The surprising truth about Disney's 1982 computer-game sci-fi film, Tron, is that it's still visually impressive (though technologically quaint by later high-definition standards) and a lot of fun. Tron was the first movie to use CGI (computer generated graphics & special effects) incorporated into the normal film. To celebrate 20 years of the breakthrough in both Hollywood's and computer's standards, Disney has released the "Tron - 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition" DVD with 5 hours of extra material on the making of the classic movie.

QNX is an operating system that all of us have used, but few of us realize it when we do. The OS was created in the early 1980's by QNX Software Systems, a Canadian company, but the version we are previewing today (unreleased yet, version 6.2), based on the Neutrino kernel, was pretty much (re)written from scratch some years ago. QNX is used everywhere, from VCRs, to DVDs, to medical machinery and even satellites and space shuttles. Many of you maybe even have tried the old demodisk, a demo of the QNX4 RTOS, plus the previous version of the Photon GUI, fitting in a single 1.44 floppy. The desktop-enhanced version of QNX RtP (free for non-commercial use) runs on almost all modern x86 CPUs, and if we judge from the following screenshots, it looks pretty good for an embedded system OS.

BusinessWeek features an extensive set of articles, editorials & interviews with key Apple people regarding the future of Apple and MacOSX. A very good read overall. In the meantime, MacUserUK and MacMinute revealed that Tuesday 22nd of January is the most likely day that Apple will announce three new, top of the line, PowerMacs: 800, 933 and dual 1 Ghz, with all models "shipping immediately." Pricing and additional specifications are unclear, although sources suggest that Apple may make the SuperDrive standard on all systems.

Amiga Information Online has interviewed one of the early AmigaDE developer pioneers, Zeoneo. Two of Zeoneo`s PDA targetting titles, namely "Convex" and "Planet Zed" are already selling at Amiga`s online shop. Also GetBoinged recently interviewed Pagan Games. Their first PDA targetted gravity game "Blobula" is already selling and it is the first among the currently available AmigaDE PDA titles to include a music soundtrack. John Harris (orginal Frogger designer) of Pulsar Interactive will hold a class and seminar on AmigaDE Programming at the AmigaExpo which will be held on the 29th till 31st of March in the US. For an earlier look at the hardware-agnostic Amiga Digital Environment and the new PPC based AmigaOS 4.0, be sure to attend the upcoming Alt-WoA 2002 show which will be held on the 23rd of February in the UK.

"In Part One and Part Two of this series we delivered an overview of the embedded processor market and key product families. We also looked at Java chips and other custom embedded processors. Then we reviewed some of the microarchitectural and programming features that differentiate embedded processors from mainstream CPUs. And we described some performance measurement techniques and issues. In this final segment, we'll dig into DSPs, media processors, and power saving techniques." Read the third installment of the interesting article at ExtremeTech.

There is a brand new version of the Unix windowing system, XFree86 4.2, available for download. This is mostly a bug fixed release, no major new features were introduced. Our Take: XFree does the job just right when it comes to serve just what it was designed to do back in the '80s: provide a windowing system to a Unix workstation or server. But these days, everyone seems so busy trying to shapeshift X11 with themes or funky window managers and squeeze its architecture and code hard to push it to perform adequate with 3D games. But X was not designed for all that. Proof of that is the fact that X is not as smooth as MacOSX's Aqua or BeOS is, is not multithreading, it does not have good response times or latencies, it does not support font antialias correctly, no double buffering, and even 3D gaming support is a hack. Should X be pushed to do things it was not designed to do, or should it be re-implemented in such a way that it features all the latest tech gizmos, but in a more "natural" way that it also stays compatible with most of today's X applications? Discuss.

FreeBSD 4.5 Release Candidate 2 was released today. The fvwm2, unzip, and Gnome-Sawfish packages are not included on the ISO image due to build failures. This will be solved for the third (and hopefully final) release candidate. The final version is expected in 1-2 weeks from now. Testing guide is available.

