David Adams Archive

It seems that Microsoft may have unintentionally leaked certain details about its upcoming Windows 7 feature set in a privacy supplement that was posted on its homepage. Driver protection, dynamic update, Homegroup, People Near Me, and Trusted Platform Model are all features mentioned (and described) in this document that will be new to Windows 7 that hadn't previously been publicized.

As part of our ongoing series, "Building the Wired Home," we've been experimenting with what could be a sea-change in the whole concept of a home computer. Home computers, of course, have long ago become commonplace, and computers have even taken on some roles that used to be delegated to standalone consumer electronics, such as audio and video storage and playback. They've gone from being exotic oddities to ever-more-useful home appliances. Interestingly, though, as our home computers have become more powerful, sophisticated, and useful, they have also become decentralized and have, in most inefficient fashion, been chopped up and redistributed around the house. "Read more" to learn how our experiment worked out.

New software packs were released in comparable versions for both Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server. Shell Essentials is a new collection pack with tools for the command line. Network Necessities with networking programs, Developer's Delight with developer tools and The Perl Pit with Perl and its modules were released in new versions with updated package collections. Also, Syllable was accepted for listing on DistroWatch.

Microsoft announces new rich Internet applications development and streaming media features; company outlines plans for supporting Windows, Mac and Linux tools for developing Silverlight applications. Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation's integrated development environment (IDE) and by providing new controls to developers with the Silverlight Control Pack (SCP) under the Microsoft Permissive License.

HP has released a roadmap outlining future development of OpenVMS, the operating system that commercialized many features that are now considered standard requirements for any high-end server operating system. (Such as Integrated networking, Symmetrical, asymmetrical, and NUMA multiprocessing, including clustering, distributed file system (Files-11), Integrated database features, support for multiple computer programming languages, hardware partitioning of multiprocessors, etc). With over 30 years of development, OpenVMS has stood the test of time and has continued to evolve as one of the most secure and trusted mission critical OS's of our time.

An EE Times straw poll of embedded device makers in Europe found that while last year 50% said they planned to use Linux, that number had dropped to 33%. 26% said they planned to use a commercial OS, up from 15% a year ago.

A Fortune Magazine article looks at hand-held computing's most beleaguered major player and wonders whether it wouldn't be better off hitching its wagon to Google's coat-tails and adopting Android. After shunting aside its own, old-and-creaky OS in favor of Microsoft's it's been hanging its hopes on a long-awaited new Linux-based OS. Android may be Palm's best bet to avoid stemming its inexorable slide into irrelevance.

Windows XP just refuses to die. Have you ever notice that in movies they hit the bad guy just hard enough to stun him, then go about their business with their back turned to him while he slowly gets up and surprises them by attacking again? In this allegory, Microsoft management is the cute couple and XP is the villain: "Microsoft's deadline for allowing OEMs to sell PCs with systems that are "downgraded" from Windows Vista to XP is still a moving target. Initially planned to expire on June 30 of this year, Microsoft at first granted an extension to July 31. However, OEMs are still selling the downgrade option (often for a premium) and, according to new reports, the deadline apparently has been officially extended for six more months to January 31, 2009. The information is based on one leaked email sent to an OEM."

Gutsy/foolhardy Mac clone maker Psystar responded in August to Apple's copyright infringement lawsuit with an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple. Earlier this week, Apple's lawyers filed a motion to have the suit dismissed, calling it "deeply flawed." In its statement, Apple contends: "One of the bedrock principles of antitrust law is that a manufacturer's unilateral decision concerning how to distribute its product and with whom it will deal cannot violate the Sherman Act."

The Linux Kernel version 2.6.25 introduces a new Linux process sleeping state, TASK_KILLABLE: If a process is sleeping killably in this new state, it works like TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE with the bonus that it can respond to fatal signals. This feature is generally an improvement over the existing options -- after all, it is another way to keep from getting stuck with dead processes.

Microsoft's leader of C# development, writer of the Turbo Pascal system, and lead architect on the Delphi language, Anders Hejlsberg, reveals all there is to know on the history, inspiration, uses and future direction of one of computer programming's most widely used languages - C#. Hejlsberg also offers some insight into the upcoming version of C# (C#4) and the new language F#, as well as what lies ahead in the world of functional programming.

A very interesting "Blogwatch" posting at Computerworld links out to an interview with Richard Stallman wherein he posits that Cloud Computing is a trap to entice users to give up control and privacy and become subject to closed, proprietary platforms. Since RMS is a professional provocateur, I wouldn't consider all of his pronouncements newsworthy. But the thoughtful responses linked in this blog roundup were interesting, and I believe the issue of convenience vs control vis a vis Cloud Computing is a very timely and important debate to be having at this point in IT history.

No, Motorola isn't building an army of humanoid robots. The fading mobile phone powerhouse already has 50 developers on its android-based mobile phone OS team, and it intends to expand to 350, according to TechCrunch. Other major handset vendors seem to be expressing interest in the new Google OS as well. Will intense pressure from competitors backing an open OS be just what iPhone fans have been praying for, forcing Apple to loosen the screws a bit?

Mandriva has done quite a lot of work on optimizing boot speed for its latest release, Mandriva Linux 2009. Frederic Crozat (head of the French engineering team) has written a blog post summarizing Mandriva's past work on this front, and the tweaks and improvements made for 2009. It shows that close analysis of inefficiencies in boot, and fixing 'small' bugs, can result in gains as large or larger than 'big picture' items like new initialization systems.