Direct 3D 8.0 Wrapper for OpenGL Open Sourced

Those of you who had been following my articles at BeNews last year, you probably remember the France-based RealTech-VR and their effort to bring a Direct3D-to-OpenGL wrapper to the BeOS. The company paused most of that effort when was clear that BeOS was stopped being developed, but after pressure from the community, they have now open sourced their D3D-2-GL implementation and work has already started to port the wrapper to MacOS and Linux in an effort to bring Direct 3D to more alternative operating systems. Today we feature a mini-interview with Stephane Denis of RealTech-VR about the implementation.

“Modern Operating Systems”: Page Replacement Algorithms

Yet another excerpt (previous articles here and here) from the well known "Modern Operating Systems" book at InformIT (free registration required): "When a page fault occurs, the operating system has to choose a page to remove from memory to make room for the page that has to be brought in. This sample chapter from Modern Operating Systems looks at a variety of page replacement algorithms designed to tackle this problem." InformIT also features two more excerpts this week: "Multithreading and the C++ Type System" from the "Modern C++ Design" book and "Solaris: Cluster and Complex Design Issues" from the "Designing Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0" book.

Making MacOSX a UNIX Contender

"If developers could port their Motif-based applications to Aqua as easily as Mac Classic developers can port to Carbon, those nice UNIX apps might reach the Mac faster. As a sysadmin, I see OS X as a fantastic replacement for a UNIX workstation. But there are a few things Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) should think about if it really wants to compete in the UNIX space. I'm not saying that if OS X doesn't have these things, UNIX people won't look at it as an alternative. However, I believe that the following alterations would make OS X much more appealing as a replacement for current UNIX workstations." Read the rest of the editorial at OSOpinion.

A Look at the Future of Operating Systems

"Operating systems will become highly distributed and self-healing and will collaborate with applications. Imagine computers in a group providing disk storage for their users, transparently swapping files and optimizing their collective performance, all with no central administration. But the machines providing this pool of virtual storage dare not trust one another completely. Indeed, a hacker takes over one of them and ruthlessly begins attacking others in the group." Read the rest of the story at ComputerWorld.

Big Gobe Competition – Win a Free gobeProductive 3

Gobe Software recently announced the release of version 3.0.3 of gobeProductive, a free update for all 3.0.x versions. If you are a user of gobeProductive, you may upgrade by selecting "Check for Updates" from the 'Help' menu within gobeProductive. gobeProductive 3 is a great office suite for Windows and Gobe is so generous that is giving away 10 copies to 10 lucky OSNews readers, one copy every day for the next 10 business days! Total value of $1250 USD. Enter the competition now, read more how you can win.

Windows .Net Build 3604 Released To Testers

From ActiveWin: "Microsoft has just released to its set of beta testers a new pre-RC1 build of Windows .NET. This new release, that can be downloaded by every Windows .NET approved beta tester carries the build number 3604. This is an interim build between Beta 3 and RC1 is not considered "Beta quality". This build is intended as a preview of our progress post Beta 3 and to allow you to regress bugs fixed since Beta 3."

OSNews Web Design Update Complete

After more than a week of coding, the updated OSNews design is pretty much done. While a lot of you (including myself) prefered the older, simpler & cleaner design, which was also much faster to load and even rendered nicely on... text-based browsers, this updated design was necessary. We had to expand PriceGrabber (part of the deal) so we can get some revenue to be able to pay for our (always on-the-increase) bandwidth needs, and the only way to do so was to add a vertical bar. Also, we needed to add more menu items (check out the massively updated "OS Resources" and "Advertise" pages), so we had to make the menu vertical (the 765-pixel wide horizontal menu was not a scalable option anymore). UPDATE: I just added better support for Lynx, Links & W3M text-based browsers. *You will have* to load www.osnews.com/home.php instead of the plain www.osnews.com though because the default index.php is actually static (generated on-the-fly every 1 minute) so it won't work with my PHP text browser detection code. UPDATE 2: Better AvantGo support added.

Robert Love’s Preemptive Patch Made it Into Linux 2.5.x

Great news for the Linux desktop users. Robert Love's patch which turns the Linux kernel to behave like a preemptive one, has been accepted to the development 2.5.x Linux source tree. Preemptiveness greatly improves UI responsiveness (for example mp3s won't skip when you do something CPU heavy at the same time and you won't experience as many UI "locks" during normal usage). Our Take: Let's hope that SGI's XFS will also make it to be included by default to the 2.5.x Linux kernel.

