How Microsoft is Losing to GNU/Linux

  Submitted by Moulinneuf Linux 90 Comments
It's that time of the year again. "If 'a year of GNU/Linux on the desktop' is defined as a year when GNU/Linux has finally started its steady encroachment to the desktop then 2006 is the year. A lot of users have started using GNU/Linux on their desktops long before, but it is 2006 which marked the two probably biggest GNU/Linux desktop releases to date, Ubuntu Dapper and Novell SuSE 10. It is 2006 which marks the biggest opportunity for GNU/Linux to steal the desktop market share from Windows due to the bad reputation behind the pending Windows Vista release. And the eyes and focus of both the GNU/Linux community and major GNU/Linux corporations such as Novell are fixed on that opportunity. Novell marketing is true: 'Your Linux is ready'."
Read More

Comparing the PowerPC 970 Pricing

  Submitted by rangnar IBM 19 Comments
PPCNUX-Team member Arno found a source that posts prices of the PowerPC970 (G5) CPUs. They conclude that that could not be the reason that there's no Apple machines running on PowerPC anymore. "G5 Quads for everbody! Thanks to IBM's pricing policy, the open-armed Power.org community, and Genesi's sustained commitment to the Power Architecture this could become a truely realistic option in the not-so-far future..."
Read More

The Answer to RIAA and Music Piracy is Magnatune

Multimedia, AV 104 Comments
Magnatune has the right idea and we love their motto: "We Are Not Evil". They are a real record label but they give away 128 kbps mp3s of all their artist's songs for free. If you like what you hear you can purchase higher quality DRM-free FLAC, Mp3, OGG, AAC, WAV versions at a price you set! If you don't, you can always keep, share or delete your legally downloaded 128 kbps mp3, your choice. They are sharing revenues 50/50 with their signed artists and they allow consumers to share their purchased songs with 3 friends. What sets them apart from other "free music" web sites is that they actually sign artists that are able to produce high quality music and are serious about their work (rather than just being a random mp3 hosting site). Also, artists keep all of their work's rights.
Read More

Gentoo 2006.1 Review

  Submitted by csousa Gentoo 36 Comments
The Gentoo release team has just announced the launch of their 2006.1 version, so TechGage is going to take a look at what's new. Included in the updates is an improved installer/LiveCD with Networkless mode, smarter partitioner, updated compiler and more.
Read More

Vista’s Transition, Cost Justification

Windows 59 Comments
Two editorials on Vista, from eWeek and Microsoft Watch. The former: "The looming choice for Windows users is either to stick with Windows XP (and older hardware) or take Windows Vista cold turkey. But Microsoft doesn't have to be so tough - Apple did it differently with the Mac OS X rollout." The latter: "How will Microsoft - and its business customers - cost-justify upgrading to Vista in the coming months/years? With Windows Vista, Microsoft needs to please at least two constituencies with very different sets of requirements."
Read More

Mandriva Linux 2007 Beta 3 Released

Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 16 Comments
Improvements: "New 3D desktop support (both with AIGLX and Xgl) and a new tool to configure it (drak3d); new 'One' CD with 3D desktop support (AIGLX and Xgl, both on KDE and GNOME, autodetection of the best 3D solution); new rpmdrake; more applications migrated to XDG menus; GNOME 2.16 RC1; kernel 2.6.17 (based on 2.6.17.8 with ALSA 1.0.12 rc2); KDE 3.5.4; new 'Ia Ora' Mandriva theme (still only included in GNOME); new VPN configuration tool (drakvpn); new firewall." Get it from the mirrors.
Read More

Sun Scraps Low-End ‘Serrano’ Sparc Chip

Oracle and SUN 12 Comments
Sun Microsystems has canceled its lower-end UltraSparc IIIi+ 'Serrano' processor, choosing instead to focus its priorities on alternatives including its more radical 'Niagara' chip family. Sun had planned to introduce the UltraSparc IIIi+ chips in three servers, the V215, V245 and V445, models that likely will be announced at a Sun event Sept. 13. But the company chose to scrap the chip, John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, said in an interview Thursday.
Read More

The Problem with Threads

General Development 33 Comments
"Concurrent programming is difficult, yet many technologists predict the end of Moore's law will be answered with increasingly parallel computer architectures - multicore or chip multiprocessors. If we hope to achieve continued performance gains, programs must be able to exploit this parallelism. Automatic exploitation of parallelism in sequential programs, through either computer architecture techniques such as dynamic dispatch or automatic parallelization of sequential programs, offers one possible technical solution. However, many researchers agree that these automatic techniques have been pushed to their limits and can exploit only modest parallelism. Thus, programs themselves must become more concurrent."
Read More

Linux Running Out of Steam?