With the release of WindowsXP, the Microsoft operating system has shown new levels of stability and performance, but analysts say that security is not up to par yet. Bill Gates, chairman of the Microsoft corporation has now set security as the top priority for the software maker's products, a shift that analysts say can't happen soon enough. The internal memo Gates sent to Microsoft employees and subsidiaries was leaked to the press yesterday.

"What is real time? This article, first of a three-part series, introduces the benchmarks we'll run on real-time Linux version in the next two issues. Linux is well tuned for throughput-limited applications, but it is not well designed for deterministic response, though enhancements to the kernel are available to help or guarantee determinism. So-called real-time applications require, among other things, deterministic response. In this article I examine the nature of real-time applications and Linux's strengths and weaknesses in supporting such applications." Read the rest of the story at LinuxDevices.

"Java inventor James Gosling says he isn't losing much sleep over Microsoft these days, despite the software giant's effort to stem Java's popularity with its own Java-like language. The next battle in Web services software development pits Microsoft against Java creator Sun Microsystems, along with Java adherents IBM, Oracle and others. Crucial to Microsoft's effort is C#, a Java-like language that will soon be part of the company's new Visual Studio.Net package of software-development tools, which was released to developers Wednesday." Read the rest of the interview with James Gosling at C|Net News.

""The Heist." A panicking manager type leads police detectives into what appears to be an empty server room. "It's the crime of the century!" the balding, middle-aged, middle manger exclaims over cheesy adventure-movie background music. "Everything's gone!" "What was stolen?" asks one of the cops. "Everything," the pointy-haired boss answers, "payroll, R&D, customer records ..." Of course, our hero, a scruffy-looking geek boy, saves the day. He points to a mainframe in the back of the room, and says, "We moved everything onto that one. It's going to save us a bundle. I sent out an email ... " The music swells, and the announcer says something about IBM servers running Linux saving you a bundle. What the commercial doesn't tell you is that the spendy IBM server in the commercial is running multiple copies of Linux at one time as virtual machines." Read the rest of the interesting article regarding virtualization at NewsForge.

From TheRegister article regarding the Be liquidation auction that took place yesterday: "Afternoon engagements called us, and we never got the chance to bid for the 29 Be mugs, the lot of a hundred Be T-shirts (we'd dearly one of either - will swap), or the iMac we'd promised shacker. Let alone the BeBoxes. Or, gasp! the Hobbit prototypes which preceded the PPC BeBox." In the second photo you can also see sitting Marco Nellisen (SoundPlay author, Palm engineer now) and behind him, Arve Hjonnevag (ex-Be kernel engineer, at Palm now too). In the meantime, BeUnited, after was rejected a license from Palm, they now state that they will focus on supporting Open BeOS, while Palm, Inc. revealed some information about PalmOS 5: "Three significant improvements include the ability to use multitasking and multithreading in applications, improved performance using OS 5 with the faster processor, and compatibility with current applications." However, not all Palm developers are happy because: "Some of the old programs will run faster, some will run slower, and some won't run at all."

The faster version 2.0 of the Universal Serial Bus connection technology, the center of some controversy with Windows, has been incorporated into the latest test version of Linux. Linus Torvalds, founder and leader of the Linux operating-system project, released version 2.5.2 of the "kernel," or core software, Monday, including initial support for USB 2.0. Linux may have lost its allure as a get-rich-quick scheme for would-be entrepreneurs, but the largely volunteer programming community that advances the core software is still functioning." Read the rest of the story at C|Net News.com. The unstable kernel 2.5.x also includes the new VM, scheduler and we hope to see the preemptible and XFS patches rolling in that source tree. In the USB 2 matter, Windows2k/XP's USB 2 stack is also not ready yet, but it has already leaked on the web.

"Online vandals are using a two-month-old security hole in Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system to break into servers on the Internet, a security expert said Tuesday. Researchers witnessed the attack when one intruder broke into a Solaris server under intense observation as part of the Honeynet Project, an initiative to develop ways to turn spare computers into digital fly traps to study and document actual Internet attacks." Get the rest of the story at C|Net News.com.