Go Crufty

Graphics 42 Comments
"In Vernor Vinge’s sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of “software archeology”. Vinge’s future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system — like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology — to find out how, or why, something works." Good stuff over there from UI designer Matthew "mpt" Thomas.
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Updates for BlueEyedOS and Cosmoe

Haiku 29 Comments
BlueEyedOS has made some progress in the past few months, and here are two brand new screenshots showing the progress. In the meantime, the DirectFB-based Cosmoe 0.6 is expected to be released around Christmas, but Bill Hayden has already released a developer release. Update: More BeOS-related news today: Unconfirmed rumors want OpenBeOS to have been renamed to "Walter Operating System", while OpenBFS 1.0 Beta3 is posted for testing.
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Microsoft’s New Open Source Mess

Microsoft 35 Comments
"What a mess. Less than a week after a court-approved deal ends the antitrust case, Microsoft's back in the spotlight. The latest Halloween memo portrays your company as utterly obsessed with the open-source software movement but utterly confused about how best to proceed. I can only imagine the state of confusion. Microsoft has tried to persuade developers and users for the last four years that there's no there there--and to no avail." Read the editorial at ZDNet. In the meantime, Business 2.0 posted a story called "Fighting Microsoft the Open-Source Way": Apple, IBM, and Sun have opened up their software code to the public in their battle against Redmond. It just might work. And here is another, interesting, editorial about the DOJ settlement. Update: Another one at PCWorld.com.
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Lycoris Desktop/LX Build 61 Development Release

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 3 Comments
"New in build 61: branded hwprobe; removed "unverified" from rlsysinfo; minor khelpcenter update; changed kicker clock applet type to plain, without date; minor mozilla update; upgraded NVidia drivers and rebuilt additional kernel modules; made printk default to level 6; fixed minor adduser bug; added more sdx1 and sdx4 entries; removed rmmod -a from crontab; added change the system password entry in control center; upgraded ghostscript to espgw 7.05.4, less to build 378, libdvdcss to 1.2.3, modutils to 2.4.21, PCMCIA to 3.2.1, util-linux to 2.11x and finished the unattended installer." Download the ISO of Lycoris and report some bugs.
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