PetrOS to Add BeOS Compatibility Layer

OS News 5 Comments
Peter Tattam from Trumpet Software and also the creator of PetrOS wrote in to tell us that " we are exploring the possibility of providing a BeOS layer to PetrOS. This is consistent with our philosophy of providing multiple API support in the OS. I am in discussions with the OpenBeOS group to determine the feasibility of getting OpenBeOS to run in PetrOS. This would involve us writing a BeOS compatible kernel driver, and supporting ELF format executables in addition to the current PE format executables.We will continue our development on the Win32 layer at the same time with a goal of being able to seamlessly run BeOS and Win32 applications on the same desktop." OSNews recently hosted an interview with Peter regarding PetrOS.
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The Dollars and Sense of MacOSX

macOS 21 Comments
"My fellow cheapskates, I feel for you. Really, I do. I know you want to upgrade to OS X but are racked with doubt. Is Apple's stunning new operating system really worth its $130 price tag? After all, that's enough to buy more than 10 different shareware versions of solitaire or keep yourself in beer and pizza for month." Read the rest of the editorial at BusinessWeek.
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Turbolinux 7 Server to Hit the Market

Linux 1 Comment
Based on Linux Kernel 2.4, Turbolinux 7 Server supports 64 GB of memory, a journal file system, a 128-bit SSL library, and 32 SMP support. It is scheduled to begin shipping on December 7. Turbolinux is focusing on enterprise business needs with this release, as it tried to design this version of the server with extreme flexibility and functionality in mind. "Turbolinux 7 Server offers businesses a highly secure, high-performance operating system," Pete Beckman, vice president of engineering for Turbolinux said in a prepared statement.
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Radeon 8500 vs. Ti500 – Overclocked Graphics

Benchmarks 14 Comments
Tom's Hardware has setuped a match between the two most powerful 3D graphics card models, the ATi Radeon 8500 and the nVidia GeForce3 Ti500. To cut the (long) story short, ATi shows that it has a much more impressive hardware than nVidia has, but also much (also impressively) worse drivers. So, while it takes a small lead to only some tests under Win98, under WindowsXP, the ATi card completely fails to perform adequately, plus the drivers are unstable and even exiting or crashing randomly some of Tom's tests.
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BSD’s Strength Lies in Devilish Details

BSD & Darwin 4 Comments
"BSD is the established favorite of Internet service providers, which are attracted to BSD for its familiarity (many ISP techies cut their teeth on BSD-based SunOS) and its low cost. And BSD is well-entrenched as a general server OS, as well as serving a niche role as a provider of network security services such as packet filtering and authentication." InfoWorld analyzes *BSD and even compares it (briefly) with Linux.
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Companies Reluctant to Take on Linux

Linux 4 Comments
"Linux penguins are braying louder, but companies don't plan to adopt many of them in the near future. Almost every large company has at least thought about Linux, and some of them are running pilot projects or even day-to-day (albeit nonessential) systems on the open-source operating system. And because the economy is still weak, many tech observers believe that Linux--and its price tag of "free"--will attract more businesses looking to cut costs. At least that's the theory. Practice indicates something else." Read the rest of the editorial at ZDNews.
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World’s First Preview of gobeProductive 3

Office 38 Comments
Gobe Productive is a well known and the most important third party application in the BeOS world. It is a powerful Office Suite. Gobe (the same developers who wrote ClarisWorks for Macintosh in the past - now called AppleWorks) is now looking for a larger market than BeOS has to offer, and version 3.0 of Productive will be first published for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. A Linux version is scheduled for development and release shortly after the Windows one. This is the world's first preview of Gobe Productive 3 (GP3), with lots of screenshots and a good portion of information about the upcoming product (a public beta version should be released in the near future too).
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KDE Studio Gold 3.0 Final Available

General Development 1 Comment
KDE Studio Gold is a full-fledged IDE for the development of sophisticated C++ applications - including the high utility features you expect from a modern development environment, such as code completion, dynamic syntax highlighting and popup function parameter lookup. Debugging is simplified by tight integration with kdbg in the IDE, and comprehensive documentation is provided. Version 3.0 is now available and shipping. TheKompany added a couple of new features to this final release, which includes an integrated Programmers Calculator and Font Viewer. Demo versions are also available.
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Gassée Believes MS Bootloader Concession Could Boost Linux/BSD

