DOJ Says Microsoft Should Not Break Up
The U.S. Justice Department announced today that it will not seek to break Microsoft Corp. in two during the next phase of the software maker's landmark antitrust case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in late June had overturned a lower court's order by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Microsoft be broken into two companies as a remedy for anticompetitive practices. At the same time, it upheld the lower court's conclusion that Microsoft has a monopoly in the market for computer operating systems and maintains that monopoly power by anticompetitive means in violation of U.S. antitrust laws.
Microsoft Showcases New Tech at Research’s 10th Anniversary
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated today technologies for transcribing spoken Chinese, making handheld computers aware of when they're being touched and moved, and adding emotion to computer slide shows. At an event recognizing the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Research, Gates indulged his fondness for technology, raising hopes for a world where computers will become more useful. At the event, among the things it was showed was a handheld computer that understands which way is up and where it's being touched, technology that lets it reorient the display according to how it's held or understand when a person is holding it like a cell phone to give dictation. The "Mulan" software project for reading Chinese writing out loud or transcribing speech into characters. With about 60,000 characters in Chinese, it's difficult to use keyboards. Automated bug detection that helped make Windows 2000 less crash-prone is being used in all other Microsoft product lines. Video compression technology that's less error-prone than the prevailing MPEG4 standard. Software that's designed not to sap people's emotion when creating narrated slide shows so sharing photos online is more like the storytelling that accompanies the viewing of traditional photo albums. Software that can reconstruct three-dimensional images from a few still photos.
Interview With Ville Turjanmaa, the Creator of MenuetOS
Today we are hosting an interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the creator of the Menuet Operating System. Menuet is a new, 32-bit OS, it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16,7 million colors, sound at 44.1 khz stereo, easy of use and easy low level API. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code.
Red Hat Unveils Embedded Software
Red Hat, Inc. announced today a programming toolkit for creating software for "embedded" computing devices such as set-top boxes, handheld computers or network routers. The Embedded Linux Developer Suite comes with version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, RedBoot loading software to start up the device, configuration tools for different software modules, and options and support for MIPS, SuperH, Intel-compatible, PowerPC, ARM, StrongARM and XScale chips. Pricing will be announced in October, when the software goes on sale, Red Hat said.
Interview with QNX’s Paul Leroux
Just in time for the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this week, we here at OSNews thought that we would bring our readers an interview from the world of embedded OSes.
OSNews was happy to meet with Paul Leroux of QNX Software Systems at their headquarters in Kanata, part of the Silicon Valley North area around Ottawa, Ontario. With 20 years of experience in the field, QNX is synonymous with embedded systems. Many people will be familiar with the QNX demo disk that fit their OS, GUI, browser, web server, games, TCP/IP, and more onto a 1.44M bootable floppy. In 2000 QNX gained notoriety for making the QNX realtime platform free for non-commercial use. QNX has been riding a wave of buzz in this last year. We spoke during the hectic lead up to Embedded Systems Conference.
OSNews was happy to meet with Paul Leroux of QNX Software Systems at their headquarters in Kanata, part of the Silicon Valley North area around Ottawa, Ontario. With 20 years of experience in the field, QNX is synonymous with embedded systems. Many people will be familiar with the QNX demo disk that fit their OS, GUI, browser, web server, games, TCP/IP, and more onto a 1.44M bootable floppy. In 2000 QNX gained notoriety for making the QNX realtime platform free for non-commercial use. QNX has been riding a wave of buzz in this last year. We spoke during the hectic lead up to Embedded Systems Conference.
ZDNet Reviews WindowsXP
"Windows XP is more than just a pretty face. This top-to-bottom overhaul of the Windows operating system has something for everyone from families to business users." Read the whole of the exhaustive review of Microsoft's new product over at ZDNet.
GNOME 1.4.1-Beta2 Released
A new beta of Gnome 1.4.1 has just been released. Mostly bug and security fixes have been added for this release. Get the betas here or here. In the meantime, work for Gnome 2.0 is going strong and it is planned to be released sometime next year, having full versions for both Linux and Sun Solaris 9 among other platforms.
New Development Version of GTK+ Available
A new release of the development versions of GTK+ and associated libraries (GLib, Pango, Atk) is available. This is a an unstable preview release and should not be used in production. This release is incompatible with GTK+ and GLib 1.2.x and software that has not been explicitly ported will not compile with this version. GTK+ 1.3.7 is the unstable version that will result to GTK+ 2.0 which is the next major version of GTK+ and the one which Gnome 2.0 will be based on.
VMware Launches VMware Workstation 3.0 Beta
VMWare today announced the availability of a Beta release of VMware Workstation 3.0, the latest generation of its award-winning desktop software for technical professionals. Workstation 3.0 delivers significant performance and usability improvements over previous releases, the company says. Workstation 3.0 provides support for the latest operating systems including WindowsXP and the latest Linux distributions, supports additional peripheral devices, and provides significant enhancements in networking and better overall performance. VMware will ship Workstation 3.0 in the fourth quarter of 2001. New features include: Host and guest OS support for WindowsXP Pro and Home Edition, USB device support, DVD-ROM support, CD-R/RW support, CD-ROM ISO image support, generic SCSI device support -- makes devices available directly to the guest OS, large virtual disk support, now up to 128 GB per IDE virtual disk and 256 GB per SCSI virtual disk, improved CPU, networking, disk and interactive performance, completely new Windows style user interface (Windows host version), built-in NAT for easy connection to networks, more flexible and easier to configure virtual networking, improved support for laptops and more. Our Take: No word for BeOS support as a Guest OS. Update: I downloaded the latest beta version and BeOS loads this time, without crashing. While it is loading very fast in the beginning, when it is going to graphics mode, because the VMWare virtual graphics device does not expose the VESA standard, the performance falls so much that hits the disk pretty hard. Normal BeOS boot time is 12 seconds when launched natively, under VMWare it takes up to 5 minutes on a dual Celeron 533 under Win2000 and of course it is so slow (please remember that all this slowness is just because of the unsuported gfx subsystem that makes the rest of the launching process and the OS to be unresponsive) that it is completely unusable. Screenshot here.
