Sci-Fi: a New Kind of OS

"Imagine if you will, a world where your ideas and perhaps, even your own creative works became part of the OS of tomorrow. Consider the obvious advantages to an operating system that actually adapted to the needs of the users instead of the other way around. Not only is there no such OS like this, the very idea goes against much of what we are currently seeing in the current OS options in the market."

Understanding Objects and Collections in Visual C# 2005

Start learning about an important programming concept, namely objects. The more you work with Visual C#, the more you'll hear about objects. Visual C# 2005 is a true object-oriented language. This chapter isn't going to discuss object-oriented programming in any detail—object-oriented programming is a complex subject and well beyond the scope of this book. Instead, you'll learn about objects in a more general sense.

Misconceptions About the Portland Project

"When OSDL announced the first release of its Portland initiative at LinuxWorld Boston in April, heralding it 'a breakthrough in desktop Linux', I muttered my skepticism to a co-worker. He expressed surprise at my reaction, noting that the initiative employs extremely smart people. I don't doubt their intelligence, or their sincerity, but I wouldn't bet a penny on the project living up to its initial claim, because you can't conjure a silver bullet out of intelligence and sincerity." KDE developer Kevin Krammer replies: "There is an article over at linux.com which predicts that the Portland initiative will fail to reach its goal of 'unifying the Linux desktop'. Unfortunately the author somehow missed that 'unifying the Linux desktop' is not the goal of Portland."

Is Haiku Having Growing Pains?

The controversial discussion about the important of communications at the Haiku project continues, and seems to be heating up. The project recently announced a new marcom team, and now the team lead (Koki) is coming on strong to the developers. He claims that the new Haiku website now in development "looks awful, is disorganized, and it has no focus whatsoever", and proposes to fix it by organizing it into marketing and development areas managed by each group (plus an open community area). Read on for a short summary written by OSNews reader sogabe.

Java Theory and Practice: Testing with Leverage

In this final installment on testing of the three part series, Brian Goetz examines another technique for smoking out bugs that violate design rules: aspects. The first two installments in this series, Part 1 covering testing in integrated frameworks and Part 2 on testing with leverage, show how static analysis tools like Find Bugs can provide greater leverage in managing software quality by focusing on entire categories of bugs rather than on specific bug instances.

Windows Vista the Last of its Kind

Vista will be the last version of Windows that exists in its current, monolithic form, according to Gartner. Instead, the research firm predicts, Microsoft will be forced to migrate Windows to a modular architecture tied together through hardware-supported virtualisation. "The current, integrated architecture of Microsoft Windows is unsustainable - for enterprises and for Microsoft," wrote Gartner analysts Brian Gammage, Michael Silver and David Mitchell Smith.

Q&A: Linux Guns for Desktop

Red Herring interviews Eric Raymond. "Open-source advocate Eric Raymond on winning over the iPod generation, the need for open source to conquer hearts and minds beyond geekdom, and why Linux advocates don’t have much time to beat Microsoft." Update by ELQ: Raymond shows signs of once more playing a bigger role in open-source circles. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains this change of strategy in DesktopLinux.com as he knows Raymond personally.

Microsoft’s Zune Aims to Be Social Butterfly

Normally we try not to report on music players, but since this concerns Microsoft's direct attack on Apple's music player, it's actually somewhat interesting. "Microsoft's forthcoming Zune player is shooting to be the life of the party, allowing users to create mobile social networks and stream music to nearby friends or strangers, according to a government regulatory filing. A Microsoft representative confirmed that the filing is legitimate and that Toshiba will manufacture the Zune device, but declined to offer additional details or comment on the information in the FCC filing."

Windows Vista Build 5536 Pre-RC1 Released

Microsoft has reached Pre-RC1 with this latest release, Build 5536. The screenshots taken show some of the new features in this build. According to a quick test, Pre-RC1 is very stable and fast. "This build is Pre-RC1 as the screenshots demonstrate. 5536 is surprisingly stable and fast compared to all previous builds."

Sysjail 1.0 Released

"Sysjail is a userland virtualisation system for OSs supporting the systrace library. It runs on OpenBSD, NetBSD and MirOS. The first generation of sysjail is as close to a drop-in replacement for FreeBSD's jail subsystem as reasonably possible. While sysjail currently behaves as a NetBSD/OpenBSD/MirOS implementation of jail, it also provides additonal auditing and resource-limiting utilities."

The Apple vs. Microsoft GUI Lawsuit

When Mac sales dropped off in 1985, Bill Gates personally wrote John Sculley suggesting that he license the Macintosh design to companies like Apollo, DEC and Wang, and establish the software as the industry standard. Apple declined, and Microsoft published Windows. Sculley was enraged, and eventually filed suit. After five years, Apple lost, but not before severely damaging its relationship with Microsoft (which accounted for 2/3 of all Mac software sales).

Slackware 11.0 RC3 Released

Release Candidate 3 of Slackware 11.0 has been released. Patrick says this will most likely be the last RC but he won't rule out an RC4. One important thing in this release: kernel 2.6 has been moved out of /testing and placed into /extra. From the changelog: "Here is Slackware 11.0 release candidate 3. I think most of the irresistible upgrades are in here now, and the bug reports have been mostly handled."