  Submitted by NotParker Linux 33 Comments
Not only is Linux having trouble breaking market share for desktops, server shipments actually grew at a smaller rate than Windows server shipments. "Somewhat surprisingly, Linux seems to be running out of steam a little. After nearly four years of double-digit revenue growth, the Linux server sub-market accounted for only USD1.5 billion in sales in the second quarter of 2006, an increase of only 6.1 percent. IDC didn't say this, but it could be that the mainframe market has saturated itself with Linux and is no longer consuming Linux MIPS like it has for the past several years. Linux server shipments grew 9.7 percent in the quarter, and most of the revenue and shipments were on X86 and X64 servers. Windows-based server shipments increased by 11 percent."
Read More

Another Quickie: ReactOS

ReactOS 32 Comments
I downloaded a few VMware images for use in VMware player. The mouse (a PS/2 type) did not work either in ReactOS or in Syllable, but did work in PC-BSD (all in VMware Player). Later, I downloaded the install-cd iso of ReactOS and burned it to a CD. The image is a tiny download (19MB uncompressed), so it didn't take long. I intended to install ReactOS on a laptop and desktop.
Read More

Mozilla Releases New Beta of Firefox 2.0

  Submitted by editingwhiz Mozilla, Gecko 29 Comments
"Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel. "Firefox 2 Beta 2 is intended for Web application developers and our testing community," the team said on the Mozilla development website. "Current users of Firefox 1.x should not use Firefox 2 Beta 2 and expect all of their extensions and plugins to work properly."
Read More

Crossover for OSX Intel Beta Released

  Submitted by hairyneanderthal macOS 26 Comments
"I am very pleased to announce that we have made a public beta of our upcoming CrossOver Mac product available for general download. What we are shipping today is our first beta release of CrossOver Mac. This release will give you a taste of the promise of CrossOver, but should be considered an early test release - we intend to make substantial further improvements before we ship a production version."
Read More

Mac Performance: From G3 to Xeon

  Submitted by jfpoole Apple 5 Comments
"Since we released Geekbench 2006 on July 10th, we've received over 4800 Geekbench results; over half of those results are from computers running Mac OS X. I took a look at the results, and found that we've received results for almost every computer model Apple's shipped in the past six years, from the iMac G3 to the Mac Pro. Since we love us some benchmarks here at Geek Patrol, I thought it'd be interesting to put together an overview of Mac performance over the past six years."
Read More

Microsoft Allows Free Redistribution of Virtual Server, PC

  Submitted by Alessandro Perilli Microsoft 4 Comments
"With an unexpected move Microsoft changed agreement terms of its virtualization products and allows anybody to freely redistribute them within proprietary applications. In particular Virtual Server 2005 R2 (both x86 and x64 editions) requires to sign a Redistrbution Rights licensing agreement, while Virtual PC 2004 automatically grants this right in the EULA. The upcoming Virtual PC 2007 will be redistributable as well."
Read More

Mono 1.1.17 Released

  Submitted by Tommy Borgen Mono 1 Comment
A new version of Mono has been released, and it contains many significant updates and bug fixes. " The Mono Basic compiler and the Basic runtime have been removed from the Mono distribution. A new compiler that is compatible with Visual Basic 2005 and a matching runtime are now part of a separate distribution. On this particular release, we are offering the basic runtime, but the compiler is not able to run completely on Mono yet."
Read More

Google Open Sources Tesseract

  Submitted by diegocg Google 11 Comments
Google has announced the release of the source of an old OCR software called Tesseract in source. "In a nutshell, we are all about making information available to users, and when this information is in a paper document, OCR is the process by which we can convert the pages of this document into text that can then be used for indexing."
Read More

Trolltech Releases Second Preview of Qt for Java

  Submitted by gunnarsl Qt 2 Comments
Trolltech has released a second preview of Qt Jambi - a prototype version of Qt that allows Java programmers to use the popular cross-platform development framework. This second release incorporates the feedback of over 1700 beta testers, and features new additions like Web Start functionality, improved integration with Eclipse and single JAR file deployment for Qt Jambi-based applications. More information is available in the Qt Jambi product alert with tech details in the Qt Jambi Whitepaper. To try it out, sign up for the preview license and download.
Read More