English Video of the Amiga 2001 Show Available

Virtual Dimension has finished translating this year's video coverage of the Amiga 2001 show. This annual show held in Cologne, is the highlight Amiga event among the dozens Amiga events being held annually all over the world. Highlights inlude an interview with Ben Hermans of Hyperion Entertainment about the development of AmigaOS4, an interview with Gerald Carda of bplan GmbH regarding their new PPC based PEGASOS motherboard and MorphOS; 'a lightweight PPC OS which is able to emulate 68k AmigaOS and software on PPC hardware in a similar way to how Amithlon works on x86 hardware' and finally it also includes a demonstration of AmigaOS XL powered systems. Amiga Inc and some AmigaDE partners were not present as they decided to attend a very small Canadian Amiga show, which was being held simultaniously to ensure some interest.

Kyro On The Block; ST Pulls Out Of Graphics

"ST Microelectronics Inc. has decided to put its graphics operations up for sale, placing the future of the Kyro graphics accelerator in limbo. The announcement comes after the troubled graphics accelerator, designed by PowerVR Technologies, itself a division of the U.K.'s Imagination Technoogies PLC, missed several major milestones that company executives outlined in an exclusive interview last June." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Our Take: With 3Dfx long gone, Matrox & 3DLabs already out of the 3D gaming market and SiS, VIA, Intel and Trident not been able to produce fast 3D chipsets, the ball is now only between the duopoly of ATi and (mainly) nVidia. I wish good luck to ATi, as I just can't handle yet another monopoly in the tech world. I want choice, I need diversity.

64-Bit CPUs: What You Need to Know

"Itanium--you've gotta start somewhere". ExtremeTech will take you from the genesis of IA-64 through the present day of Itanium, to the future: McKinley, Madison, and Deerfield. Then on to Hammer, PowerPC, SPARC, and more. "It's Nothing Like a Pentium": Ten years in development, 325 million transistors and counting. "The Good Stuff: the Instruction Set" 41-bit VLIW instructions are elegant... until they get weird. "But What About x86 Compatibility?" It's there, sorta. It probably won't be the most popular feature. Read the first article of a three-part series at ExtremeTech.

OpenBeOS Concept GUI Screenshots and… an Easter Egg

'Stubear' is a graphics artist who in his free time helps the OpenBeOS folks in constructing the User Interface for a future version of this new operating system. Particularly, this shot looks pretty clean, but the widgets still need some work to look sharper. These are just concept screens, but sometimes, especially if you have lots of time in your hands, it is nice staring at nice shapes and colors. Moreover, OSNews received an email (which contained a real screenshot) from a BeOS user who wished to remain anonymous. The screenshot shows a hidden feature ("easter egg") of the "Dano" version of BeOS which is called ZSnake! To enable this feature press and hold CNTRL+ALT+SHFT and then click on the "Menu" application under "Preferences". While this feature seems unfinished (zooming to the screenshot shows some pixels out of order) this is a neat little UI gimmick that it not supported by any other operating system or Toolkit so far and it looks at least interesting UI-wise.

XFce: Not Just Another Desktop Environment for UNIX

Oliver Fourdan, a French developer who works his day job at embedded Linux company Anfora, explains how XFce got started: "Back in late 1996, I'd started working on HP workstations that used CDE and I really liked that interface. I was very disappointed with Microsoft Windows 95 and its 'Start Menu,' so I found the concept of the toolbar in CDE very much more convenient. I had been using Linux since 1994, so it sounded natural to me to try to reproduce a concept I liked, on Linux. And at that time, there were no other projects like this--well at least, none really usable." Read the review of the XFce desktop environment at NewsForge.

Dell Discontinues Intel Itanium Workstation

"Dell Computer Corp. has discontinued its Itanium-based workstation due to weak demand, marking another setback in Intel Corp.'s efforts to promote its 64-bit chip released eight months ago." Read the rest of the report at ExtremeTech. Our Take: It is astonishing (and truly disapointing) to see a super-chip (a real wonder in the CPU design), like Itanium is, not being able to sell well, mostly because sysadmins not wanting to give up on x86. I think, now I understand better when software companies choose to support legacy code, even if it bloats their product. It seems to be a necessary reason to commercially succeed, no matter what we geeks say about clean designs and speed. Let's see what the new Intel 64-bit CPU McKinley can do in the marketplace. The failure of Itanium so far also caused Intel to try competing with AMD Hammer in the x86-64 bit area.

AppleScript Primer for Mac OS X

"AppleScript is a built-in Macintosh automation tool that gives users the ability to control the operating system and several of their favorite applications. While this powerful scripting system has always had a loyal following of Macintosh aficionados and publishing professionals, the release of Mac OS X 10.1.2 may mean AppleScript is ready to strut its stuff in front of a wider audience. Here are some of the exciting AppleScript developments on MacOSX..." Read the rest of the article at OReillyNet.