Archive

According to Mozillazine, IE for UNIX has been discontinued by Microsoft. There's no details other than the removal of links from Microsoft's UNIX page, but the direct link to the download page still works.

Java 1.4.1 has recently been released. Over 2,000 bug fixes have been issued in this maintence release. Two new garbage collectors have been added, Concurrent and Parallel. Click here for more information while you can also find the the full list of changes.

In a new Amiga editorial for Suite101, John Chandler focusses on the Amiga solutions already available and what we can soon expect from Amiga Inc. Among this are AmigaDE enabled Zaurus PDAs and smartphones, AA availability in mainstream European shops and AmigaOS 4.0 scheduled for a pre-Christmas launch.

At my Rolla, Missouri, home, I have a desktop computer running Red Hat Linux and a laptop running Windows 2000. They are networked and I lived happily with that for a long time. This summer I had to stay in California for six weeks so I decided to take the laptop with me and send the desktop from Mailboxes Etc.

Be Inc, the well known OS company that produced the multimedia-oriented OS BeOS, was acquired by Palm Inc. a year ago. The further development of BeOS was stopped, since Palm doesn't seem to care about it. Will the BeOS spirit survive with the BeOS clones currently flourishing?

There's an interesting editorial at Mikhailtech regarding FPS, refresh rates and what the brain really distinguishes. Although he has no scientific background experience he has assembled some interesting facts. You can get more information on how the brain interprets visual data here.

I arrive home to find a spiffy package from ADC... Look it's Jaguar! The excitement was racing to install this upgrade but then I thought what about my data? I wanted to partition my drive differently for Jaguar so I did what I would do on any of my systems. I tared my home directory double checking the file contents to make sure I got all my hidden files. I then uploaded the tar to my server via scp and checked the md5sum of the file. Everything looked good I was ready to go!

As Amiga Inc is about to re-enter the computer arena with new AmigaOS4 powered desktop systems as well as with 3rd party embedded products utilizing AmigaDE technology pre-installed, there are a growing number of people who wonder what an advanced classic AmigaOS currently offers. This was an important reason for me to write a simple to understand WinUAE tutorial, so this would hopefully help interested people with setting up a fun and easy to use emulated AmigaOS environment on widely available mainstream Windows computers. This article also includes many WinUAE screenshots and information on acquiring and using freely available software.

Prologue by the editor-in-chief: "A bit more than two years ago, while I was still serving at BeNews, I asked Jeremy Friesner to write an article and present his cross-platform client-server messaging system for dynamic distributed applications, MUSCLE. Two weeks later, he came back to me with a multi-page article, explaining MUSCLE. To demonstrate the power of MUSCLE, Jeremy created a demo application based on it. The result was BeShare.

A while ago I wrote a short article on a rumour about Apple potentially using a POWER4 derived CPU. Since then there has been a lot of talk of Apple switching to an x86 based solution and now a desktop POWER4 derivative has been announced. Some people suggest this will be too expensive and in it's cut down form slower than a x86. What is Apple more likely to go for?

First of all, I am very flattered that our recent editorials over at OpenBeOS have received so many responses in the OSNews commenting section.I would like to address some of the issues brought up in the many thought provoking comments, in the order that I read them:

Many companies are trying to move to a subscription model for their software and Apple really has something going for them in that respect if you think about it. We, OS X Users, are already accustomed to the automatic updating of the OS and like it. dotMAC actually looks nice all in all, even if some might feel it is expensive. What people don't like is unpredictability; they have nothing against change as long as they like the outcome and know where it is going.

There have been many articles as of late about the so called "source" distributions of Linux. Articles about "rpm hell" and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.

An interview with Robert Love is at KernelTrap. Robert is author of the kernel preemption patch which has been merged into the 2.5 development kernel. In this interview, Robert discusses the status of Linux kernel preemption, talks about his recent involvement with the O(1) scheduler and explains his recent VM overcommit work. He also reflects upon Linus' use of Bitkeeper, the future of Linux, and the recent Kernel Summit in Ottawa.