Legal 21 Comments
"One possible concession by Microsoft in the proposed AntiTrust settlement has come too late to save the company which pressed hardest for its inclusion: Be, Inc." "I'm always cautious around what these guys 'promise'", Be's CEO Jean-Louis Gassée told TheRegister via email at the weekend. JLG believes that the restriction that DOJ posed to Microsoft regarding the bootloader issue, can boost Linux and *BSD. Our Take: Funny really, JLG says that this concession can boost Linux and *BSD, but he fails to mention his own child, the (abandoned) BeOS.
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Big Blue’s $40M Giveaway to Open Source

  Submitted by Nando IBM 1 Comment
IBM announced on Monday that it will donate $40 million of its software tools to the public domain in a move to create an open-source organization aimed at developers. An organization called Eclipse will make available some of IBM's software programming tools to developers to create applications for e-businesses and Web services. More than 150 of the leading open-source companies, such as Linux distributors Red Hat and SuSE, along with Merant, QSSL and Rational, will be part of the Eclipse community.
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FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited Now Available

Databases No Comments
FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited is now certified for Apache Web Servers running Red Hat Linux 7.1 and the powerful new Mac OS X Server. FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited offers the same powerful database features found in FileMaker Pro 5.5, including two-way ODBC capabilities, record-level access privileges and more. However, in contrast to FileMaker Pro 5.5, it sets no limits to the number of Web Browsers that can access a FileMaker Pro database published on the Web.
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Interview with TrollTech’s Harri Porten

Original OSNews Interviews 6 Comments
The Norway-based company Trolltech is well known for their C++ and fully OOP Toolkit, Qt. Qt is the basis of KDE, but it is also a very important and powerful tool under Windows, MacOS/X and X11 developers. Qt 3.0 released less than a month ago, bringing some really impressive features, like the ability to build platform- and database independent database applications, greatly improved internationalisation and font handling etc. Harri Porten, TrollTech employee and also a KDE developer (mostly working on the javascript part on Konqueror) answers some of our questions.
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Preliminary PowerPC G5 Hits 2.4GHz

Hardware 11 Comments
Motorola has released the latest update to its PowerPC 8500 - aka G5 - processor that ups AltiVec performance and delivers consistent 1GHz and up clock speeds, TheRegister rumours, based on their Apple sources. "Indeed, the source claims, two of the chips in the sample set of CPUs sent to the Mac maker, clocked at 2.4GHz. Most, however, ran at 1GHz, 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz, and some - a "considerable number", says our Deep Throat - operate at 1.6GHz." In related news, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has again upped the stakes in its processor performance race with rival Intel. AMD launched the new Athlon XP 1900+, its highest performance desktop processor issued to date.
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MS Passport Cracked with Hotmail

Bugs & Viruses No Comments
"Passport and Wallet users are going to be disappointed to learn that these feature-rich tools can't be used until MS fixes a little bug which makes sport of taking over someone else's account. Passport authenticates a user for access to his credit cards and Web site accounts and passwords, to make life easy for on-line merchants and shoppers, and hackers and identity thieves." TheRegister reports.
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OpenBSD 3.0 Pre-Orders Beginning

  Submitted by Ludovic Hirlimann OpenBSD 2 Comments
OpenBSD 3.0 is now available for pre-order from the OpenBSD web site on 3 CDs, for US$40 (up $10 from recent releases). What's new: (1) ipf is now replaced by OpenBSD's own firewall/NAT system; (2) OpenSSH 3.O; (3) The CDs are bootable on 6 architectures; and (4) disc 2 has a mystery audio track! Sales of CDs, T-shirts, and posters are the primary source of funding for OpenBSD development.
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AMD & Nvidia to Bring High Performance Motherboard

AMD 13 Comments
AMD and Nvidia will make a show of nForce next week, News.com reports. The new Nvidia nForce chipset for AMD Athlon/Duron, announced in June, will make its debut next week in motherboards and desktop PCs, an Nvidia representative said. nForce takes risks in that it aims to create a market niche where none existed before, a middle-of-the-road between high-end chipsets with no graphics and low-price chipsets with integrated graphics. Past integrated graphics chipsets, whether for Intel or AMD, have been aimed mainly at the low end of the PC market, where reducing costs is the primary goal and performance is only a secondary consideration.
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