PostgreSQL vs MySQL, a Year Later
"To many people, PostgreSQL and MySQL seem like similar, alternative databases. Both are quickly gaining popularity. Based on the track records of older versions, there's a lot of debate over the speed of PostgreSQL and the durability of MySQL. But times have changed and each database has progressed. On both counts, the two packages are the closest they've ever been, so when deciding which to use in a Web application, a developer doesn't always have a clear winner. If you're looking for a database to prop up a Weblog or portal, you'll find that many such packages rely on MySQL. It should be possible to port them to PostgreSQL, but if you're looking for a turnkey package, chances are you're not interested in doing too much porting work. If you're migrating from Oracle, Sybase, or Microsoft SQL Server, I suggest PostgreSQL. Like those databases, PostgreSQL has triggers, stored procedures, and a rich set of built-in functions (including many functions for date manipulation). Also, PostgreSQL procedural language is easy to learn if you're familiar with Oracle's PL/SQL and SQL Server's Transact-SQL." Read the whole shootout article over at WebTechniques.
Hewlett-Packard to Acquire Compaq in $25 Billion Deal
NY Times reports that Hewlett-Packard will announce that it is acquiring Compaq Computer for $25 billion USD in stock in a bold move to grow as the computer business struggles with shrinking sales, executives close to the negotiations said last night. If completed, this will be one of the bigest merges/buyouts in the computing business history.
First Glance at nVidia’s nForce Glue Chipset
FiringSquad takes a look at nVidia's first offering of motherboard chipsets, the nForce, which reportedly has some interesting features including 3D capabilities. The reviewer concludes that "Now that you've seen everything NVIDIA is offering with nForce, you see why we feel this is a groundbreaking product -- quite literally there isn't anything else on the market with such powerful features! Even if you don't like them, you've got to give NVIDIA a lot of respect With nForce, NVIDIA has turned itself into a powerful competitor in a little over a year!"
Microsoft Ready to Announce New PocketPC OS
News.com is reporting that Microsoft will be announcing two new versions of its PocketPC OS in a few days. The new versions (a high-end and a low-end) will sport an XP-esque look, 802.11 drivers and VPN support. It's all part of Microsoft's strategy to beat Palm in a race to widespread adoption in large corporations.
Interview With KDE’s Konqueror Team
Today we are hosting an exclusive interview with the Konqueror team, KDE's integrated filemanager, image/document viewer and web browser. Dirk Mueller, Waldo Bastian, Carsten Pfeiffer and Simon Hausmann are answering questions regarding the future of Konqueror, its portability and the integration with QT3.
Dennis Ritchie Put the C in Compiler
He invented the C programming language. He is one of the co-creators of Unix. He has watched more than one multi-billion dollar industry evolve around his creations. And still, Dennis Ritchie shows up for work each day in the same Murray Hill, NJ office where he and Ken Thompson first ran Unix on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 back in 1969. Why? Well, it's not just any old company that employs Ritchie. This is Lucent's Bell Labs we're talking about the home of the laser, the place where the transistor first saw life. It's a pretty exciting work environment, and, as Ritchie is fond of saying, it's nice to walk around your office and stumble into things like canisters of liquid helium. It was at his nondescript office, right next to where Unix was invented, that Ritchie met with Linux Magazine's Robert McMillan and Adam Goodman." More at Linux Magazine.
Work for KDE 3.0 Has Started
The sleepless KDE/QT developers have started work for KDE 3, the X graphics environment, planned to be released sometime next year. KDE 3 will be based on QT 3.0 and will also feature educational and other apps (like Kompare and KWinTV) as part of the default installation, support for extremely large files, new versions for KNode and KMail, email templates in KMail, advanced Web Shortcuts, S/MIME support, plugins for the KMenu, a graphical Regular Expression app (KRegExpEditor) and much more. A mailing list for the KDE3 users can be found here. Update: If you are an adventurous user, there is an alpha version of KDE 3 available.
ExtremeTech Revises Article on Java vs C#
Since the original article, first appeared some months ago, Microsoft has released Beta2 of Visual Studio.NET. As with any beta software, changes were inevitable, so ExtremeTech are now updates the article and accompanied source code to reflect the changes made. According to the article, the API changes in C#, in some cases made the language too different from Java, while in other cases brought the two languages closer. It is a very interesting read, as the article has a code-to-code comparison between the two languages. Also, looking at the archives of ExtremeTech we found this very interesting article, which discusses the kernel enhancements that WindowsXP will feature and also mentions the nifty tricks they added to get around the Registry bloat and slowness when searching for a Registry Key.
New Version of Java 3D Available
A new version of Java 3D is now available on Sun's web site. The new version (1.2.1_03) is a bug fix release for Windows and Solaris. The Linux release is still at release 1.2.1_01.
QNX RtP Ported to the Compaq iPAQ
The QNX RtP 6.1.0 microkernel (which also runs on PCs) and its Photon micro GUI have been ported to the Compaq PDA solution, the iPaq. The screenshots look very attractive indeed, we just hope that the QNX team add some more software in it, like a Calendar, Contacts or a Todo list which are undoubtly, very useful applications for a PDA.